Good Company Theatre: Waiting for Godot
Like many people who encounter Samuel Beckett’s 1953 absurdist masterpiece Waiting for Godot, Mark Fossen—who directs Good Company Theatre’s current production—has found his perception of it shifting over time. “At first, I was really struck by the quote-unquote absurdity of it, that nothing quite makes sense, … that it was this strange, abstract philosophical piece.” But as for his current sense of Godot, Fossen says, “It’s just funny. Beckett loved the silent film comedians. When we read it, it feels so dry and philosophical. When you hear it coming out of people’s mouths, it feels more normal.”
Fossen says he initially felt intimidated by the prospect of tackling this story of two characters waiting for someone who might never arrive, saying “it holds a place of significance in my theatrical life.” He approached it, though, by latching on to Beckett’s affection for classic silent comedy, to provide the entertaining spark to a tale about the grand question of, as he describes it, “if life doesn’t give you purpose, what are you doing? … It doesn’t feel like ‘theater vitamins’ to me; it’s ‘Laurel and Hardy get dropped in the Backrooms,’ this liminal space. You can chew this script to death, but at the end of the day, you can just enjoy people hitting each other with their bowler hats and falling down.”…