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The NSU Theatre will present Samuel Beckett's absurdist play, "Waiting for Godot" Feb. 14-17 in the Orville Hanchey Art Gallery. The Gallery is in the new wing of the A.A. Fredericks Center for Creative and Performing Arts. The play will be directed by Scott Burrell.
Burrell will use one male and one female cast for the play. The female cast is Katie Guell of New Orleans as Didi, Amie Clarke of Blue Springs, Mo., as Gogo, Missy Rowe-Bizzell of Natchitoches as Pozzo, Darcy Malone of New Orleans as Lucky and Heather Wynne of Harleton, Texas as Boy.
The male cast ...Read More
The NSU Theatre will present Samuel Beckett's absurdist play, "Waiting for Godot" Feb. 14-17 in the Orville Hanchey Art Gallery. The Gallery is in the new wing of the A.A. Fredericks Center for Creative and Performing Arts. The play will be directed by Scott Burrell.
Burrell will use one male and one female cast for the play. The female cast is Katie Guell of New Orleans as Didi, Amie Clarke of Blue Springs, Mo., as Gogo, Missy Rowe-Bizzell of Natchitoches as Pozzo, Darcy Malone of New Orleans as Lucky and Heather Wynne of Harleton, Texas as Boy.
The male cast includes Josh A. Laird of Oakdale as Didi, Jonathan Steele of Mandeville as Gogo, John Chambers of Shreveport as Pozzo, Joshua Powell of Fort Smith, Ark. as Lucky and Kerry Lambert of Gonzales as Boy.
Tony Blanco of New Iberia is the dramaturg. Joshua Olkowski of Oakland, Calif. is assistant director with Emily Taylor of Neosho, Mo. working as stage manager and Becca Foster of Winnfield serving as assistant stage manager.
According to Burrell, "Waiting for Godot" continues to be a dramatic work
historians mark as a turning point in theatre history. Labeled the "poster child" of the absurdist theatre movement, Godot typifies the ideas of man caught in transition, out of harmony with his world, grasping for some rationality in an irrational world. "Sense" is not to be made in Godot. According to the theorist Martin Esslin, the foremost author on absurdist theatre, the absurdist movement renounces "arguing about the absurdity of
the human condition; it merely presents it in being in terms of concrete stage images."
The play was initially written in French and was first presented in
Paris in 1953. It was immediately met with both shock and glorification. The play ran for
over five years in Paris playing to over a million spectators. Translated into English, it moved to London's West End where it met acclaim. The play then jumped the ocean to Miami in 1956. It was received rather coldly in the States. But, through persistence, recasting and a move to Broadway, Godot became a critical success.
The two-act play, often called plot-less, was once labeled "a play in
which nothing happens twice." According to Burrell, Godot follows the absurdist precepts, defying those who look for "oversimplified explanations and meaning." Beckett simply poses the question for which there may or may not be an answer. Two tramps, Didi and Gogo, reminiscent of vaudeville characters of yore, stand on an open road, waiting for the arrival of a character named Godot. Godot never arrives and the two are left to pass the time.
Often seen as a comment on existentialism, the two characters represent "everyman's" mundane existence waiting on a savior that may or may not arrive. As the character Gogo says, "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful."
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