Missing: the tree.
Added: a silent thrash of imaginary air guitars for the Bill and Ted fans in the audience.
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett’s well-worn meditation on the nature of life and human purpose, has been revived on Broadway (Hudson Theatre, currently booking to Jan. 4, 2026), starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, with the intention of using their “excellent” chemistry to bring a fresh perspective to the relationship of Beckett’s famous duo, Estragon (Reeves) and Vladimir (Winter).
The challenge in staging Godot is dual: We have to believe in Gogo and Didi being trapped together, both resignedly happy and corrosively co-dependent, for eternity; and the actors playing them have to convey this terminal condition, with the rest of Beckett’s absurdist philosophical game-playing, without the audience feeling seat-gnawingly desperate for the show to end.
Directed by Jamie Lloyd, this Godot features some of the hallmarks of his other notable productions like A Doll’s House, Sunset Boulevard, and Evita: stark set, muted modern dress (with familiar bowler hats; the characters look smart, not tramp-like). However, there is no blood or gunk smeared over bodies, although lusty Reeves fans can look forward to seeing his legs and a pair of black briefs when his trousers fall down.
This is a relatively gimmick-free production (indeed, perhaps Lloyd’s most conventional yet), meekly facing the challenge shared by all Godots—how to make imaginative and engaging sense of Beckett’s alternately dour and mordantly comic interrogation of the human condition. It is missing the usual stage furnishing of an almost-bare tree to symbolize… well, discuss (meaninglessness, the cross, hope in the few leaves that materialize on it?). All that is left on stage at the end are a pair of boots that have been much abused during the show.
Of the pair, the lesser-famous Winter is the more impressive performer. He seems to have dug deepest into the text and his character, clearly navigating Vladimir’s question of what the men are doing in this nameless, featureless place—always the answer, “Waiting for Godot”—with a detective’s coolly inquisitive determination. This finally leads him, and the audience, to a conclusion that Winter nails with a quiet devastation.
Next to his uptempo pup, the rangy 6’1” Reeves with his grey-tinged beard, plays Estragon as a kind of Abe Lincoln-styled, stiff maiden aunt, legs primly pressed together when seated, always looking vaguely horrified and stunned out at the audience. (Armed with a cup of tea, he would have made a great Violet Crawley in Downton Abbey if Dame Maggie Smith hadn’t been available.) The voice—Reeves’ deep, cool-dude monotone—is unchanged from his “John Wick.”
Other productions ramp up the clowning of moments such as when the men switch bowler hats, but Winter and Reeves mostly play on subtler forms of physical comedy with the set—by Soutra Gilmour, who also did the costumes—a kind of concave indoor skate park (reminding this audience member of the memorable skate park design of Bowl EP). This allows the actors space to run and tumble in some lovely set-pieces when they fall and cannot, will not, get up.
This telescoping shape, which shrinks to a black circular pastille-shape at its rear, summons up the opening credits of a James Bond movie (pre-007 appearing with a gun and blood coursing down). At different moments this appears as an eye, eclipse, or perhaps—more metaphysically—both arena of circular repetition with background window on to (again, discuss!) mortality, nothingness, and eternity.
Jon Clark’s background lighting adds more variety: stark whites, lilac, and a lime green when a (both-excellent) Brandon J. Dirden and Michael Patrick Thornton appear as traveler Pozzo and his slave Lucky.
Dirden is cruel, sadistic and with the staccato, stormy cadence of a Southern preacher, the silent Lucky is seemingly a victim until he shows his command not just of language but of his own, suddenly vulnerable, master. Zaynn Arora and Eric Williams share the role of the “A Boy” (each performing the role three days a week; it was the quietly affecting Arora the night I was there) who alights upon Didi and Gogo to again dangle the imminent appearance of Godot before them.
Didi and Gogo’s playful, protective intimacy is the key to not just their fictional relationship, but the oil of making any production of Godot bearable for an audience. At a key, cheeky moment, which Beckett’s estate presumably signed off on, the pair assume the character profiles of Bill and Ted to twang unseen air guitars. (Yes, the audience goes wild.)
This now joins a group of notable contemporary Godots on Broadway: Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin’s (with John Goodman as Pozzo), Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Patrick Stewart’s, and Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks’ 2023 wittily executed off-Broadway production.
Reeves and Winter don’t attempt to solve the questions Beckett’s text poses. We do not find out who Godot is; we do not know why, when the secondary characters appear again the following day, they do not recognize Vladimir and Estragon. The pair are still trapped in a hellish loop of a next-day never coming. They cannot go anywhere, there is nowhere else to go. But they want to go, they want to proceed.
Reeves’ standout moment comes when he lets out a clotted, anguished roar when they arrive for an umpteenth time at a non-answer for where Godot is, and when to expect him. However, if Godot never comes, if inertia and entrapment and finally death are all there is, then at least the men have each other. And maybe there is hope for this pair above all the other Didi and Gogos before them: as Bill and Ted, Reeves and Winter win out over—and even win over—Death in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey and Bill & Ted Face the Music.
Reeves, Winter, and Lloyd have not produced a revolutionary or revelatory Godot (you’re still grateful to inhale the night air when Beckett’s existential trudge is done), but they have found a route to a non-disastrous, pleasurable one.
Reeves and Winter make you feel it when the men embrace—as if one is holding on to the life raft embodied by the other—and when they quietly care for each other, strange day after strange day. If this is stunt casting, then it is stunt casting with a sweetened depth. Their Didi and Gogo are a plausible flipside to Bill and Ted, for whom loyalty and friendship were the bedrock of their heroism. Whether Beckett intended it or not, and no matter the forces of nihilism assailing them, you feel this Didi and Gogo are going to be excellent to each other for eternity.
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