En Attendant Godot - Waiting For Godot
(Beckett, Samuel)
The theater of the absurd never gained broad popularity beyond the academic community, and much of that excitement lasted only briefly during the 1970's, especially in the US. The singular exception to this rejection of oddness for oddness' sake appears to be Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot". An expensive Broadway production of this play starred Robin Williams and Steve Martin. France, and Europe in general, were more open to the highly stylized machinations of surreal productions, and some of Beckett's strangest works were actually produced for French television. Famously, when waiting for Godot was first translated to english from the original french, the difficulties associated with finding a venue led one production to be performed inside of a US prison. A highly skeptical community of critics thought there was no way a group of undereducated prisoners would ever understand such a play, and were proved thoroughly incorrect by the show's popularity. Indeed, Waiting for Godot remains one of the more popular plays produced as an activity within the US prison system. We see in this phenomenon evidence that it may not be the style of the absurdists which has prevented an emergence of greater popularity in the genre, but that the layers of excrutiating analysis required by most works of this sort deny meaning to all but the most obscurely minded. Godot accords therefore with most other storytelling techniques in that simplicity of meaning and clarity of conflict retain their vibrancy in the ability to reach into the lives of average people, regardless of any other stylistic device. It is indeed a very misguided elitism that drives writers and artists to have as few people as possible capable of understanding a work of art, in an effort to emulated the demonstrable genius of quantum physics and higher mathematics. Becket is proved by Godot not to be a genius, which would serve to exclude people, but a visionary capable of bringing people to his work. Until this fundamental difference is recognized by more artists, it is unlikely that another work of this sort will gain the popular appeal of Godot.
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