Samuel Beckett and His Works Are Strangers to Some at Reading

“Approach when you’re told, can’t you?” shouted Estragon.

“What is it?” demanded Vladimir.

Now it was up to Michael Lindsay, as the Boy, in Samuel Beckett’s most famous play:

“Mr. Go-Dot . . . ,” he said uneasily, almost rhyming the title character’s name with go-cart .

The room at the Newport Beach Public Library murmured in laughter Tuesday night, and those who knew that Godot traditionally receives a French pronunciation with a silent t tactfully whispered their correction to Lindsay. Lindsay, who later said he had never heard of Beckett (hard t) before being given his lines, artfully adopted the change in diction and the scene continued successfully.

And so it went at an Orange County tribute to Beckett, the Nobel Prize-winning Irish writer who died Dec. 22 in Paris. What they lacked in knowledge of Beckett’s work, the participants in Steve Mellow’s Readers’ Theatre made up in their enthusiasm for the spoken, if enigmatic, word.

For nearly an hour, 40 people joined Mellow for an MTV-paced look at the existentialist’s oeuvre.

The rapid-fire survey began with eight volunteers who in quick succession read one or two lines from the 1938 novel “Murphy,” the 1929 article “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce” defending James Joyce, the 1961 play “Happy Days,” and the 1953 play “The Unnamable.”

Mellow himself then read the 1946 novella “First Love” in which a depressed and somewhat bored 25-year-old relates the story of his marriage.

Next came brief selections from the 1958 play “Krapp’s Last Tape” and, at last, “Waiting for Godot,” the 1952 tragicomedy in which Vladimir and Estragon talk their way through two acts, impatiently awaiting a title character who never appears.

“Waiting for Godot,” a product of the melancholy that gripped the European intelligentsia after World War II, has been interpreted as an ironic commentary on the human condition. Though Mellow described Beckett as “alive and well in Orange County,” the brooding playwright still might be considered more at home in Greenwich Village than at South Coast Plaza.

Indeed, Newport Beach Tuesday night was not the place to search for an existential critique of the human condition and its postulated meaninglessness.

“To me, Beckett sounded like a troubled man,” said Huntington Beach housewife Rosemary Rootes, 50. Rootes said the Beckett sampler hadn’t prompted her to read more of his work, but charitably offered that hearing passages from 1950s minimalist plays “beats sitting home and watching TV. There’s nothing good on TV, really,” she said.

Mellow Martin, 35, of Santa Ana, who played Estragon, said that like Rootes he too had never heard of Beckett before Tuesday. He added, though, that his experience would prompt him to further inquiry: “I want to read more of his stuff, and find out why he’s so grumpy.”

Unlike his audience, Steve Mellow, the 53-year-old founder of the read-aloud program, has a long acquaintanceship with Beckett’s work. Mellow said he attended the first American presentations of “Krapp’s Last Tape” at a New York City theater workshop in 1958.

“I’ve always been in love with the words of Samuel Beckett,” he said. “I’ve always been interested in the philosophy that life is meaningless, and that it means something that life is meaningless.”

Although he was surprised that so few of his participants were familiar with Beckett, whose death at the age of 83 made front-page news around the world, Mellow said that “if Beckett was a new experience for them, it was a good experience.”

Mellow has begun to turn his attention to upcoming programs, including selections from the new Thomas Pynchon novel “Vineland,” and, perhaps more popularly, an evening devoted to the writings of Louis L’Amour.

But on Tuesday night, Mellow was prepared to sum up his work in an appropriately Beckettian fashion:

“The significance of what we did here tonight is insignificant,” he said. “I can tell you I know that.”

Steve Mellow’s Readers’ Theatre meets next on Jan. 23 at 7:30 p.m., at the Newport Beach Public Library, 856 San Clemente Drive, for an hour’s worth of new releases including Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland.” Admission: free. Information: (714) 972-1690.