Deep Reads: Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

This month we will read Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. You can find a copy of the play here. (and if you order using this link, I will receive a few pennies to help support the cost of the meet up)
Two tramps wait by a barren tree for a man who never arrives. That is more or less the whole plot, and it is why the Irish critic Vivian Mercier famously called it a play in which nothing happens, twice. Samuel Beckett went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969, and the Nobel committee honored work that finds a strange elevation in the destitution of modern humanity. Few plays have so little going on and so much to say.
The play’s reception is part of its legend. When it opened in Paris in 1953, sophisticated audiences shouted insults and walked out.
Then came San Quentin Prison in 1957. The San Francisco Actors’ Workshop performed the play for roughly 1,400 inmates, an audience many expected to be hostile or bored. Instead they were riveted. Men who knew little about art or theater but who understood waiting, uncertainty and endurance recognized the play at once, and reportedly understood it better than many sophisticated theatergoers had. Accounts of that night helped cement the play’s reputation as one of the century’s essential works.
Why read it now? We live in an age of perpetual waiting: for news, for answers, for a rescue, for something to make the uncertainty make sense. We scroll, we speculate, and we keep each other company while we do. Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon ask what it means to go on when no resolution comes, and what we owe one another in the meantime. It is bleak, but it is also funny and tender, and it finds a kind of grace in persistence and companionship.
You can also watch the play online several places including here.
And a lecture I have found particularly useful is here.
A note before we begin: Waiting for Godot contains references to suicide, treated with black humor but also real despair.

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Note! Meetup recently doubled the cost of the meetup to about $352/year ($176 twice a year) Want to help support the group? A few of you generously offered. If you would like to contribute $5, $10, $20 or any amount, the easiest way is venmo: @JohnSeanDoyle or just reach out to me directly. Thanks for considering it!