So in my last post I said that we would next be discussing the super-secret, mystery-history, “Why does no one know this anecdote because it is so sad and hilarious and good?” backstory behind “Waiting For Godot.”
That was not a lie. That is exactly what we are doing right now.
So let’s start with a theme in American Cultural History that is mosy relevant to this story. I like to call it “Foreign Exchange Student Syndrome.” This is when something is really cool in another country (usually a country in Europe, but Asia can work too) and then it comes to America and we’re all “Wait, whaaa? But I don’t get it…”
Now I am not a social scientist or foreign affairs expert, so I have no idea what it is that makes Americans not “get it.” It could be that there’s something in the Thames and Seine just makes Europeans sharper, cooler, and way more fun at parties. It could be that we as Americans are only truly comfortable colonizing, and don’t like being colonized ourselves, even if what’s taking us over is something as simple as a passing fad. Or it could be that we are just not as smart as we probably should be.
Of course, there are foreign trends that blow up huge on the American cultural stage and get an instant popularity pass (See: The Beatles, Pizza, and Any Japanese Anime Show Featuring A Kid Going on a Quest Alongside Magical Creatures and a Simultaneously Catchy and Irritating Theme Song).
But we’re not talking about the free-pass-to-cool foreign exports today.
No, today, we’re talking about “Waiting For Godot.”
So let’s first take on Godot in Europe.
It’s the fall of 1948 in post-war Paris (The same year “Death of a Salesman” was written! Postwar Western Theater, you are such a G!), all around birds are chirping and children are singing because the Germans aren’t bombing them anymore, and amidst all of this song and joy, Irish expatriate Samuel Beckett is down to write a play.
This is Samuel Beckett.
I mean, he’s no Arthur Miller (who is?) but I give him points for his mysterious grin and oddly placed spectacles. The way he’s wearing his glasses makes me think that Beckett should wear classic black Chuck Taylors and listen to Arcade Fire on the A Train while sketching pictures of The Girl That Got Away on a piece of newspaper that just fluttered by. He’s like a character in a Fox Searchlight picture. I’m right about this. Also, Gene Hackman or Alan Arkin should totally duke it out to play Beckett in the biopic and whoever wins the role can never wear his glasses right and this will win him a Best Actor nomination and maybe even a surprise dark horse victory. I’m also right about this.
(One more quick fun fact about Samuel B-Town before we continue on-Beckett, a middling academic, novelist, essayist, and poet at the time, had a revelation a few years earlier in his mother’s bedroom where his entire future literary career was revealed to him by God or something like that. Now whenever I go home, I hang around my parents’ bedroom hoping the same thing will happen to me. It hasn’t worked so far, so I think I’m going to try the kitchen next…)
Anyhow, what starts as a writing exercise for Beckett lights a creative fire under his posterior and in the autumn months of 1948 he completes “En attendant Godot,” which even though he’s English (well, Irish, but speaks English) he writes in French.
(Two things.)
(One, “Waiting for Godot” was a WRITING EXERCISE??!?! Between that and Miller writing the first act of “Death of a Salesman” in a day… I don’t even know you guys.)
(Two, how gangster is it that Beckett wrote in French? French is so much prettier than English and it’s not fair. I wish I could write the rest of this blog in French, but I can’t because I don’t speak it.)
So in early 1949 Beckett finishes “Waiting for Godot” and gets hocking.
And no one wants the play.
Where have we heard this story before?
Oh, right, last blog post.
Seriously, it seems like the best litmus test to see if a play is going to be a classic is if everyone hates the play’s guts before said play even happens. It’s working so far…
But eventually they do get “Waiting For Godot” up and running in 1953 and it’s a critical and commercial success in Paris, because Parisians are all like “A play about the meaninglessness of life? We’re in!” The play was also apparently quite controversial, but man, it’s France where they wear lingerie that would be considered torture devices here in the states, what isn’t controversial over there?
“Waiting For Godot” opens in 1955 (that’s two years later for those of you keeping score at home) in London. At first the play gets a bunch of bad reviews and the audiences are like wanting to smack Beckett upside the head for making them sit through two and a half hours of theater they don’t understand. But THEN the Sunday Times and the Observer give Godot super-glowing reviews, and all the Brits who didn’t get it is like “Oh, no, wait, I do get it. Ha ha ha! Just kidding. Tricked you good!”
So now the producers are like “Paris, check, London, check. America? Let’s get it on.”
And get it on they did on January 3rd, 1956 at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, Florida.
Wait, wait— they went from London and Paris to MIAMI?
I’m confused.
But I’m not alone. Everybody else was too.
So this American premiere has been hyped into outer space. It was famously heralded as “the laugh hit of two continents.”
“Hold up, ‘Waiting for Godot’ is what you are talking about in relation to this pull quote?” you are wondering in confusion.
You are not alone. This is what everyone else was wondering in confusion too the night of the premiere.
People were so confused in fact, that they forgot where they parked their manners and started acting like total jackasses. Within minutes people were getting out of their seats and leaving
(Do you remember what happens in the first few minutes of “Godot” It’s just Estragon taking off his shoes and chilling with Vladmir. Do you know what it would take for me to leave a theater in the middle of a performance? It would have to be like a burning swastika or truly unforgivable singing. These Americans of the 1950’s, their hat brims and poodle skirts must have just been on too tight and prevented blood from circulating up to the part of the brain that thinks legitimate thoughts.)
So people are leaving by the droves. You couldn’t get them to leave faster if you started a fire in the wings. By intermission three-quarters of the audience have packed their bags and by the end of the show there’s like, pretty much nobody left.
EXCEPT the young college-aged ushers who are there running the house. These kids are still in the theater and they are BAWLING. No they’re not crying because they had to stay. They’re ACTUALLY having their emotional breakdowns because they totally get the existential crisis of “Godot”, it’s a feeling these Beatniks-to-Be experience every day of their lives.
(NOTE: This is what is so awesome about being young. You always get the “crazy new thing” and it’s really fun rebelling against the stodgy and narrow-minded “old guard.” I’m really not looking forward to getting old and not getting the newfangled ways of the young. Already I don’t get Lady Gaga, Twitter, and Anyone in the Twilight Movies. Oh God, it’s happened. I’m old already.)
Also, Tennessee Williams and William Saroyan are both in the audience and they stay through the entire play as well. Not just because they’re playwrights and they have to give Beckett the professional courtesy of not being professional a-holes. No, they actually really like the play too.
So this is the life that “Waiting For Godot” ends up leading. It is made a classic by two kinds of people. First, the intellectuals, the Parisians and playwrights, who get the historical and cultural value of this groundbreaking piece. Then there are the oppressed, who respond emotionally to the chords of imprisonment and life’s meaninglessness ring through the play. “Waiting for Godot” has been successfully performed in German prisons since shortly after its French debut. There was a famous production sponsored by a black church in the American South shortly after the Miami premiere. Post-Apartheid Johannesberg has been home to several productions. “Waiting For Godot” is one of those few pieces of literature that bring the intellectual elite and the socially outcast together, if not in body, then certainly in spirit.
The middle-class bourgeouis never end up saddling on for this particular ride.
But they’re never much fun, anyway.
So WHAT did we learn from this post?
1.) Wearing your glasses wrong makes you look a.) smarter, b.) cooler, and c.) more important.
2.) French is prettier than English.
3.) If everyone hates your play… you’re probably on the right track.
I think we’ll do one more post in this series. It’s going to be a secret for now, mostly because I don’t know what it’s going to be yet…
Here are a couple more indie pictures of Samuel Beckett.
Wearing all black.
Smoking and thinking about the Universe.
Having coffee by himself.
You guys, the facts speak for themselves!
Okay, I can’t help you with twitter or the casting choices behind Twilight, but call me and we’ll talk about Lady GaGa. Seriously, she’s brilliant; she might be the biggest-budget public performance art piece of all time. Also, great blog. Let me know if you hear that Beckett is single . . .
Samuel Beckett wrote in French so that he could write without style, not as a writing exercise or because it was pretty. He did not want to be carried away in the confusion and implication of his mother language (not English itself, but English as it was his first language), so he chose one he knew but had learned later in life. His first major writing in French came with Mercier and Camier in 1946, which he wrote before his Trilogy, which he was finishing as he wrote Waiting for Godot. And Coconut Grove is a dinner theatre. Say what you will of Waiting for Godot, but if I were a grumpy retiree looking for some fun theatre dinner and got Beckett, I’d probably be hauling ass out of the theatre as well.