In his thoughtful tribute to the late Arthur Miller just a week after his death last year, columnist Rick Salutin paused to consider Miller’s belief in the social dimensions of theatre:

I'd rather think he was arguing for theatre as the art that needs a live social reality — actors and audience — even as it represents things not real (death, the past etc.). Theatre is social, like human beings, while “literature” moves away from the social; it isolates writer, work and reader from each other […]In this sense, theatre has more in common with rock concerts than with literature.

The logic outlined here began to seep into my understanding of why I wasn’t particularly enjoying the Arts Club’s production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at about the time when the second act began.  The stage design was engaging and creative; the performances were good, if a little broad; the script, needless to say, was brilliant.  But the small, sparse audience in attendance didn’t have the presence needed to sustain the often comic production onstage – and Beckett’s play, without the laughs, comes off as unnecessarily maudlin, and scattered.

The manic moments in Waiting For Godot buttress the play’s broader, heavier themes of existential malaise; but in the vast, nearly-empty Stanley theatre, the high energy of the onstage slapstick wasn’t – couldn’t be – reciprocated by the crowd.

Once I settled in a bit more for the second act, trying to take the onstage action on its own merits, the experience became more enjoyable; this, likely, has something to do with the second act’s more somber tone – the formerly sturdy and obnoxious Pozzo is now blind, cowed and helpless; the hopeless eternity of waiting becomes bleaker, and more desperate.  In its second act, the play is more independent of audience reciprocation, and so more engrossing under the circumstances in which I experienced it.

Still, the truth of Salutin’s assertion of the social dimensions of live theatre were driven home as I watched what some critics are lauding as “the must-see event of the season.”  I just kept waiting and waiting to be amazed by the show, but the feeling never came.

Waiting For Godot, directed by Morris Panych, runs until April 23 at the Stanley Theatre.

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