In Samuel Beckett’s work, everything is on the surface. Nothing is hidden, encoded, or allegorized. No truth lies inside or behind; there is no secret to be revealed. Changes, effects, and transformations don’t result from internal processes but from shifting relations between entities in space. Halfway through his debut novel, Murphy, when the narrative belatedly turns to the protagonist’s own thoughts, Beckett apologizes to the reader: “It is most unfortunate, but the point of this story has been reached where a justification of the expression ‘Murphy’s mind’ has to be attempted.” Even what seems like a nominal shift into consciousness is really about the phrase “Murphy’s mind,” as if interiority itself were merely an effect of language.

As Nietzsche pointed out almost 150 years ago now in his Zarathustra, many of us are habituated by what he called “the spirit of gravity” to equate significance with depth, spelunking into texts and works of art as if their true value were a hidden treasure. This isn’t to suggest there’s nothing in Beckett to find, or that everything in the text reveals itself at first glance. But such meaning as there is accumulates rather than being revealed or discovered.

This accumulation happens through two particular kinds of repetition: reiteration and recombination. His novel Molloy opens, “I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now.” The protagonist, who regularly visits his mother, obsessively rehearses the various routes he can take to get there. Serial iterations replace narrative time, while recombinant constellations replace plot. Beckett’s texts are weird landscapes littered with the most improbable mélange of objects: a bicycle, a tree, some bowler hats, a stone in Molloy’s pocket, a schizophrenic out for a walk. Some shapes that kind of look like people. The eye skitters back and forth, unsure what to focus on or where to rest, especially since everything seems to keep being slightly different. Like his approximate contemporary Bertolt Brecht, Beckett pared language down and reconfigured it into a strange new register to produce effects of absurdity and alienation: too intensely sincere to be ironic or parodic, but too bizarre and blasé to be tragic. You know someone is winking but you’re never sure if you’re in on the joke.

The narration in Beckett’s prose and the stage directions in his theatrical works do little to explain these minimalist assemblages, functioning instead to tweak and reorganize them. In Waiting for Godot the directions are mostly mechanical adjustments to the components on stage: they modify the position and relative placement of the characters; on occasion they modify the volume of speech or the degree of tension (“coldly,” “attentively,” “irritably”). But they reveal nothing of the characters’ interiority, no motivation, no particular affect, only whether they are closer or farther apart, louder or quieter, more or less intense in their tone.

Godot is a play about two down-on-their-luck individuals, Vladimir and Estragon, who spend its two acts in the same spot, waiting for the eponymous Godot. Each act depicts a single day of their anticipation; each is centered on an encounter with the parallel duo of Pozzo and Lucky, and each ends with an appearance by a messenger boy. As in a number of other Beckett works, the tension of Godot comes from the hellish banality of repetition. Like an overextended franchise pumping out yet another sequel, each repetition—of a line, an idea, a gesture—becomes more wearying, more absurd, more pitiful, not even by virtue of itself or its own failings but by virtue of all the previous instances it carries on its back, as on the multiple occasions when one of the two protagonists asks “Who?” and the other replies “Godot.” (Unlike Marvel Studios, Beckett does it on purpose.)

The second act recapitulates the first, and despite any variations, witticisms, and surprises, there lingers the sense that you’ve seen this all before. We’re only privy to two days of the cycle, but the play gives us every reason to think we would have seen much the same on the day before, or the day after. Godot ends when it ends not because Vladimir and Estragon have learned a lesson or grown in spirit or reached a turning point but simply because Beckett chose to show us two days out of a potentially infinite many. Who knows what effect it would have to pile on an extra iteration?

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It’s hard to imagine more inspired casting for Vladimir and Estragon than the stars of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, whose careers in the last four decades are the result of sustained, careful effort to escape the treadmill of infinite sequels that could have easily followed the success of their early bobbleheaded screen personas. (Reeves in particular has had to escape that treadmill multiple times, thanks to *The Matrix *and John Wick.) Godot offers the audience a sliding-doors peek into what their lives might be like if they’d just kept making Bill and Ted movies forever. When, early on, the two lament their joint fate and Estragon wearily says, “We should have thought of it a million years ago, in the Nineties,” the line is so natural that you’d think Beckett had written it with exactly this metacultural accident in mind.

The curtain rises on Reeves and Winter in the obligatory bowler hats, the former looking not unlike the well-known photograph of him morosely feeding pigeons. I expected Winter to play the whinier Estragon and Reeves the brooding Vladimir, but it worked great the other way around. The two inhabit their parts effortlessly, conveying the feeling of decades-long proximity: not even a friendship, necessarily, but the kind of graceless intimacy born of cramped quarters and too much information; shiftless vagabonds and movie stars on set both learn quickly what it’s like to pee under awkward conditions.

Andy Henderson

Alex Winter as Vladimir and Keanu Reeves as Estragon in Jamie Lloyd’s production of Waiting for Godot at the Hudson Theatre, 2025

Unfortunately, things take some turns as Act I unfolds. The director, Jamie Lloyd, hot off his Tony-winning production of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Sunset Boulevard, stages Godot with a heavy Broadway hand. The dramaturgy, the lighting, and the sound design speak in crescendos, dramatic silences, and sudden shifts: the production has an urgent need to signpost for the audience. When it’s time to get Serious, the characters’ speech slows down from its relaxed conversational pace to make room for a series of heavy pauses, the lighting shifts from uniform white to murky blue, and the mixing desk slathers reverb onto the mics. The final minutes of the play, especially, are slow, blue, and echoing to an almost unbearable degree. It’s Beckett with emotional subtitles.

When your eye is wandering back and forth across an alien landscape, it quickly becomes irksome if someone keeps cranking your head around to make you look at one particular thing. In the text of the play, lines and even entire exchanges recur between the two acts, sometimes with slight variation, from the extended exchanges about Estragon’s boots to the two encounters with Pozzo and Lucky. Nothing demands that the first act end on a light note and the second with the earnest weight of revelation. If one iteration is played for laughs and the next for high drama, that’s a production choice that risks forcing an interpretation or an affective response on an audience that would otherwise be free to wonder what they’re supposed to be feeling.

The most dramatic of Lloyd’s dramatic choices is the characterization of Pozzo. Played by Brandon J. Dirden in what seems to be a Cajun accent, he speaks in an often uncomfortable series of howls and roars leavened with passages of quieter, mannered emoting. Dirden’s decisive presence largely elides the self-consciousness of Pozzo’s pretensions. (“But how am I to sit down now, without affectation, now that I have risen? Without appearing to—how shall I say—without appearing to falter.”) It’s not clear what the vision for the role is, but Pozzo overwhelms every scene he’s in, except, strangely, for the climax of Lucky’s speech in Act I, which is oddly tame onstage despite being described as a brawl in the script.

Andy Henderson

Brandon J. Dirden as Pozzo in Jamie Lloyd’s production of Waiting for Godot at the Hudson Theatre, 2025

In the play the domineering, self-absorbed Pozzo and the brutish, servile Lucky serve as a paired counterweight to Vladimir and Estragon, perhaps an image of what their relationship would look like if it was one of domination rather than of mutual codependence. The stage instructions in Act I have Pozzo “driving” Lucky, who has a long rope around his neck; in Act II Pozzo is blind and being led by Lucky, whose rope is now considerably shorter. Pozzo’s reduced condition is one of the few indications of actual linear change over time, though it also seems likely that if they came back the next day he might be just fine again. But whether Pozzo and Lucky’s track is linear or elliptical is incidental, because in either case they are simply passing in proximity to Estragon and Vladimir’s own looping orbit. In Act II, when they debate whether to help Pozzo, who has collapsed on the floor, Vladimir says,

We wait, we are bored. *(He throws up his hand.) *No, don’t protest, we are bored to death, there’s no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste.… In an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness!

Whether Pozzo gets over it or declines irrevocably—or whether Lucky remains in his service or parts ways with him—is irrelevant to the amnesiac circularity of the play’s two leads, in which the other characters have much the same status as Estragon’s boots or the carrot in Vladimir’s pocket: a diversion or an interruption that ultimately changes nothing.

It seems a mistake, then, to give Pozzo center stage and have Estragon and Vladimir cede to his grandiose posturing. At the very least, it should be clear that Pozzo is bad at speaking, rather than making the audience feel like they’re bad at understanding. Decorating his words with the stage effects of profundity makes viewers expect a kind of meaning that just isn’t there to find in Pozzo’s self-important verbiage, seeming to give a significance to the encounter that I’m not sure it’s supposed to have. Pozzo should be ranting ineffectually while the characters rearrange themselves over and over (Pozzo with Estragon, Lucky with Vladimir; Pozzo with Vladimir, Lucky with Estragon; Estragon with Vladimir, Pozzo with Lucky); the audience would have to focus on the shifting constellation of elements instead of trying to extract depth from the words of a man in a spotlight.

Here, and even more in the play’s final moments, Lloyd strains to extract a narrative arc and a dramatic climax from what are basically just iterating segments of action and speech. But the irony of trying to impose narrative progress on a play about two guys who are stuck in place should perhaps have been obvious.

Lipnitzki/Roger Viollet/Getty Images

Lucien Raimbourg, Pierre Latour, Jean Martin, and Albert Remy in Roger Blin’s production of En attendant Godot at the Théâtre Hébertot, Paris, June 1956

In its circularity, Godot presents a stark contrast to the Bildungsroman-like stories that dominate Broadway stages, in which the protagonists learn and grow in tandem: once you know the right thing to do, you’ll also do it, whether you happen to be Javert or the jury in Twelve Angry Men. But what keeps the characters in Godot on their hamster wheel is not a lack of knowledge or a lack of will, nor is it an error; their amnesia is a mercy, a psychic defense mechanism that holds the horror of grinding repetition at bay. It’s not success but failure that would liberate them: the boy would just have to show up and say, “Godot is never coming,” and the wheel would stop spinning. But why should any given day on a hamster wheel be more interesting or revelatory than another? There’s nothing that Vladimir and Estragon can learn that they haven’t already forgotten.

I suppose Broadway viewers have been taught to expect some bang for their buck: as celebrity castings continue to send ticket prices farther into the stratosphere, audiences want an emotional journey with a climax that rises just as high. But some theater pieces just don’t work like that. Sometimes art leaves you confused, rather than enlightened. In an interview with Reeves posted on the play’s Instagram account, he emphasizes the presence of the syllable “God” in “Godot.” This is a common reading of the play, one in which alienation results from the absence of the divine rather than from the hollowness of cyclic existence—a Lutheran existentialism instead of a Parisian one. But Beckett himself disavowed this reading, insisting that when he wrote the play in French it didn’t even occur to him that the English word “God” is in the title. Clearly, there are multiple ways to understand Waiting for Godot. But this is all the more reason to do less guiding, and to let audiences do more looking and listening.

One last thing: I respect bold staging choices but if you’re going to do Waiting for Godot there really has to be a tree.