I Stopped Waiting for Godot at Intermission

DATELINE: Santa Cruz, California, May, 1971
A stunningly defiant and revolutionarily brazen production of Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" took the stage at the UCSC Little Theater this evening. Vladimir and Estragon were absurd as ever, but played by women.

One of my housemates photographed the actors in costume in our yard for display in the theater lobby. I, who did not go to school and did not go to work, was recruited to black the edges of the card stock he mounted the photos on with a Flair pen. I felt connected to the production, and was given a free ticket for my artistic contribution, so I went. By myself. The story of why I, nineteen years old, was not in school, though registered for that semester at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon, is theater of the absurd in itself. Depressing theater of the absurd. I would argue there is no other kind of theater of the absurd. In fact, the point theater of the absurd wants to rub our little noses in seems to me so intuitively obvious and as foregone as conclusions go that it is pointless. Ha!

Vladimir and Estragon stood around, spoke their bits, waited. I squirmed in my seat. The lights went up and I walked home. My housemate commented later that my leaving at intermission was wise as the second act carried on pretty much the same way. I had thought the play was over.

Prior to that time I had imagined myself an intellectual. I had read every book in my parents' bookshelf, including 1984, but excluding most volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, by the time I was in 8th grade. Samuel Beckett felled me. Why was he doing what he was doing? Well, yeah, that absurd thing, but why was he belaboring the point? Was he good? Why was he good? Why didn't I get him? I was proud to see women play these famous roles, but what was the point? If I took not having a point as the ground we stand on in life, which I did, why not do something else with work we create? Is this not a bit like pathetic fallacy? Or that other idea, where the writer mimics an inadequacy of some kind, let's say the production of boredom, to make the point that people were bored, which is supposed to be a writing deficit not a part of writing, I thought, to celebrate.

Years later, friends and I went to see "Texts for Nothing" at the Seattle Rep. These texts were not intended for the stage, Beckett had thought them "abortive," but Bill Irwin and his collaborators brought four of these to the stage. Bill Irwin is a terrific physical comedian with a lot of verve and wit, and I thought if anyone could guide me into an appreciation of Samuel Beckett he could. As we walked to our seats, my sig oth said, "uh oh," and pointed to the hole center stage. "You know that where he's going to end up, just a head sticking out of that hole." I was enjoying a bit of twilight sleep by the time Bill Irwin was neck-deep in that hole.

Is this a personal failure? I signalled my peers that I was intellectually precocious by reading Albert Camus's The Stranger in ninth grade, no comment on our chief of state overtly intended. Let it wobble in your near consciousness. For further exploration of that topic I recommend Adam Gopnik's "Talk of the Town" piece in last week's New Yorker.

I don't believe texts are for nothing. Who cares if there is no guiding hand up there to grant us meaning with a wiggle of his/her disinterested pointer finger? "Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty" is where I go with absurdity. Absurdity = given. What can I do with my time that makes sense to me? A sense I create out of a hierarchy of goods and needs that has human basis - ah secular humanist blast blast blast - but wait, not for Godot, who isn't coming even in the second act, but, oh and then there are those who are lit by evil - yeah, six year old girls, say, or world domination, or destructive fires, but let's say I give you a test and you pass, so given that you are this good kind of no evil doing person, then I say get out there and try out your voice on the world. I will too. Ready, go.