Two years ago, Christopher McElreon, co-founder and executive director of the Classical Theatre of Harlem, approached New Orleans residents with a simple question: “What are you waiting for?”
Their answer would dramatically color what has since become a nationally renowned, stylistically radical revival of the classic Samuel Beckett play, Waiting for Godot, which will be showing this weekend at Reynolds Theater through Duke Performances.
In 2006, some nine months after Hurricane Katrina, McElreon began traveling down to the Lower Ninth Ward, poster child neighborhood of post-Katrina New Orleans, looking to bring his production of Godot to the community which originally inspired the revival’s post-diluvian aesthetic.
McElreon was fresh from a brilliant five-week run in Harlem, where CTH had set the play in a 15,000-gallon swimming pool on stage, complete with a submerged house and tree visible at the surface of the water. No changes were made to the text, and no overt references were made to Katrina. And yet, audiences found themselves experiencing something greater than Godot in a pool, and word of the revival quickly spread.
Part of CTH’s mission statement is to present the “classics” in Harlem, in a way that makes them more immediate and socially relevant to a contemporary audience. A notoriously heady play in which nothing happens, twice, Godot was initially met with outrage when it premiered in 1955. Now recognized as one of the most significant English plays of the 20th century, Godot has caused an outpouring of academic analysis and existentialist baggage—of which Beckett himself only commented, “Why people have to complicate a thing so simple I can’t make out.”
Struck by how remote the play seemed and inundated by the news of Katrina at the time, McElreon decided to merge Beckett’s themes of waiting with the aftermath of the storm, creating a production that spoke directly to a very specific audience.
“I started seeing all the images that were littering the landscape of the media,” McElreon said. “I saw two guys floating down the street with a door… a tree coming out of the water… I saw folks who were in need of help…just waiting.”
The images resonated with the text. Visual artist and activist Paul Chan approached McElreon with an idea: stage the play at a street intersection in the Lower Ninth Ward. The two went to New Orleans and began knocking on doors. They asked two basic questions: “What are you waiting for?” And, “If we are to do this play in the Lower Ninth Ward, what else do we need to do to make this a meaningful experience?” The project began to take shape based on the responses.
“What we continuously heard was… ‘We’re not waiting for anything. We have taken charge of the situation ourselves because we’re tired of waiting,’” McElreon said. “The other thing we heard was, ‘You can’t come down here and exploit the landscape. We have seen countless artists come down… and leave nothing behind for the community.’”
Thus a simple idea evolved into something much more profound.
“[The project] takes the basic idea of theater, which is the relationship between an actor and the audience and expands that to include community,” McElreon said.
CTH raised $50,000 toward grassroots rebuilding efforts, arranged university master classes, community workshops at local high schools and a series of potluck dinners, where residents discussed what it means to wait in a post-Katrina New Orleans. And there was the play itself, which McElroen directed with a notably optimistic interpretation informed by the community’s spirit of self-reliance.
“[This revival] really has a vaudevillian style,” said actor J. Kyle Manzay, who drew from his training in Commedia dell’Arte. “The physical comedy of it helps me gain access to [the character of Estragon].”
That opening night, 1600 people showed up in a devastated neighborhood to see not only theater, but Godot.
“The production that comes to Duke carries with it the remnants of those two productions,” said Aaron Greenwald, director of Duke Performances.
The revival’s emphasis on local relevance suits the programming of Duke Performances, Greenwald said. The Duke organization has continually sought to reengage students with community and the roots of culture.
“I think it’s important for an institution like Duke, that has global reach and... cutting-edge research happening, that we and the Durham community understand where home is,” Greenwald said.
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