Keanu Reeves & Alex Winter’s Adventure

Of course it works. Two old friends known for their clownish escapades, always wanting to get back to somewhere they were – anywhere but here, really – all the while using ever so odd verbiage to conduct idiosyncratic conversations that only sound a bit absurd on the surface but actually speak to real emotion and maybe genuine friendship. I can’t remember if the Bill & Ted movies were loaded with despair and suicidal ideation – I think not – but the stars of those movies, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter probably had the chops ready to go, as they demonstrate in Samuel Beckett’s post-war classic Waiting For Godot, directed by Jamie Lloyd and opening tonight at Broadway‘s Hudson Theatre.

Bringing his impeccable, austere design and movement sensibilities to a play that has great use for them, Lloyd and his creative partners Soutra Gilmour (set and costume design), Jon Clark (lighting design), Ben and Max Ringham (sound design) and Cheryl Thomas (hair and makeup design) have created a production that’s pure 20th Century modernest elegance, all light and dark and ambient drone and forced perspectives.

So, that set. On an otherwise dark, empty stage sits a tunnel, a very, very large open-ended tunnel, likely made of stone, the end furthest from the audience smaller – the forced perspective – to give it a sense of distance. A tunnel to what? Who knows, but a bright light does occasionally shine at the far end. (The staging takes some liberties with Beckett’s stage instructions for “a road” and “a tree”; no road this, and we’re only told the characters see a tree).

And into this tunnel wanders one Estragon, or Gogo, played by Reeves in a tramp’s tattered black (or is it a dirty blue, or even gray?) suitcoat, bowler hat and boots that don’t fit, and Vladimir, or Didi, played by Winter in similar colors but of a perhaps vaguely more modern fit). In any case, these are Beckett’s drifters, no doubt, right down to the aching feet and bad breath.

When we meet the two, Reeves’ Estragon is complaining about his ill-fitting boot, struggling to remove it. “Nothing to be done,” he says, in what may be the most concise opening line indicator in all of modern history.

You probably know the rest, but I’ll sum up best I can. These two starving, bedraggled sometime-acquaintances/sometime-friends ponder everything they can dredge up from their fading memories. Were they hear yesterday? Why are they hear today? What happened last night, or will happen tomorrow? They have nothing to do, at least that they want to do, and know only one thing: They are waiting for Godot, a mystery man who at least Vladimir senses is the key to their lives. Neither has any idea what Godot will tell them, nor whether he’ll even show up – everyday Godot sends an emissary to announce his arrival on the following day, and every day after the emissary arrives with the same massage.

What’s a human to do but wait for Godot and pass the time in despair and hope-against-hope?

The duo are soon joined to two other visitors, the thoroughly unpleasant Pozzo (Brandon J. Dirden, Broadway’s Take Me Out, Skeleton Crew, here truly terrifying in his now sweet-now menacing shifts), a sadist in his long black trenchcoat and Mad Max shades, accompanied by his servant Lucky (the excellent Michael Patrick Thornton, who appeared in Lloyd’s A Doll’s House revival with Jessica Chastain). The very sight of these two characters is ominous, with Pozzo bellowing orders and insults (“Pig!”) to Lucky (Thornton is an actor who uses a wheelchair, so the stage rope typically used to tie master to servant is instead supplanted by Pozzo’s constant manhandling of the chair).

Thornton, by the way, gets one of the play’s tour-de-force moments when, long thought by Gogo and Didi to be mute, the servant is ordered by his cruel, whip-wielding master to “think!,” at which time Lucky begins to recite Godot‘s strangest monologue, a mish-mash of intellectual-sounding gibberish that, at times, will have you believe it makes sense. Thornton handles it beautifully (at Pozzo’s command to dance, the wheelchair user simply raises his hand and does a few Fosse hat tosses and then a sort of Charlie Chaplain finger dance. It’s a fine moment.

Pozzo and Lucky will return in Act II, though somewhat changed, and they’ll never be able to provide the answers that Vladimir and Estragon crave.

Reeves and Winter use every trick in their respective books to wile while waiting. They argue, they make up, they hug, they bellow and they show affection. They dance, they do the show’s famous vaudeville hat swap (expertly, I might add), they climb (or attempt to climb) the curved wall of the tunnel only to come sliding down again and again. At one point, just after reciting Beckett’s written line “Back to back like in the good old days,” Reeves and Winter look at the audience and immediately break into the famous air guitar riff from Bill & Tedd’s Excellent Adventure complete with sound effects. The audience goes wild, and why not? This is the sort of clowing Gogo and Didi – long thought to be based at least in part on Laurel and Hardy – might do.

As for the acting, there’s little doubt that Winter is the most natural (and more experienced) stage actor of the two, more versatile and, when necessary, capable to drawing real pathos from this grim, gorgeous work of art. You believe his every changing mood. Reeves, as they say, is Reeves, an exceedingly charming actor who projects more than he acts but always seems to have full control of an audiences’ attention (and affection). Yes, even when he seems to be trying too hard to be stentorian or angry or carrying out a bit of slapstick tantrum, he has us rooting for him.

And why not? He and Winter are limning their decades-old friendship, good times and bad, and melding it with one of the greatest 20th Century modern drama duos ever created. It’s their Godot, and damned if it doesn’t work.

Title: Waiting for Godot
Venue: Broadway’s Hudson Theatre
Written By: Samuel Beckett
Directed By: Jamie Lloyd
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, Brandon J. Dirden, Michael Patrick Thornton
Running Time: 2 hr 15 min (including intermission)