Waiting for Godot

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot begins with a declaration of futility. Estragon, one of the play’s tramps, attempts to remove an intractable muddy boot and despairingly announces, “Nothing to be done.” This sense of existential desperation pervades the New Yiddish Rep production, performed in Yiddish with English supertitles. Director Ronit Muszkatblit’s version has to be one of the bleakest in recent memory. While the approach may not appeal to casual theatergoers, Beckett devotees will find much to savor.

Richard Saudek plays Lucky in the Yiddish translation of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Top, from left: David Mandelbaum as Estragon and Eli Rosen as Vladimir.

Performing the play in Yiddish (Shane Baker has provided the translation) makes a great deal of sense because Godot can be viewed as a post-Holocaust response. Beckett was in the French Resistance, and he began writing the play just three years after the end of World War II. The monumental inconceivability of human cruelty, the Holocaust, and nuclear destruction pervade the text, and life, as reflected in the play, is senseless and completely expendable. As one of the characters says, people “give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”

The production also draws on rich Yiddish performance traditions. Pre-show and intermission music includes Yiddish cabaret songs, and the pair of tramps, Vladimir and Estragon (Eli Rosen and David Mandelbaum), verbally spar with the cadence of early 20th-century Jewish comics and Borscht Belt comedians.

As the pair waits for the elusive Godot, they devise ways to pass the time. Yet unlike with other productions, Muszkatblit and her cast have not thoroughly mined the play for laughs. In the characterizations by Rosen and Mandelbaum, mustering even momentary amusement proves to be an impossible endeavor. They are simultaneously dependent upon and bored with each other. As Estragon says, “There are times when I wonder if it wouldn’t be better for us to part.” But like a couple in a codependent marriage, they bicker, hurl insults, and temporarily make up. This is their life, hour by hour, day by day, ad infinitum.

“Pre-show and intermission music includes Yiddish cabaret songs, and the pair of tramps verbally spar with the cadence of early 20th-century Jewish comics and Borscht Belt comedians.”

Their tedium is temporarily disrupted by the appearance of the arrogant landowner Pozzo (Gera Sandler) and his docile, bonded servant Lucky (Richard Saudek). Pozzo literally throws Estragon a bone, and Lucky provides a brief entertaining interlude. Even that becomes unbearable for the tramps. And when the boy (alternately played by Noam Sandler and Myron Tregubov) arrives at the end of each act to inform Estragon and Vladimir that Godot will not appear, the news is met with a collective shrug. 

The effect generally works, but at times the leisurely pace and (for non-Yiddish speakers) alienating supertitles can be wearying for the audience, partly because of the central performances. Individually, Rosen and, in particular, Mandelbaum offer convincing and moving portrayals, but as a tragicomic duo, they do not always seem to be in sync. Their banter sometimes seems rather hesitant, and their physical comedy (such as lifting dead-weight bodies and trading bowler hats) can seem a bit under-rehearsed. They lack, for instance, the natural, easy timing that other clowns (Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin, to name just two) have brought to the parts. Granted, Rosen replaced another actor right before the show opened, so the pair still may be finding their rhythm.

Mandelbaum and Rosen as the tramps in Beckett’s existential tragicomedy. Photographs by Dina Raketa.

Sandler’s Pozzo is not a force of nature as one often sees, but his downplayed, almost offhand abusiveness is frightening in its ordinariness. As Lucky, Saudek is scarily good. Oppression and cruelty have sucked the life out of the character, but when ordered to dance and “think,” he is able to summon the remaining vestiges of physical and intellectual presence. Saudek’s slow-build then unstoppable first-act monologue is a coup de théâtre.

George Xenos’s tattered costumes and minimal scenery provide a dash of theatricality and creativeness: the play’s fundamental set piece, a tree—or is it, as the characters debate, a bush? Or maybe a shrub?—is the skeleton of a patio umbrella. Reza Behjat’s lighting is similarly effective, and the primary lighting effect, the moon rising, is engineered by the boy, who hangs a crumpled, illuminated globe from a visible wire.

Yiddish theater appears to be making a long-awaited New York comeback. (The acclaimed Yiddish version of Fiddler on the Roof is set to reopen Off-Broadway in a few weeks.) And while this Godot may not be the revelatory production theatergoers have been awaiting, it offers an intriguing new perspective on a familiar and well-worn play.

The New Yiddish Rep’s production of Waiting for Godot plays through Jan. 27 at the Theater at the 14th Street Y (344 East 14th St. at First Avenue). The play is performed in Yiddish with English supertitles. Evening performances are at 7:30 Monday through Sunday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $35 and may be purchased by calling (646) 395-4310 or by visiting www.newyiddishrep.org.

Beautiful Day Without You

Origin Theatre Company, established in 2002, is dedicated to presenting American premieres of works by European writers. Origin’s current production, Beautiful Day Without You, is a commissioned play by Marco Calvani. Primarily known in Italy, Spain, and France, Calvani is an actor, director, and playwright, and he has collaborated several times with playwright and provocateur Neil LaBute. Beautiful Day Without You is Calvani’s first full-length play in English.

Directed by Erwin Maas, the play treats a number of contemporary issues in the U.S., including racism, homophobia, drug use, and the limitations of the health care system. Emphasizing the racial and gender divisiveness metaphorically, the play is framed by the specter of a dead puny dog of mixed breed (and awaiting an autopsy in a refrigerator’s salad crisper) and an offstage Doberman, a powerful purebred descended from notable European lineage and described as “supreme breed.” There are also a few shocking twists and more than a few scabrous epithets along the way to the unconvincing conclusion. In short, this is Neil LaBute territory with even less subtlety.

Richarda Abrams (left) plays Janet Blount, an out-of-work nurse, and Anne Son is Rachel Huang, an animal control officer, in Marco Calvani’s Beautiful Day Without You. Top: Son with Dan Butler, who plays Bob Sacco, a belligerent Doberman owner.

Bob Sacco (Dan Butler) proudly boasts of his white European ancestry and is the owner of Blaze, the “supreme breed” Doberman. Blaze is accused of killing Pippi, a small mongrel dog, owned by Janet Blount (Richarda Abrams), an African American, out-of-work nurse. The hot-tempered and alcoholic Bob claims to have no recollection of the incident, and Janet, who calls the deceased animal her “baby,” apparently took the animal home after the attack rather than to a veterinary hospital. In just one of many implausible plot points, it is only after Bob refuses to take responsibility for his dog’s actions that Janet threatens to call the police.

Rachel Huang (Anne Son), an Asian-American lesbian (all of the characters’ individual identities are underscored in the play) is the animal control officer assigned to investigate the case. As the play progresses, the trio develop an unlikely codependent relationship. Bob has a stroke, Janet becomes his nurse, and Rachel finds support and assistance from the other two in helping to cope with her heroin-addicted wife.

The connections joining the characters are tenuous at best, and the play lacks satirical bite and caustic social commentary. That said, Calvani deserves credit for tackling pressing cultural issues in the U.S. They seem to derive, however, from the perspective of an outsider, one who hasn’t been steeped in America’s boiling identity politics. For instance, quotidian racism and homophobia, except when addressed by neo-Nazis and white nationalists, tend to be insidious in their carefully contained subtext and in deep-rooted discriminatory practices. Here, bigotry and bias are expressed openly and carelessly. For instance, Rachel overtly refers to Janet and other African Americans as “you people”; Janet points to Saint Paul in the Bible for justifying her attitudes toward homosexuality; and Bob describes a presumably effeminate dog with an anti-gay slur and bemoans the rise of African American fraternities at Northwestern. Ranting about the changing demographic in the Chicago suburb, he says:

When we moved here this neighborhood used to be so close-knit, quiet, harmless. I mean, look at it now! I swept my sidewalk only yesterday and go look at it now! A disaster, junk everywhere! They are dirty, loud, lazy. And most of all they are poor! I don’t know how it happened but somehow we became less and less and less!

Janet (Abrams) nurses a stricken Bob (Butler). Photographs by Deen van Meer.

The characters and their devotion to one another come across not as simply insensitive but borderline psychopathic.

Maas’s direction does not mitigate the play’s tilt toward overstatement. The evening begins (and ends) with the three actors jogging in place and picking up the pace to a fevered sprint. The mad dash and heightened emotions rarely slow down enough to let the audience take a breath, and the evening becomes rapidly enervating.

As the emotionally on-edge Bob, Butler (the bullying Bulldog from television’s Frasier) is aggressively forceful, but he injects his performance with a few moments in which he reveals vulnerability as well as abject grief over the death of his wife. Blount, as the financially struggling nurse with her own family problems, holds her own against her belligerent neighbor. Son’s character is the least fully drawn, but she too has some nice moments as she exposes the character’s efforts to keep personal issues out of her professional life.

Guy De Lancey designed the set, lighting, and costumes. The entire theater, including the floor and audience seats, is draped in white painter’s canvas. The impression is that of a liminal space, a world somewhere between earth and heaven, art and reality, and being and becoming. Regrettably, this is a play that would have been more effective if it were grounded in the here and now.

Beautiful Day Without You plays through Nov. 25 at the West End Theatre (263 West 86th St.). Evening performances are at 8 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; matinees are at 3 p.m. Sunday. There are no performances on Nov. 21 and 22, but there is an added matinee at 3 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 24. Tickets range from $35 to $65 and can be purchased by calling (866) 811-4111 or visiting origintheatre.org.

Uncle Romeo Vanya Juliet

Bedlam, the estimable theater company founded in 2012, has a reputation for reinvigorating classic texts with a combination of raw energy and incisive interpretation. At its best, Bedlam distills a work to its bare essence using a small cast to reveal the play’s soul, which apparently had always been hiding in plain sight. Their production of Saint Joan, for instance, employed just four actors and revealed the vigor and immediacy within Shaw’s verbosity. The same four actors performed Hamlet as a giddy romp that also succeeded in finding new depths of pathos and urgency. And their adaptation of Sense and Sensibility managed to plumb the theatricality from Jane Austen’s 19th-century novel with 21st-century showmanship.

Bedlam’s latest production, Uncle Romeo Vanya Juliet, described in the show’s publicity as a mash-up of Uncle Vanya and Romeo and Juliet, takes a different approach. Rather than burrowing into the separate plays for new subtextual insights, the adaptation by Kimberly Pau looks outside of the texts for inspiration. The dramaturgical merging attempts to show how the classic works complement each other through their über-textual parallels. The final result, unfortunately, is as ungainly as the show’s title. The production ultimately numbs Chekhov’s aching anguish and neuters Shakespeare’s romantic poetry.

Susannah Millonzi as Sonya and Eric Tucker as Astrov in Kimberly Pau’s Uncle Romeo Vanya Juliet. Top: Zuzanna Szadkowski as Yelena/Juliet and Edmund Lewis as Vanya/Romeo.

Actually, the mash-up designation is rather misleading. While one might expect this appellation to be a classical cocktail mixed with equal parts Vanya and equal parts Romeo and Juliet, the primary focus is essentially on the former. Pau has provided a script that is a generally faithful version of Chekhov’s play with just two eliminated characters (Vanya’s mother and Sonya’s former nanny), but the rest of the existentially afflicted individuals are all present.

For the first two thirds of Uncle Romeo Vanya Juliet, directed by Eric Tucker, audiences can expect a fairly straightforward interpretation of Chekhov’s masterwork. For those unfamiliar with the plot, the lives of Vanya (Edmund Lewis) and Sonya (Susannah Millonzi) are thrown into turmoil with the arrival of Sonya’s father and pedantic professor, Serebryakov (Randolph Curtis Rand), and his young wife, Yelena (Zuzanna Szadkowski). Astrov (Tucker), the neighboring doctor and dabbler in botany, has become a permanent fixture in the home, and his passionate love for Yelena wreaks emotional havoc on the household.

Vanya also loves Yelena, and both Sonya and Yelena love Astrov, and although no one dies as a result of star-crossed passions, their fates are even worse: except for the haughty professor, the characters will presumably live in eternal misery and loneliness.

In Bedlam fashion the proceedings are punctuated with cheeky anachronisms and choreographed chaos. When Vanya threatens Serebryakov with a gun, for example, the characters scream that he is “going postal,” and Yelena has a momentary daydream/dance break underscored by the 1980s lovers’ anthem, “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Moments of emotional turmoil are highlighted with actors forcefully rolling set pieces into and out of the playing space. (John McDermott’s scenic design, which playfully creates a Russian estate with moveable birch trees, office furniture, and an iconic samovar, is spot-on.)

Tucker and Szadkowski. Photographs by Ashley Garrett.

The Romeo and Juliet tangents offer little in the way of emotional or intellectual illumination. At times, there are moments of cleverness, such as in a reference to Vanya’s dream. This prompts Astrov to metamorphose into Mercutio and recite his well-known Queen Mab monologue. There is also an extended riff late in the play in which Vanya fantasizes about killing Serebryakov, and the characters assume an alternative reality. Vanya/Romeo and Yelena/Juliet are romantically tragic in ways that undercuts the quotidian tragedy that Chekhov presents.

If the amalgamation does not effectively serve Chekhov’s and Shakespeare’s works, the five-member ensemble (with an on-stage musician, John Coyne, who masterfully accompanies the cast in periodic Russian folksongs) tears into the material. Alternating between rough-and-tumble acting and broad comedy, each actor also has quiet moments to show the sense of solitude just under the surface.

Les Dickert’s impressive lighting (with a special nod to the birch trees with red fairy lights) and Charlotte Palmer-Lane’s mix of contemporary and period-inflected costumes (including putting Yelena/Juliet in a white wedding dress for most of the second act) provide a waking dreamlike quality to the proceedings.

Chekhov purists might be more inclined to see the current production of Uncle Vanya across town at Hunter College. Richard Nelson’s spare, quiet production seems more radical in its simplicity. The Bedlam production needlessly and regrettably complicates the play with its infusion of dramatic schizophrenia.

Uncle Romeo Vanya Juliet plays through Oct. 28 at A.R.T./New York Theatres Mezzanine Theatre, 502 W. 53rd St. Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday through Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday. For a performance calendar and tickets, visit bedlam.org.