LOOKING BACK Ualbany plays role in ‘Godot’ history
ALBANY — In 1956, what was then known as Albany State College put on the sole American performances that summer, and only the third U.S. production, of a play that had been a theater sensation since its world premiere in Paris three years earlier, thrilling critics and confounding audiences.
Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” was performed six times from July 26 through Aug. 4, 1956, by the State College Arena Summer Theatre on the downtown campus. Of the 768 total seats available for the run, in a theater set up in a basement gym at Page Hall, only 12 were empty, meaning “Godot” played to 98.5 percent capacity. The figures are contained in a letter from the production’s producer/director, Paul Bruce Pettit, to Michael Myerberg, the producer of the Broadway production of “Godot,” which had spring and fall runs in New York but was dark for the summer. According to a note in the program for the Albany production, “This ... ‘Waiting for Godot’ is the only one that will be given in the United States this summer.” The letter, program and other materials were provided to the Times Union by University at Albany archivist Jodi Boyle, who found them among theater department records in the university archives.
After the Paris premiere, performed in French, as originally written by Beckett, who would later do the English translation, “Godot” was performed in London, Dublin, Frankfurt, Rome and Helsinki before its American opening in the fall of 1955, according to the Arena Summer Theatre program. A tour originally scheduled for Washington and Philadelphia was moved by poor ticket sales to Miami, where audiences of vacationers were lured with advertising that promised “the laugh sensation of two continents” but, according to press accounts at the time, they found the play so impenetrable that taxi drivers quickly learned to line up at intermission to pick up fleeing audiences.
“Godot,” which consists of little more than two vagabonds talking on a deserted country road for two-and-a-half hours over two acts, has famously been called a play in which nothing happens, twice. Critics of early productions were more receptive than some patrons, and notices for Barrington Stage Company’s current production in Pittsfield, Mass., have generally been outstanding.
A 1956 review for the Times Union’s former sister paper, The Knickbocker News, is included in Pettit’s letter to Myerberg. The paper’s drama critic, Ormonde Plater, called “Godot” a “perplexing play indeed” and advised a would-be attendee to read the play beforehand “if he doesn’t care to walk out of the theater in exasperation.”
After acknowledging that the plot of “Godot” might seem as “nonsensical as a finger painting by a child,” Plater goes on the enthuse about the play, saying it is a “surrealistic masterpiece” with a scope “no less sweeping than of James Joyce in ‘Finnegans Wake’ or ‘Ulysses.’ ” Pettit notes in his letter that Plater misspelled one character’s name, calling him Estraban instead of Estragon, which no doubt would have annoyed Beckett, who, during a round of insults between the vagabonds, has one delivering a winning blow by directing the word “Critic!” at the other.
Andi Lyons, a lighting designer, professor emeritus and unofficial historian of Ualbany’s theater department, said the university has produced “Godot” twice since the 1956 production, most recently in 1991, as the final show directed by the department’s legendary professor Jarka Burian. (The department’s fall 2022 productions, part of the Ualbany Performing Arts Center’s fall schedule, are “The Wolves,” by Sarah Delappe, about a girls’ indoor soccer team, and August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” about family strife over a beloved musical instrument.)
Theater audiences have largely come to accept “Godot” as one of the most important plays of the 20th century, its author’s influences evident in the work of Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Tom Stoppard, Edward Albee and Suzan-lori Parks. Even more lasting was his explosion of theater convention.
The preeminent Beckett scholar Ruby Cohn, who was a longtime friend of the playwright and a 30-year professor of comparative drama at the University of California, Davis, wrote, “After ‘Godot,’ plots could be minimal; exposition, expendable; characters, contradictory; settings, unlocalized, and dialogue, unpredictable. Blatant farce could jostle tragedy.”
Even now, almost 70 years after first being seen in a theater, “Godot” is for some opaque or off-putting. On opening night for Barrington Stage’s production, a performance presumably attended by the company’s most staunch and savvy patrons, a small but noticeable exodus was evident at intermission, the departing vehicles’ occupants apparently satisfied with having seen nothing happen only once.