~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Waiting For Godot
review by Michael Scott Moore

SF Weekly (March 4, 1998)
Home / Now Playing & Coming Soon / Back to Media List / To email us

Last year's Fringe Festival yielded a farce about two Elks Lodge members who whistled a long and warbling tribute to a late comrade, trading vaudevillian quips between numbers and calling themselves the Whistleaires. Mark Romyn and Philip Worman made you think that they were talented enough as actors to get away from the cheap comedy they were dealing in and take on a serious script. They must have thought the same thing, because in a single bound they've promoted themselves from sketch comics at the Fringe to principals in Waiting For Godot at the EXIT's Absurdist Series, a brilliantly apt if overambitious leap. It's apt because Godot is vaudevillian, and because Estragon and Vladimir have the same dominant-submissive stage relationship that Romyn and Worman had as the Whistleaires. But it's overambitious because Godot is so long, and has so much depth and bleakness that to keep things moving takes more sophisticated acting skills than the Whistleaires have quite developed.

Beckett once told a reporter that the sound of a man screaming with pain in a hospital room was more or less the mood he wanted to capture in his plays. He may have been joking; but Waiting For Godot can drive an audience into screaming fits it it's performed either very badly or very well. The Whistleaires fall in between. Romyn, as Vladimir, has an excellent physical talent, pulling his mouth into a rubbery self-satisfied smile and moving his limbs with a lanky creepiness that fits the play well. But he's too cheerful. He is -- to repeat myself shamefully, from a review of an Absurdist Series show last year -- too young and American to reach the mordant depths of the role. Both Didi and Gogo need to be decadent, hopeless, European, or if not European at the very least grounded in despair, and Romyn is young and lucky enough not to be weighted with so much gravity. Worman does a better job; he's good at being feckless and morose, possibly because he doesn't have as strong a character-actor bent as Romyn, but it's still just a good impression of despair rather than the real thing. The result is not a bad show at all -- some of the routines are very good -- but a sometimes stagnant one.

The player who can do real despair is Derek Gavin Mutch, playing Lucky. Except for a broken run of thinking out loud near the middle of the play, what Lucky has to do mostly is sag under the weight of Pozzo's luggage, closing his eyes and almost falling asleep until something jars him upright and he starts to sag again. Mutch does it with impressive feeling. He even foams at the mought and drools. Joshua Pollock seems on top of his lines as Pozzo, not in them; and Benjamin Cooper, the young boy making his professional debut here as the Young Boy, holds up his lines admirably. There is, by the way, no whistling in the show -- except for a snippet of "Strangers in the Night" before the lights come on.
Home / Now Playing & Coming Soon / Back to Media List / To email us