WAITING FOR GODOT

WAITING FOR GODOT. By Samuel Beckett. American Conservatory Theater at the Geary Theater, San Francisco. 25 October 2003.

If Charlie Chaplin and Pablo Picasso were locked together in a theater, the result just might be the American Conservatory Theater's revival of Waiting for Godot. This production of Samuel Beckett's classic, which has become an exemplar of absurdist theatre, made an intriguing foray into intertextuality-well beyond the customary homage to vaudevillian comedy and Chaplin films implicit in the many pratfalls and verbal non-sequiturs of Beckett's tramps. The scenery of J.B. Wilson-a drywall backdrop with a huge rectangle cut out of it; a zigzagging ramp cutting between the low mound and woeful tree; and an additional proscenium, gold and ornate, that literally framed the action of the stage-suggested the baffling geometry of a cubist painting. The effect was both disorienting and compelling, especially when the glowing moon rose within that rectangle, as the day, along with the hopes of Didi and Gogo, faded toward night, simultaneously suggesting an enormous doorknob (the possibility of escape from interminable waiting?) and a train-light in a tunnel (imminent, or even immanent, doom?). Cubism's valuing of abstract form and radically fragmented objects over realistic detail, in effect, became a visual metaphor for Beckett's disavowal of theatrical realism and doubled the opacity of a play that, like Lucky's thinking or Godot's identity, confounds straightforward explication.

This intersection of theatrical absurdism and cubism was particularly fruitful under the artistic direction of Carey Perloff, who recently celebrated her eleventh season with ACT. Perloff...