21. Samuel Beckett Writes about High School
The Memory: When I was about fifteen, one of my older brothers offered me a free ticket to go with him to a play at Stratford. I had been before; but those had all been to see a production of Shakespeare or one of his contemporaries, and always on the Festival stage, a thrust stage that by then I knew well. Of course I said yes. It was a free ticket, and it was an adventure.
But it wasn't what I expected. We arrived at the Avon Theatre, a proscenium house, and formerly a movie theatre. We were in the balcony, in the centre. For these reasons, the perspective of the performance was very different than I was used to, in every respect. But the difference, and the perspective, shifted far more when the play started. It was a production of 'Waiting for Godot,' by Samuel Beckett. I had never heard of either.
I was aware as I watched this production that it was completely different from anything I had seen before. I was also aware that the pacing was...odd. Nothing seemed to be happening in the play, except that a couple of men were waiting and filling in time while they waited.
What I remember is that my brother, who was ten years older than me, fell asleep. And I remember that I was very attentive. I was awake, alert, listening, watching, feeling everything that happened on stage as if it was happening to me. I was aware that these two characters were bored out of their minds, frustrated with where they were and who they were waiting for, had nothing to do but play games with and on each other, and were essentially wasting their lives.
My memory tells me--has told me for several decades--that I recognized this play as being both about my life in general, and about my life at high school in particular. 'Oh my God,' I believe I said to myself, or out loud, or to my brother when we were driving home, or in my dreams afterwards--'these guys are in high school!'
That's the full memory. Here is what surrounds it.
The Context: Here are a few historical and personal pieces of information that make me believe this memory is more than just a stray thought:
While I may have seen a proscenium-like theatrical space at some point in my life to that date, I believe this is the first time I had seen live performers on a stage like this (see my early excursion to a puppet show for another kind of performance). I believe it was disorienting for me to be in a space where everyone was facing the same direction, where I could see no one else across the room, as was usual when sitting around at the side of a thrust stage auditorium. I was far more 'alone' in this space, with no view of audience, and no one to tell me how to behave. There were no audience members visible in the half-light across the stage, and no 'spear-carrier' to guide me. I was on my own.
Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot has become ubiquitous, with performances in abundance and of all kinds. We read it in school later, and it was performed in high school drama clubs, on regional and professional stages, and entered popular culture, at least in some measure. But when I saw it, this had not yet happened. It was beginning, yes, but if my dates are right, this was1968, and this was the first production at a major theatre in English Canada, of a play that was not widely known, and not accepted as a great work of art. On the contrary, people still looked at it as an experiment in boredom. Audiences had not yet grown used to the dramaturgy, though they soon did.
I believe my memory of this production is so vivid precisely because I identified with the situation of the two protagonists. I identified with them because I was a teenage boy who was unhappy with his position in life. I considered myself out of control, of any part of life, as teenagers often do--but in particular of my 'institutional' life. I attended high school every day, but I didn't seem, at the time, to be getting anything out of it. The learning was too easy, the social life was somehow out of bounds for me, and I spent a great deal of my day waiting to go home again.... Bored and waiting. I sat around in hallways, libraries, and classrooms, watching other students disrupt class and undermine the teachers, and joining in. I recall burning paper airplanes sailing across the room during science class, and teachers running crying from the room out of frustration. And no, this wasn't the true every hour of every day. And yes, I'm aware that whatever my attitude, I was a singularly fortunate teenager. I just didn't know it at the time. I was bored and waiting....
What surprises me about this memory is my own ability to respond to this production, at my age and with my limited exposure to the performing arts. I don't seem to have had any difficulty at all finding my way in and through this narrative, or these characters, or this situation. This was very different than my experience of the other theatre to which I was exposed--Shakespeare. That took work. This did not.
I read later that Waiting for Godot had an early performance at Folsom Prison, and that the prisoners seemed to enjoy it, because it was about their lives, waiting and with nothing of consequence to do except to fill the time. I identified with this anecdote. As a young man I immediately and without any justification identified with this story--of high school as incarceration. This was of course a very foolish comparison; but I had a not-uncommon adolescent sense of condescension and outrage--of 'righteous indignation.' I find it interesting that it was this now-quite-canonical play that pulled this out of me, and that made me realize just how much a play that seems to be so at odds with the world can also be 'ripped from the headlines'....
Addendum #1: I have wondered if one way I found into my identification with this play was through my many hours of watching television in the 50s and 60s. I saw a lot--and I do mean a lot--of superannuated vaudeville and film comics, on sit-coms, talk shows, and old films. It's no secret that Beckett knew about this kind of performance and used it in his writing. I didn't read these performances the way Beckett read them, but even early in my life, I was used to Keaton, who made a film with Beckett, and to Bert Lahr, who was in an early production of Godot.
Addendum #2: For my entire adult life, I have enjoyed the dramaturgy of Beckett. It didn't matter what it was, however brief, obscure, measured, minimal, comic. It resonated with me. One of the best moments of my theatre-going life was seeing a performance of one of his later plays, in French and in Paris, with Jean-Louis Barrault and Harold Pinter in key roles. And one of the most memorable classes I ever taught was an evening class to a group of second-year students, to whom I had assigned a number of Beckett's short 'dramaticules.' They were outraged by his work, truly angry, almost physically leaving their desks in frustration, wondering how anyone could take him seriously, or think that he had any art or craft to him at all. At one point a student wrote a word on a page and held it up, saying 'Look at me. I wrote a play!.' I was on my feet for two hours with that group, and never worked so hard to make something understood. Or accepted. I had taken over the class at the last minute, for a sick colleague, and perhaps didn't know 'the room.' But I thought afterwards of my own response to Beckett, as compared with theirs. Why was I, in so many ways unresponsive and cynical and angry at their age, sympathetic to this work.
Why were they so upset with it? Was it because it appeared 'artless'?
