Arin Arbus Finds Permission from Samuel Beckett Himself to Tinker with ‘Waiting for Godot’
The Beckett estate is notoriously protective of Waiting for Godot and his other works, but as director Arin Arbus read Beckett’s production journals, she learned he was a master tinkerer — and it helped her relax a little.
Paul Sparks and Michael Shannon in Waiting for Godot at Theatre for a New Audience. Photo by Hollis King.
Arin Arbus describes herself as a “text-based director,” and thank goodness for that because Waiting for Godot has plenty to parse. Not only is the dialog wildly dense, but Samuel Beckett’s stage directions are also incredibly specific — and they must be heeded. The Beckett estate protects the late playwright’s work, ensuring it’s performed as Beckett intended. The estate has gone so far as to try to shut down productions of the play that have made artistic decisions the estate did not agree with.
While Arbus didn’t have any plans to drastically alter the play for her production currently running at Theatre for a New Audience, she did find herself intimidated by what she lovingly called “Beckett’s bossiness.”
“It really is one of the most difficult plays I've ever directed,” she said. “Before we got into rehearsal, I had a little breakdown. I was just like, ‘This is overwhelming. This is so oppressive. Really, you're gonna say how he has to step?’” She’s not exaggerating. At one point, Beckett’s stage directions indicate when Estragon should take a single step forward throughout his lines — every two words or so, for a total of six steps.
Though she was initially daunted by the project, she found solace in an unlikely source: Beckett himself. Though Waiting for Godot was written between 1948 and 1949, Beckett endeavored to direct it himself about 30 years later. He and his assistant director took meticulous notes throughout the process, which have since been published as The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot. Arbus read the 500-page tome, which contains musings, drawings, directorial notes, and rationalizations for every artistic choice made throughout the rehearsal process. And through it, she managed to find a sense of freedom.
It seems that even the play’s author had some trouble translating the script from page to stage. “He described the play as a mess,” said Arbus. “He made lots of cuts. He made changes. He was just trying to make it work.” Beckett’s struggle gave Arbus the permission she needed to wrestle with Godot too. Even with all the script’s prescriptiveness, she saw just how many choices there still were to make. “I overcame my claustrophobia of his stage directions,” she said.
It didn’t hurt that she had a cast that was more than willing to jump in with both feet. “This has never happened to me before in my life, but they all came into the first day of rehearsal knowing their lines,” she said. That buy-in was important because Arbus directs her pieces collaboratively. “I think there are directors who have a vision ahead of time. I really don’t,” she said. “I'm interested in making it in the room with the people I'm working on it with.”
So they started at the beginning. “In rehearsal, we first tried everything that was written — like a recipe,” she says. After that, the picture started to come into focus, as did the amount of work that needed to be done. “There's a huge amount of authorship that you have to do even if you're following the stage directions to the letter — like actually trying to decide what each thing is about,” said Arbus.
While the number of steps, for example, may be predetermined, how Estragon steps may not be. Are they little steps or big stomps? Does he shuffle or march? Beckett doesn’t say, so the possibilities become endless. And with a play as opaque as this one, those choices can change the entire meaning of a moment. The delivery of a line, one character’s nonverbal reaction to another, the pacing of a scene — “the actors and the director have to invent a way to do it,” she said.
Waiting for Godot’s minimalist staging leaves little to hide behind — the script simply calls for “A country road. A tree.” — so the words really are everything. “I am trying to understand what is there, what is what, what is in these words, and what do they mean?” said Arbus. “Beckett eliminated all of the things that we're used to in a piece of theater. The dramaturgy of how these little pieces of the play add up only comes into focus in front of an audience.”
What it all means is ultimately up to each audience member and the moments they take away from Beckett’s magnum opus. And Arbus is ok with that, “When I was younger I was more interested in everybody's heartbeats synching in a show,” she said. “And I'm now interested in people going on their own journeys.”
So after many weeks of making minuscule choices and dissecting every line, Arbus and her cast serve up Didi, Gogo, Pozzo, and Lucky on a silver platter, and that’s all they can do.
