No More Waiting in the Wings for ‘Godot’ : For the Play’s 40th Anniversary, SCR Bases Its Production on Beckett’s Later Adaptations

If luck is indeed the residue of design, then few theaters have played out that notion more dramatically than South Coast Repertory.

In the early ‘60s, Martin Benson and David Emmes, who were to become SCR’s co-artistic directors, met at San Francisco State University, where they came under the spell of drama teachers Herbert Blau and Jules Irving, who also ran the San Francisco Actors’ Workshop. At the time, the Bay Area theater community was still abuzz over Blau’s production at San Quentin prison of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.”

It was also in San Francisco that Benson and Emmes made friends with such fledgling actors as Martha McFarland and Don Took, whose favorite play was “Waiting for Godot.”

When Benson and Emmes talked of forming a theater with their actor pals, they might well have ended up doing a summer theater operation in the Northern California town of Guerneville, along the Russian River. But Emmes happened to be from Orange County and was hired to teach drama at Long Beach City College, and so the call was Go South, Young Men. As in South Coast Repertory.

Early in 1965, the little touring company finally had found a home in a Balboa Island marine shop. Its first production there opened on March 12, 1965. The play?

“Waiting for Godot.”

Twenty-eight years to the day later, “Godot” returned to SCR, with Benson directing on the Second Stage. “David just told me a couple of days ago about the coincidence of the timing,” Benson says, “and it’s kind of amazing to consider. . . .”

“Godot” itself dates to January, 1953, when Roger Blin’s staging opened at Paris’ Theatre de Babylone. Beckett’s sparse “tragicomedy” (his word) of Vladimir and Estragon (or “Didi” and “Gogo,” as they call themselves), waiting for the mysterious figure, Godot, to make an appearance, quietly gained a following that eventually exploded into the phenomenon of the Theater of the Absurd.

“Godot” became more than a play: It marked a fundamental break with hallowed dramatic traditions, including the cardinal law of rising and falling action. And Didi and Gogo became more than characters: They seemed to symbolize postwar 20th-Century humanity, adrift in an uncaring universe, waiting for death.

For this combined 28th and 40th anniversary staging, Benson has cast Took (who played Didi in the ’65 production) in the role of the hapless slave Lucky, which Benson played in ’65. And Benson has managed to secure the services of Michael Devine, who did the “Godot” set in ’65.

One might imagine that the walk down memory lane for Benson, Devine and Took and the rest of the “Godot” cast (Ron Boussom, Richard Doyle and Hal Landon Jr., all founding members of SCR) must be a rich and full one.

“Well, not exactly,” Took says. “We’re always trying to look forward, to growth and change. I think it’s kind of sad to rest on memories, to live on past glories.”

Benson notes that the cast has had its chuckles thinking back on how SCR scraped by with its first “Godot”: How, for instance, handyman Benson applied his blowtorch to a piece of carpet to create the right “apocalyptic” look for Beckett’s world.

In any case, a focal point for the current production isn’t SCR’s old staging but the 1984 London production that Beckett supervised, with a cast that included Alan Mandell. Benson’s plans for the new “Godot” involved contacting Mandell to discuss the London show, for which Beckett rethought and revised his original text.

Benson, it turned out, got more than a discussion; Mandell gave him the text with Beckett’s own notes and markings. “I keep it locked in a drawer,” Benson says. “I bring it out from time to time and pass my hands over Sam’s notes, hoping I’ll get some extra vibe from them.”

Those notes include some significant cuts Beckett made, eliminating nearly a page’s worth of dialogue in each act. “I imagine some Beckett purists will come and follow along with the published text and howl at the changes,” Benson says, “but these are exactly the changes Beckett specified.”

Took says he knew that things were going to be different from 1965 when “Martin came in the first day of work and was calling it ‘ God -ot,’ which I still can’t get used to but which is the way Beckett pronounced it. . . . (Benson) told us all, ‘We’re going to do this the way Beckett intended.’ ”

One thing Beckett did not intend was that “Godot” would become a plaything of the intelligentsia. It has, of course, but Benson wants to ensure that, on stage at least, the play exists apart from the gargantuan critical baggage attached to it.

Pressed for whether he sees the play as a kind of Christian metaphor for the search for grace, or as an existential construct, Benson demurs: “I have really tried to get away from an intellectual approach. I’ve read through all the critical literature, and you know what? All the critics contradict each other. So I’ve thrown all of it out.”

Took, on the other hand, seems to have taken it all in, and has filtered various interpretations of Beckett’s play through his practice as a veteran character actor. He gives the impression that he enjoys nothing more than talking about Beckett all day.

“I think I saw ‘Godot’ 10 or 12 times in the early ‘60s,” the tall, wiry actor recalls. “It was the play of a time when I was revolting against the middle-class values I was raised in. It sort of bloomed in our faces right during that moment between the beatniks and the ‘60s rebellions.

“And now with the whole ‘Slacker’ generation” he says, referring to Richard Linklater’s recent film on wandering, aimless youth, “they could find a new anthem with ‘Godot.’ It sums up that feeling of dread we all have now and then, the feeling of life’s nothingness.

“I can’t recall where I read it, but a writer came up with this image as a metaphor for life: Imagine you’re a sparrow, you fly out of a storm into a beautiful, well-lit room, and then back out into the dark night. You wonder, what that was all about! Or as Lucky’s master, Pozzo, says: ‘They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.’

“As a young man, I dwelled on Beckett’s ideas. Then, as a young actor playing it in 1965, I realized that I had found nirvana. I was acting, and doing it in the world’s greatest play. I had found a home.”

“Waiting for Godot” continues through April 11 at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, Tuesdays through Fridays at 8 p.m.; Saturdays at 2:30 and 8 p.m.; and Sundays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. $23-$32. (714) 957-4033. A review of the production will run in Monday’s Calendar.