Surviving and thriving

Waiting for Godot, Bad Jews and Arts Alliance Tulsa

Worth the wait

As far as I can reckon, Tulsa hasn’t seen Waiting for Godot in 21 years. That’s a long time to go without experiencing one of the greatest plays of the 20^th century. American Theatre Company’s new production by TU theatre professor and legendary Tulsa actor Lisa Wilson brings it vigorously, urgently, into the present. 

But in this present, time is askew. In Wilson’s words, “it’s then, it’s now, it’s tomorrow.”

The Irish playwright Samuel Beckett set his 1948 two-act tragicomedy in a rock-strewn waste in which it’s hard to tell one day from another. As Wilson puts it, “We walk into the middle of a T. S. Eliot poem.” She chose to set this production in America.

In American Theatre Company’s 99-seat theater in downtown’s East Village, the experience will be intimate and visceral.

Godot is a play in which, famously, the hoped-for event (the arrival of Godot) never happens. Many things happen, though, while the two tramps Vladimir and Estragon (nicknamed Didi and Gogo) wait: slapstick, despair, lullabies, arguments. An aristocrat named Pozzo and his slave, Lucky, join the scene, and Lucky gives one of the most difficult monologues in theatre history—performed, as Wilson describes it, like “a steampunk cuckoo clock with sprung gears.”

And for the entirety of the play, the two men happen to each other. 

“The relationship is marital, almost,” says Wilson, laughing. “We know it. It has all the foibles and human weaknesses, bad feet and prostate problems, bad dreams, high hopes and deep disappointment, rituals. We know these people; they amuse us. 

“[Beckett] lets us see how it is when we strip away everything else, take away all the folderol. We see it and we go, ‘Oh my.’ There’s the humor, but you turn around and there’s the pathos.”

As the play goes on, we begin to question whether Didi and Gogo (played by frequent collaborators Craig Walter and Sterling McHan) can go on. Part of Beckett’s genius is to stitch together the characters’ experience inside the play with our experience viewing it from the outside.

“We’re put in the same position that Gogo and Didi are in,” Wilson says. “Are they going to get out of this? Is Godot ever going to come? They’re down to eating black radishes!”

Wilson sees parallels between our current environment and the one Beckett’s characters inhabit. 

“What people are attracted to today—‘The Walking Dead,’ ‘The Last Ship,’ ‘I, Robot’—are things about extermination, end times, ‘How do we survive?’ And when you think how much time people spend ‘connected’ but alone on social media, that sense is very disconnecting. I’m listening to these characters who talk about: ‘What do we do while we wait?’ … Are you doing something that matters in the meantime?” 

Present tense

If Waiting for Godot asks what we’re doing with today, Bad Jews considers our obligation to what’s gone before. When it premiered in 2013, The New York Times called it the best comedy of the season. Joshua Harmon’s play listens in on two cousins, the “uber-Jew,” Daphna, and the “bad Jew,” Liam, along with Liam’s girlfriend and brother, as they savagely, bitterly, hilariously battle over the right to their Holocaust survivor grandfather’s most precious heirloom.

The one-act play comes to Heller Theatre Company—an organization with a rich history of serving up provocative material—under the direction of Rebecca Ungerman, who worked as a Jewish youth director for 25 years. 

“I’ve met and worked with so many kinds of Jews,” she says, “[so] for each of these characters I had multiple personal references to draw on. [The show] is like a really dark version of Nia Vardalos’ My Big Fat Greek Wedding.”

Ungerman says warrior metaphors are a prominent thread among the characters: “Daphna (Jackie Davis) is a fencer, strategically thrusting and parrying her rapier-sharp intellect, while Liam (Lewis Giles) is more a very smart ogre with a hammer. Liam’s non-Jewish girlfriend, Melody (Beth Geatches), is the United Nations—until she’s not. Jonah (Jack Allen) is both a stealth bomber and a Trojan horse.”

The one-act play takes place in a setting that would otherwise be private: a family apartment following a funeral. 

“Most people have been in that room with their own families,” Ungerman says, “where everything is raw, [and] anything can happen.”

The long haul

Daphna warns in Bad Jews that precious things (Judaism, in her example) tend to disappear when people stop committing to them. Heller Theatre Company itself might easily have disappeared last year after the city cut its longstanding funding. A new organization called Arts Alliance Tulsa aims to prevent such near-losses and make art-making more sustainable in our community. 

As one of more than 60 United Arts Funds in the nation, Arts Alliance Tulsa will raise and distribute funds for operational support and audience development to more than 45 local arts groups. With seed funding from the George Kaiser Family Foundation, the initiative aims to maximize the economic impact of the arts in Tulsa. 

Executive Director Todd Cunningham said the idea has been on the table for two decades (OKC has had a similar organization for 40 years.) 

“We had to come to a place where everyone in the community was ready to participate,” Cunningham says. “Our hope is to be able to help [member organizations] pay for those [operational] programs that up until now were almost impossible to fund. Our function is to help relieve some of the financial burdens so the creative spirit of our local artists can flourish.

“Two decades of cuts in government funding for the arts is having a negative impact on our communities, and we are now looking for answers. You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.”

Waiting for Godot

Fri., Oct. 30-Sat., Nov. 7
$10-$20
American Theatre Company
americantheatrecompany.org

Bad Jews

Fri., Oct. 30-Sun., Nov. 8
$17-$20
Charles E. Norman Theatre, PAC, tulsapac.com

For more from Alicia, read her article on Peter Story's one-man production of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.