"For some reason that is not particularly helpful, the play... is being touted as a contemporary riff on Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot. To cite the comparison might make it easier to advertise, but for whatever similarities that exist, the play is anchored not in Theater of the Absurd, but in the sadder and more sobering absurdity of reality."
I'm glad that Mr. Miller enjoyed it, and I share his enthusiasm for the play, but the above is an odd statement to make. The play's structure, characters, scenery, and action beats directly correlate to "Godot". I think the play stands on its own, but it quite simply could not exist without Beckett's original to provide a template for Nwandu to work from. That play also forms a lens through which we can understand the world that Nwandu is creating: a desolate corner in an American city that is as isolating and hopeless as the post-apocalyptic wasteland of Beckett's ravaged European countryside, and two men who wait for prosperity and the recognition of their humanity the same as Didi and Gogo wait for the God that never arrives.
Nwandu only steps away from the Beckett in her final few minutes, and even that is a revelatory subversion of the original. Rather than the same thing happening twice as part of an endless cycle, we see at last that these men do have a path out... and to write anything more would require sharing some of the play's most delicious dramatic surprises. |
