Content provided in partnership with

Godot in the Crescent City: Samuel Beckett's absurdist allegory of thwarted expectations and stubborn hope found a sympathetic audience among New Orleanians still stricken by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

Art in America, Feb, 2008 by Sally Heller

To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

--Samuel Beckett

Performed on a November night in 2007 in the nearly abandoned wasteland of the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, Waiting for Godot was both hauntingly beautiful and eerily disarming. Bleachers had been set up at the edge of the intersection of Forstall and North Roman streets, and a powerful light, mounted on a mobile cart, loomed over the drama enacted in the crossroads below. Up close, unruly weeds and heaps of rubble were plainly visible. In the distance, one could discern the shadowy tops of trees, the shapes of a few dislodged roofs and the sounds of foghorns coming from the direction of the levee that was breached in August 2005. "Waiting" is a key word in post-Katrina New Orleans, where residents may feel an affinity with Beckett's vagabond protagonists, Vladimir and Estragon, who engage in vaudeville-style antics--swapping hats and singing--and even contemplate suicide, anything "to hold the terrible silence at bay." Like the beleaguered residents of New Orleans, the pair display anxiety, despair and the stubborn hope that salvation will come.

Most Popular Articles in Arts: Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism; Free-standing cardboard sculpture; What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...; Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...; Tino Sehgal at the ICA; More »

The New Orleans production of Waiting for Godot was the inspired project of New York-based artist Paul Chan, who visited the city in November 2006 to lecture at Tulane University. His initial motivation for choosing this play and this site was raw anger. Two days after Katrina hit, a catastrophic flood inundated the Lower Ninth Ward, a poor but tightly knit community of families, many of which had made the neighborhood their home for generations. Former residents of the devastated zone continue to wait for government aid, for their families and friends to return, and to see if the city will let them rebuild.

[ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED]

Standing in the barren street, stunned by the silence of what had been a vital neighborhood, Chan experienced what he described in a recent conversation with this author as a "hallucination" about Godot. On his return to New York, he contacted Creative Time, a nonprofit organization that sponsors innovative public art projects and had approached him in the past about developing a proposal. Anne Pasternak, the organization's director, had visited New Orleans after Katrina with an eye to participating in the recovery in some way. Chan's idea presented the perfect opportunity.

Creative Time went on to produce Godot with New York's Classic Theatre of Harlem, with CTH co-founder Christopher McElroen directing and Chan making his debut as artistic director. Major funding was provided by the Warhol and Annenberg foundations. The play starred CTH regulars Wendell Pierce (a New Orleans native), J. Kyle Manzay and T. Ryder Smith, plus three New Orleans residents, Mark McLaughlin, Michael Pepp and Tony Felix.

Nine months were devoted to laying the groundwork and bringing together disparate communities within the city. Chan, representatives of Creative Time, students and other volunteers attended neighborhood planning meetings and church dinners, where they listened to residents voice their concerns, needs and insights. "The idea," Chan explains, "was to make Godot a site-specific work rather than a historical one." He adds, "I wanted to understand the terrain rather than impose the terrain on people."

Deepening his involvement with the city, Chan taught two seminars during the fall 2007 semester, one at Xavier University, a Catholic and historically black institution, and one at the state-funded University of New Orleans. These classes were open to the public. Moreover, some of the production's rehearsals took place at the Porch, a nonprofit cultural center in the Seventh Ward, another stricken neighborhood, spearheaded by artist Willie Birch and aimed at engaging the city's young people in contemporary art and local heritage.

Acknowledging that the post-Katrina suffering had not been confined to one ravaged area of the city, Chan and his collaborators decided to stage Godot in a second area, Gentilly, a modest middle-class neighborhood that has begun to rebound. As Chan explains in a statement on the Creative Time Web site, "The sense and nonsense of waiting engulfs other neighborhoods as well, where people still live in trailers almost two years after the storm, hoping for some type of relief to come from city, state, and federal authorities." The Gentilly performances took place before a gutted two-story house. One could see faces in the window of the occupied house next door, and hear the reassuring sounds of cars and the strains of rock music in the background, all of which contributed a human presence to the play compared to the desolation of the Lower Ninth Ward.

Four performances had been planned, two in each location, though a fifth, in the Lower Ninth Ward, was inserted into the schedule after would-be audience members mobbed the play, and hundreds had to be turned away. That much popular interest was no small accomplishment in New Orleans, a depopulated city that even in good times has a limited number of theatergoers. It surely helped that admission was free, hot gumbo was served and a jazz band escorted guests to their seats, but the enthusiastic response exceeded even the most optimistic expectations.

Godot in the Crescent City: Samuel Beckett's absurdist allegory of thwarted expectations and stubborn hope found a sympathetic audience among New Orleanians still stricken by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

Art in America, Feb, 2008 by Sally Heller

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Health

Most Popular Articles in Arts

Most Popular Publications in Arts