by John Lahr
“You’re a student—what does it mean? I don’t get it.” He didn’t wait for an answer. “All right. Two bums. They’re hungry. They’re scared. They wait for something that never comes … It’s too intellectual for me. The words say something, they’re plain enough, but somehow the ideas aren’t.”
He stopped and picked up the phone. He cradled it under his chin and talked as he dialed.
“What is this ‘habit is a great deadener’?… Hello, Lester. Bert. How many weeks did you say …?”
Waiting for Godot intrigued my father. No intellectual discussion intensified his appreciation. The play which would have a revolutionary effect on ideas and form in contemporary drama, was discussed, instead, with others whose advice he had always heeded in musical-comedy matters—with Jack O’Brian, the columnist and ex-drama critic, and Vaughn Deering, a friend and professor of drama at Fordham University who occasionally helped him rehearse. Both of them counseled Lahr to do it. However, the final and most forceful voice of approval came from Mildred, who had long advocated that her husband extend his talents into other areas of theater.
He was tough to convince. Without academic training he felt unsure of the play’s complexities and of his ability to stamp it with his own personality. Even while deliberating whether to perform the play, he seemed to delight in its mystery and theatricality. “When I first read it, I realized that this was not stark tragedy. Beneath it was tremendous humor, two men trying to amuse themselves on earth by playing jokes and little games. And that was my conception.”
Millions of critical words have been lavished on Waiting for Godot; Lahr conceived of it as a vision of action that reduced itself to a few simple sentences of explanation. While friends, and later the press, reacted to a low comic entering the intellectual arena with amusement, Lahr understood the play not from a literary point of view but strictly from a theatrical one. Once, while still undecided, he came into my room and read these lines:
Estragon: In the meantime let us try and converse calmly, since we are incapable of keeping silent.
Vladimir: You’re right, we’re inexhaustible.
Estragon: It’s so we won’t think.
Vladimir: We have that excuse.
Estragon: It’s so we won’t hear.
Vladimir: We have our reasons.
Estragon: All the dead voices.
Vladimir: They make a noise like wings.
Estragon: Like leaves.
Vladimir: Like sand.
Estragon: Like leaves.
Silence.
“He writes beautifully, doesn’t he? His meter—he’s a poet, isn’t he? His rhythm is crisp; there’s meter to it, same as in poetry. It’s not cumbersome; it’s in character. It flows.”
That was all he ever said to indicate his appreciation of Beckett. If he had a reassuring sense of the play’s poetry in private, he did not trust the weighty impact of its repetition so easily on stage. In the Miami tryout, he wanted to cut the lines he read to me so admiringly. Years later, talking to my Hunter College drama class, he recollected how sad and beautiful that dialogue was, adding, “And after the last repartee, there was a momentary silence in the audience and then laughter, as if they had held their breath and suddenly been allowed to relax.”
As an actor, he understood the subtleties of the spoken word without ever having read poetry. He never read any other Beckett plays or novels. Lahr’s simple words reflect an understanding of the pathos and meaning of the play that went beyond critical generalities. Lahr lived with silences; his understanding of language was commensurate with Beckett’s precise, philosophical use of it. His appreciation of the playful potential of words went back to his burlesque days and his use of the malaprop; at the same time, Lahr was conscious of his own inability to make words convey his exact meaning. He didn’t like to talk merely to pass time; he would rather remain silent—even with his family. Yet there were reasons why others talked—a motive that in his own shyness he understood. In a radio play, Embers, which Lahr would never read, Beckett gave an insight into the significance of his particular type of dramatic language. Talking about the sea, a man (Henry) remarks to his wife, Ada—
…Listen to it!… It’s not so bad when you get out on it … Perhaps, I should have gone into the merchant navy.
Ada: It’s only the surface, you know. Underneath all is as quiet as the grave. Not a sound. All day, all night, not a sound.
The languid rhythm of Beckett’s speakers, the endless gabble of trivialities between Vladimir and Estragon, creates precisely the surface activity that Beckett’s characters refer to in the sea. The insight is also embedded in the laughter of Lahr’s comedy scenes, from the inane blathering of the cop to cover his own embarrassment to the TV announcer’s verbocity that reinterprets the baseball player’s simple sentences. Lahr talked about playing Beckett “instinctively,” a term by which he hints that Beckett spoke to his own immediate and intense private experience.
If he understood the play’s poetry in a curiously unacademic way, his faith in Beckett as a craftsman came only after struggling through the play’s interior structure on stage. “You never laugh at a blind man on stage or people with their legs cut off. But Beckett wrote in Pozzo and made such a heavy out of him that, by the second act, when he comes back blind, we play games with him. He falls down, he cries for help. Vladimir and Estragon are on the stage. We taunt him. We ask him how much he’ll give us. We slide. We poke—you understand? The audience screams. If Beckett didn’t know what he was doing, as so many people at the time claimed, he wouldn’t have put the show in that running order. When I read it, and saw how deliberately he had placed Pozzo in the script, which was against all theatrical convention, I wasn’t sure it would work. When I played it, I realized how brilliantly he had constructed the play. I always thought it was an important play—I just didn’t realize how important.”
Lahr decided to do the play, with the idea that if it worked well Myerberg would bring it to Broadway. On the surface, Lahr was pleased; but from the beginning his uneasiness with intellectual ideas, his fear of failure, the strange format of the show, and a young director bred anxiety. Myerberg had contracted with Alan Schneider to direct the production after Garson Kanin, his first choice, backed out at the last minute. Schneider, with only two Broadway credits—Anastasia and The Remarkable Mrs. Pennypacker—had been recommended to Myerberg by Thornton Wilder, who had seen Schneider’s revival of The Skin of Our Teeth, which Myerberg had originally produced in 1943. Beckett’s play extended Wilder’s early fascination with the philosophical and dramatic consequences of the flux of time. Beckett was hard-headed where Wilder was sentimental, poetic where Wilder was folksy.
Schneider recounted his first introduction to Beckett’s work and also his meeting with Beckett in an article for the Chelsea Review (Autumn 1958). As the director who later became Beckett’s chief interpreter in the United States as well as the director of Edward Albee’s major plays, Schneider’s reactions are important. Beckett’s significance in America at the time was limited to a small coterie o£ intellectuals; only after Waiting for Godot did he become the important literary and dramatic voice in America that he already was in Europe.
Schneider met Beckett; Lahr did not. Schneider saw the play in other countries; Lahr did not. Schneider’s experience with Beckett is important because, as director, his vision of the play and how to convey Beckett’s meaning were different from what finally evolved in Lahr’s interpretation.
In 1954, Schneider saw Waiting for Godot in both its Zurich and Paris versions. Captivated by the play’s strength of thought, he set about tracking down the seclusive Beckett. As he chronicles his exasperating search—
“Finally a friendly play-agent informed me that the English language rights had been acquired by a British director, Peter Glenville, who was planning to present the play in London with Alec Guinness as Vladimir and Ralph Richardson as Estragon. Besides, added the agent, the play was nothing an American audience wo
uld take—unless it could have a couple of topflight comedians like Bob Hope or Jack Benny kidding it, preferably with Laurel and Hardy in the other two roles. An American production under those circumstances seemed hopeless, and Mr. Beckett was as far removed as Mr. Godot himself. I came home to New York and went on to other matters.
“The next spring [1955] I had occasion to remember once more. Godot received its English language premiere in London, not with Guinness and Richardson at all, but with a non-star cast at London’s charming Arts Theater Club. Damned without exception by daily critics, it was hailed in superlatives by both Harold Hobson and Kenneth Tynan (The Atkinson and Kerr of London) in their Sunday pieces, and soon became the top conversation piece of the English season. At the same time, the English translation was published by Grove Press in New York.
“I read and re-read the published version. Somehow on its closely spaced printed pages, it seemed cold and abstract, even harsh, after the remarkable ambience I had sensed at the Babylone. When a leading Broadway producer asked me what I thought of its chances, I responded only half-heartedly. Intrigued as I had been, I could not at the moment imagine a commercial production in Broadway terms.
“One day in the fall of that same year I was visiting my old Alma Mater, the University of Wisconsin, when to my utter amazement I received a long-distance phone call from producer Michael Myerberg asking if I would be interested in directing Waiting for Godot in New York. He had Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell signed for the two main roles … It was like Fate knocking at the door. After a desperate search in practically every bookshop in Chicago, I finally located a copy, stayed up all night on the train studying it with new eyes, and arrived back to New York to breathe a fervent ‘yes’ to Myerberg.
“Followed a series of conferences with Lahr and Ewell, both of whom confessed their complete bewilderment of the play; and with Myerberg, who insisted that no one could possibly be bewildered, least of all himself. He did think it might be a good idea, however, for me to see the English production, perhaps stopping off on the way to have a talk with Beckett himself. To say that I was pleased and excited would be a pale reflection of the reality. And my elation was tempered only by the fear that Beckett would continue to remain aloof—he had merely reluctantly consented to a brief meeting with ‘the New York director.’
“At any rate, a week later, I found myself aboard the U.S.S. Independence bound for Paris and London—and by coincidence, the table companion and fellow conversationalist of Thornton Wilder, who was on his way to Rome and elsewhere. He greatly admired Beckett, considered Godot one of the two greatest modern plays (the other one, I believe, Cocteau’s Orpheus), and openly contributed his ideas about an interpretation of the play which he had seen produced both in France and Germany. In fact, so detailed and regular were our daily meetings that a rumor circulated that Wilder was rewriting the script, something which later amused both authors considerably. What was true was that I was led to become increasingly familiar with the script, both in French and in translation and discovered what were the most important questions to ask Beckett in the limited time we were to have together. More specifically, I was now working in the frame of reference of an actual production situation—a three-week rehearsal period, a ‘tryout’ in a new theater in Miami, and, of course, Bert and Tommy. It wasn’t Bob Hope and Jack Benny, but the Parisian agent of two summers before had been correct so far. Was she also going to prove correct in terms of the audience response?
“Beckett at that time had no phone—in fact, the only change I’ve noticed in him since his ‘success’ is the acquisition of one—so I sent him a message by pneumatique from the very plush hotel near the Etoile where Myerberg had lodged me. Within an hour, he rang up saying he’d meet me in the lobby—at the same time reminding me that he had only an hour or so to spare. Armed with a large bottle of Lacrima Christi as a present from both Wilder and myself, I stationed myself in the rather overdone lobby and waited for the elusive Mr. Beckett to appear. Promptly and very businesslike he strode in, his tall athletic figure ensconced in a worn raincoat; bespectacled in oldfashioned steel rims; his face was as long and sensitive as a greyhound’s. Greetings exchanged, the biggest question became where we might drink our Lacrima Christi; we decided to walk a bit and see if we could come up with a solution. Walk we did, as we have done so many times since, and talk as we walked—about a variety of matters, including, occasionally, his play. Eventually, we took a taxi to his skylight apartment in the sixth arrondissement and wound up finishing most of the bottle. In between I plied him with all my studiously arrived-at questions as well as all the ones that came to me at the moment; and he tried to answer as directly and honestly as he could. The first one was ‘Who or what does Godot mean?’ and the answer was immediately forthcoming: ‘If I knew I would have said so in the play.’ Sam was perfectly willing to answer any questions of specific meaning or reference, but would not—as always—go into matters of larger or symbolic meanings, preferring his work to speak for itself and letting the supposed ‘meanings’ fall where they may.
“As it turned out, he did have an appointment; so we separated but not before we had made a date for dinner the next evening. On schedule, we had a leisurely meal at one of his favorite restaurants in Montparnasse, then I persuaded him to come along with me to a performance of Anastasia at the Theatre Antoine … it turned out to be very artificial and old-fashioned and Sam’s suffering was acute. Immediately after the last curtain we retired to Fouquet’s, once the favorite café of his friend and companion James Joyce …Shortly before dawn—since I had a plane to catch for London—we again separated. But not before Sam had asked me if it would be additionally helpful if he joined me in London at the performances of Godot there. He had not been to London in some years, had never liked it since his early days of poverty and struggle there, but he would be willing to come if I thought it helpful! I could hardly believe what I heard. Helpful!
“Two days later, Sam came into London incognito …That night, and each night for the next five days, we went to see the production of Godot, which had been transferred by this time to the Criterion in Piccadilly Circus. The production was interesting, though scenically over-cluttered and missing many of the points which Sam had just cleared up for me. My fondest memories are of Sam’s clutching my arm from time to time and in a clearly heard stage whisper saying, ‘It’s ahl wrahng! He’s doing it ahul wrahng!’ about a particular bit of stage business or the interpretation of a certain line. Every night after the performance, we would compare what we had see to what he had intended, try to analyze why or how certain points were being lost, speak with the actors about their difficulties. Every night also, we would carefully watch the audience, a portion of which always left during the show. I always felt that Sam would have been disappointed if at least a few hadn’t.
“Through all this, I discovered not only how clear and logical Godot was in its essences, but how much and how easy to know Sam was, how friendly beneath his basic shyness. I had met Sam, wanting primarily to latch on to anything which might help make Godot a success on Broadway. I left him, wanting nothing more than to please him. I came with respect; I left with a greater measure of devotion than I have ever felt for a writer whose work I was engaged in translating to the stage.…”
Myerberg’s conception of Waiting for Godot, after seeing the London production, was more certain than Schneider’s. Where Schneider had questioned its commercial nature, Myerberg was immediately impressed at the play’s ability to hold an audience despite a production he considered, in general, to be mediocre. “Let’s face it, Waiting for Godot is not everybody’s cup of tea. It’s a theatrical property; it might he called a great play. I call it a theater piece. I don’t know what a play is myself. Everybody else seems to know, but I don’t. I look for material that can be put on the stage and hold an audience for an evening. I don’t know what a play is …”
Schneider, in his article, registered little surprise at the suggestion of two
stand-up comedians like Jack Benny or Bob Hope playing Vladimir and Estragon. Myerberg’s first reaction was to envision Lahr in the role of Estragon. “Knowledge of performers is part of the producer’s equipment. I have a kind of card index mind which riffles through them. I get one casting in my mind and that’s the casting I go for. When I contracted for the play, I said ‘I’ll produce it only if I can get Bert Lahr to play in it. How I’ll sell it to him, I don’t know. If I don’t get him, I won’t produce it.’”
Myerberg’s cunning led him to another important decision that had a bearing on the final performances. He would do Waiting for Godot on Broadway, not, as in London and Paris, in the experimental noncommercial theater clubs or off-Broadway houses. The choice, which astounded many, was not daring to a producer of Myerberg’s frame of mind. “Waiting for Godot was a revolutionary play that had never been done here. Beckett had not really been introduced to the public. I regarded the problem of production this way: either you do it or you don’t. I don’t feel you can have the opportunity unless 1) you have the proper stage, 2) you attract the proper actors. I couldn’t have gotten the final cast I got—E. G. Marshall, Kurt Kasznar, Alvin Epstein, and Lahr—for off-Broadway. It’s just a question of professionalism. You couldn’t have done the play off-Broadway on the scale it demanded. After it’s established, then it can be done any place.”
Myerberg’s statement is an interesting backward glance; but the initial tryout of Waiting for Godot was handled in such a myopic fashion as to suggest that even Myerberg, for all his assurance, did not quite know what he had on his hands.
Myerberg himself admits that mistakes were made. He had mounted the play on a highly stylized set that not only made it difficult for the actors to move, but also detracted from the words and action. As Myerberg later told The New York Times, “I went too far in my effort to give the play a base for popular acceptance. I accented the wrong things in trying to illuminate corners of the text I felt were left in shadow in the London production. For instance, I cast the play too close to type. In casting Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell I created the wrong impression about the play. Both actors were too well known in specific types of performance. The audience thought they were going to see Lahr and Ewell cut loose in a lot of capers. They expected a farcical comedy, which Waiting for Godot, of course, is not.”
