“Back to back like in the good old days,” Keanu Reeves as Estragon says to Alex Winter as Vladimir; then they shout something together that makes the audience explode in cheers and laughter.

Was this an ad-lib from “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure?” 

I’ve seen “Waiting for Godot” many times, but I’d never seen any of the Bill & Ted movies the two actors had done together, so when I got home, I rented the first one, which in 1989 helped launch Keanu Reeves as a movie star when in his twenties.

In it, Reeves and Winter play a pair of lovable ignoramuses full of catchphrases they shout together – “Whoa!” “Excellent!” “Party on, Dudes!” — who travel through time in a telephone booth to gather famous people from the past (Napoleon, Freud, Lincoln) to help them with their history report so that they don’t flunk out of high school. The movie differs in some ways from Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett’s signature play, first produced in Paris in 1953, one of the most influential works of theater of the 20th century, in which two characters nicknamed Didi and Gogo wait for a third character, who (spoiler alert) never shows up.  But director Jamie Lloyd could have done a lot worse than recapture the humor of those goofy characters Bill and Ted in more than just that one moment. In any case, he also could have done a lot better than he has done in helming this fifth Broadway production of “Waiting for Godot,” which opened tonight at the Hudson Theater.

Any director faces a challenge but also an opportunity in “Waiting for Godot”: How to make approachable to the average theatergoer a complex absurdist “tragicomedy” where, as one Beckett scholar famously put it, “nothing happens, twice”  (first in Act I  then in Act II.) The directorial choices usually revolve around the two central characters, and how they relate to each other and to the audience. Productions of “Waiting for Godot” have featured the haunted clowns Bill Irwin and Nathan Lane,  the great Irish bums Barry McGovern and Johnny Murphy (and, two years ago in Brooklyn, the earthy Midwestern bums Paul Sparks and Michael Shannon), the knighted vaudevillians Sir Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen, the pandemic lockdown hibernates Ethan Hawke and John Leguizamo. (I’ll throw in Jon Michael Hill and Namir Smallwood, who portrayed the urban street dwellers Moses and Kitch in “Pass Over,” Antoinette Nwandu’s play heavily inspired by “Waiting for Godot.”)

But Jamie Lloyd seems most concerned with how his production looks. The set resembles a huge concrete tunnel. Sometimes, the lighting makes the tunnel seem to contract. At one point, the black hole at its center fills with a blinding white light, casting the characters into shadow.  (The spectacular lighting is by Jon Clark, who’s on a roll: He won this year’s Tony for the lighting design of “Stranger Things: The First Shadow.”) These are undeniably awesome effects. 

What’s unclear to me is whether Lloyd has thought them through. The fact that the tunnel in effect comes to life – expanding, contracting, shining white, going black – suggests the presence of some kind of guiding intelligence. Is this the State, and thus Lloyd is saying that “Waiting for Godot” is a fable about authoritarianism? Or is it the presence of something divine, and so “Waiting for Godot” is a fable about faith? 

I suppose either of these are defensible interpretations, although what I most take from the script is ambiguity and uncertainty about any rational or ordered existence, political or spiritual. To the characters, life feels meaningless and the world hopeless. (And to the playwright as well: Beckett wrote “Waiting for Godot,” in French, in 1948 and 1949, in the aftermath of his living in Nazi-occupied France, and during the height of the Cold War fear of nuclear annihilation.)  Line after line reveal the alienation and despair. The play begins with Estragon saying “Nothing to be done.”  More elaborately, in an out-of-nowhere exchange, Vladimir expresses skepticism about the four varying accounts of the two thieves who were present at the crucifixion of Jesus 

“Well? They don’t agree and that’s all there is to it,” Estragon says.
“But all four were there,” Vladimir says. “And only one speaks of a thief being saved. Why believe him rather than the others?”
“Who believes him?”
“Everybody. It’s the only version they know.”
“People are bloody ignorant apes.”

What I am most uncertain about in this particular production is the existence of Lloyd’s guiding intelligence. Is he deliberately dismissing the uncertainty and ambiguity embedded in the script? Or did the fashionable British director simply go with what he knows — the cool, ostentatiously minimalist aesthetic that he last demonstrated on Broadway in “Sunset Blvd,” with the same costume and scenic designer Soutra Gilmour? Again, the actors are dressed all in black, and again their live presence is upstaged by the set (although this time it’s the tunnel that dwarfs them rather than video projections.)   The tree, which is usually central in the play (Didi and Gogo talk about hanging themselves from it) is now off-stage, as if its visual presence would interfere with the sleek lines of the design. There are also no props – when Didi offers Gogo a carrot or a turnip, it’s mimed.

The director’s visual aesthetic would matter less if we felt he was paying as much attention to the performances.  But there seems no consistent take. Each of the actors seems left on his own. 

Brandon J. Dirden’s Pozzo is appropriately menacing. Michael Patrick Thornton’s Lucky gets his moment in the spotlight (in this production, literally)  with his fevered tirade made up of the divine (or at least the word divine) and the incomprehensible. This time, in his long silence leading up to the monologue, instead of being tied by a rope to Pozzo, Lucky is sitting in a wheelchair, his face bound up in an black S&M  mask.

But both of these characters, and the Boy who tells Gogo and Didi that Godot can’t make it today, are in effect cameos. This is always and primarily the Gogo and Didi Show, but we don’t know now what to make of it.

Alex Winter has been on Broadway twice before, and he handles some of Didi’s monologues with impressive gravity. Keanu Reeves, making his Broadway debut, emphasizes in his Who’s Who in the playbill his background in theater. It’s true he has performed on stage in Canada to critical acclaim in the title role of Hamlet and other Shakespearean plays.  He certainly has his moments in “Waiting for Godot.”  (Fans of his may in particular count when he takes his trousers down to reveal black bikini underwear.) He looks the part of a hobo, with a full-bush beard and a surprisingly lanky frame (an effect aided by too-short trousers), and he moves with the convincingly awkward gait of somebody who’s lived too long on the streets. He’s persuasive at expressing frustration, once bending over in exasperation, another time letting out a loud yelp.  But the spark from his best performances isn’t there, as if he’s cowed by the profundity of it all, or too respectful of the play’s significance.  I’m going to blame this on the director. We’ve seen what Keanu Reeves can do.

That’s why that “good old days” moment stands out.  Beckett happened to have died, at age 83, in the same year that “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” came out. He might have appreciated the silliness in that movie. He was known to have loved film comedies of the silent era. (He wrote a film called “Film” starring silent film comedian Buster Keaton.) He was also an avid fan of vaudeville and music hall theater, and incorporated some slapstick routines into “Waiting for Godot.” Past productions have gone to town on the shtick where Didi and Gogo juggle three hats on their two heads. The way it’s done at the Hudson, though, nobody is likely to shout out “Whoa!” much less “Party On, Dudes”

Waiting for Godot
Hudson Theater through January 4
Running time: Two hours and 15 minutes including an intermission
Tickets: $144.48 – $592.48, Digital lottery or digital rush: $49
Written by Samuel Beckett
Directed by Jamie Lloyd
Set and costume design by Soutra Gilmour, lighting by Jon Clark, sound design by Ben and Max Ringham, hair and makeup by Cheryl Thomas
Cast:  Keanu Reeves as ‘Estragon, Alex Winter as ‘Vladimir.’Brandon J. Dirden as ‘Pozzo’ and Michael Patrick Thornton as ‘Lucky.’ Zaynn Arora and Eric Williams share the role of A Boy

Photographs by Andy Henderson