by John Lahr
Although he swore to Schneider that he would have nothing to do with another production, he could not deny that the play spoke to a vast, inarticulate region of his experience. Beckett’s limbo would elicit similar responses from convicts in San Quentin who saw the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop production in 1957. Middle-class audiences, however, found the experience unsettling and treated the production with an aggressive dislike. Walter Winchell wrote the first of a handful of notices that would characterize their typical arrogant obtuseness. While Lahr could not forget the caverns of emptiness the play dramatized, Winchell illustrated the antagonism of a class that refused to recognize it.
As one of the most influential of the old guard on the Broadway scene, his hostility, verging on hysteria, is pertinent. Some, like Walter Kerr, dismissed it (“an intellectual fruitbowl”), but Winchell wanted to destroy it as if it were subversive and those who took part in it insane.
Waiting for Godot will appear in Washington, Boston, and Philadelphia before it challenges New Yorkers at the Music Box. Lahr and Ewell are on stage throughout, trading double talk. The thing opens with Tom Ewell’s trousers unzipped.… It ends with Lahr’s pants falling to his ankles. In between there is considerable chatter about madness, boredom, human suffering and cruelty …There are several profane utterances … some of which have never before been heard on the stage before …Even the vulgarians who people the premieres found the dirty words vulgar … “Unnecessary” exclaimed a hard boiled Broadwayite. George E. Engle, a multi-millionaire who loves theater people, renovated the Cocoanut Grove Playhouse and will play Broadway shows old and new. Mr. Engle is also the proprietor of 440 producing oil wells.
“What on earth possessed Myerberg to put on such a show,” he asked John Shubert the Broadway showman. “Don’t underestimate him,” he said. “Myerberg was laughed at by experts when he put on Wilder’s Skin of Our Teeth. He made so much money with it that he bought the Mansfield Theater!… Life photographers “shot” the elite audiences as the stars were taking alleged bows … If published, these pictures cannot help the new show since half the spectators fled after the opening stanza …
The debacle was completed when Myerberg canceled the out-of-town tryouts and folded the show. Much of the fault lay with Myerberg himself. He had billed the production falsely, mounted it outrageously, and brought it to a town with no sympathetic audience to sustain an experimental play. But Schneider had an even unhappier experience, for he was not asked to direct the New York production, as he had expected.
For Schneider, however, the real sadness was in not having done justice to the Beckett he understood. As he wrote in the Chelsea Review,
The failure in Miami depressed me more than any experience I had had in the theater, though I had for a time anticipated the probability and done all in my power to avoid it. It is typical of Sam [Beckett] that his response to Miami was concerned only with my feelings of disappointment and never stressed or even mentioned his own. Nor did he utter one word of blame for any mistakes I might have made along the way …We met several times. I told him the story of Miami as objectively as I could and he spoke to me of what he had heard concerning both productions. Somehow he made me feel that what I had at least tried to do in Miami was closer to what he wanted to do—though he never criticized the efforts of anyone else.…”
Schneider never saw the New York production.
The play’s dismal reception in Miami never numbed Lahr’s faith in its fundamental theatricality. There were dimensions of the play he felt his performance had not been able to tap because of the director, the set, his own fear of the material.
“Everybody has their own interpretation of Godot. At one point in the play, you thought the tramps were waiting for God. But then Beckett would go off on another tangent. Then you knew it wasn’t God. At the finish, they were still waiting. It was Waiting. Hopelessness. It was waiting for the best of life; and it never came. I think he meant the two characters to represent both sides of man. Estragon, my part, was the animal: Sex, Hunger, Eating, Sleeping. The other, Vladimir, was Suspicion, Inquiry, always examining everything. Intellect. He had kind of an animal’s love for the other. He cared for him almost like a baby.”
Even Myerberg realized that “Lahr seemed to know the character better than anyone even from the beginning.”
What did Lahr know? Questions of the Bible, of philosophy, and social organization that the play raised had never crossed his mind. His theatrical friends urged him to scrap the idea of playing Godot. Yet he found himself defending the play without being able to verbalize its special force. In 1964, when Beckett went to London to oversee another production of Waiting for Godot, he discussed approaches to the play that might have calmed those who scoffed at Lahr’s persistence.
This play is full of implications and every important statement can be taken three or four ways. But the actor has only to find the dominant one, because he does so, does not mean the other levels will be lost …
Sunday Times, December 20, 1964
Lahr found his approach to Beckett; the audience’s violent reaction in Miami had solidified his idea. “When I saw them walking out, I knew, I knew.” Many of Lahr’s theatrical associates regarded his fascination with the play as childish. If he lacked the words to express his appreciation, his “instincts” would prove Beckett’s statement correct, peeling layers of meaning and emotion from the play that neither actor nor author could have originally visualized.
A few weeks after returning to New York, Myerberg asked Lahr if he would do another production of the play. Despite Lahr’s bad experience in Miami and his distrust of Myerberg, he agreed on the condition that he have final say about the director.
Two weeks later, Lahr found himself in Lester Shurr’s Broadway office talking to a director whom he’d never met and whose actingschool productions of Waiting for Godot he’d never seen—Herbert Berghof.
Berghof did not look like a man with a flair for comedy. He was heavy-set; his bald head and thick Viennese accent reminded Lahr more of a philosophy professor than a director. Berghof had come to the interview with a mixture of confidence and trepidation. He had directed Waiting for Godot in his acting studio and played the part of Estragon himself. Since he knew the play and had heard about Schneider’s approach to it, he felt that he could offer an alternative. “Myerberg had said to me ‘It’s all up to Mr. Lahr. If he accepts you, then it’s fine.’ I wanted to direct the play very much, but I was frightened of that meeting. I had seen Bert in all his great parts, and I was a fan of his. I was really frightened.”
Lahr stood at the window watching a mammoth cardboard Yogi Berra blow Camel smoke rings onto Broadway. He listened and nodded while Berghof explained his feelings about the play. “Although I had never seen the Miami production, I had very definite ideas about Beckett. My complete conviction was that the play was affirmative. There was nothing fanciful or strange in it. There was no raised finger. To me it didn’t have the false significance of an arty play. In Miami, it was directed for style and crucifixion and I don’t know what. I felt the play was comparable to clowning—the sublime clowning of Grok or the Fratellinis. The meaningless notions of Beckett are meaningful. We do eat carrots and go into delicious ecstasy about them. That gesture has meaning; it’s not just being silly. In comedy, what matters is that you truly see. Take a drawing by Saul Steinberg, who is a metaphysical clown among cartoonists; he’s able to X-ray something—emotionally, psychologically—with two lines. His illustration is true; he has captured an absurd moment of a human being, but with precise understanding. The same happens with Beckett’s laughter. The play in Miami was directed for significances, meanings. My understanding of Beckett was different, more affirmative. Only somebody who loves life strongly could see all the flaws and weaknesses in an attempt to find out what it was all about. The exploration of existence becomes a sublime clown’s act. There was no negation in Beckett’s play; but the kind of affirmation you get when you love someone an
d see all their faults. Life to Beckett seems to have all these absurd, unexplained aspects; and yet, he is on the search because he loves life.” Berghof’s conception of the play allowed for the comic leeway that Schneider’s did not. Lahr immediately warmed to it, expressing his humiliation and bewilderment at the Miami production.
Lahr described the elaborate set design. Berghof replied, “I think that’s phony.”
“You’re right. I wouldn’t set foot on it again.”
Berghof understood clowning and directing comedy and could see immediately how the set imposed its own limitations. “There were very complicated ramps, which made it impossible to operate like a clown because a clown basically needs an empty stage. First of all, the complicated set detracts from Bert’s gestures; secondly, the whole attitude of the play with platforms seems fanciful and out of order.”
Having found a sympathetic ear, Lahr confided, “I just couldn’t walk or talk on it. What do you want as a set?”
“I don’t want anything,” Berghof said flatly. They discussed casting, and again Lahr was surprised at how many of Berghof’s ideas paralleled his own. “I did feel it was wrong to cast Tom Ewell with Bert. Their type of comedy is too similar—naïve, simple, innocent. Bert has this same radiance or innocence. I thought the character should be played by somebody who had comédie elements but was a sharper player, more intellectual. I suggested E. G. Marshall. He had a kind of New England acuteness, a cerebral quality to contrast with Estragon’s vulnerability.”
Lahr, who had been cordial up to this point, became more involved. He moved away from the window and stopped pacing.
“I think it’s music hall. But in Miami, I couldn’t get a laugh for two hours.”
“If it’s not comic,” replied Berghof, “it’s nothing. It becomes completely dry if it is played with a raised finger and all kinds of symbolic overtones which do not communicate the meaninglessness to an audience.”
Lahr struggled with Berghof’s terms and began analyzing the play on the philosophical level Berghof had broached. He didn’t get far. Berghof stopped him, echoing Beckett’s sentiments written in 1964: ’T don’t like to talk intellectually about a play which has to be played simply in order to be an intellectual play. I would like to talk about how you go to sleep or how you eat the carrots. The words are there. If they have meaning, the meaning will come out.”
Berghof’s attitude intrigued Lahr. He seemed confortable with ideas, and, at the same time, extremely theater-wise. He began to put Berghof to the test. “Now, for instance, how would you play the opening speeches? There’s no laughs in them?”
Berghof proceeded to act out the situation. “Now I’m not as good an actor as Bert—certainly not as good a comedian—but I’m pretty good. At least I could make things clear. He liked that. I was showing him instead of talking. We went through the play. We had an absolute rapport. I don’t like to talk either. I have been on the stage since I was sixteen; and I know what is a legitimate problem and what is a lot of talk. What matters is that something is true and human, that you get true sensations.”
Berghof’s demand for theatrical honesty paralleled Lahr’s attitudes. They continued reading through the play. “Bert had a very clear and simple attitude toward the work. One of his words which I really adore is ‘That’s phony,’ ‘No, that’s not real,’ ‘No, that’s hokum.’ These are the words I remember most about his reaction to production ideas. He wasn’t satisfied with being funny; it had to be true and real too.”
The interview had taken ninety minutes, but Berghof could not gauge whether Lahr’s questions and enthusiasm were a vote of confidence. Lahr himself was still uncertain whether laughter could be coaxed up from the interpretation Berghof outlined. They came to the final image of the play, where Estragon, having failed to hang himself with his rope belt, speaks the final lines with his pants down. The technical problem of sustaining an audience rapport during this moment had plagued Lahr in Miami. It had never created the sense of sadness or the laughter that Lahr felt was on the printed page.
“Well, how are you going to make that work?”
“I worked on that for a long time in my studio,” said Berghof. “I’ve got a very simple device.”
“How are you going to get away with it and not be offensive?”
As Berghof recalls, “I said ‘That’s very simple,’ and then dropped my trousers.”
Lahr did not laugh. He stared at Berghof; and then glanced at Lester’s paneled office. Looking back at the director, he said “You’re going to direct this play. You’re my man. Anybody who drops his pants for a moment in the theater is my man as a director.”
Berghof had been accumulating information on Waiting for Godot since its European debut in 1954. On the cluttered shelves of his study were boxes crammed with programs, pictures, and articles about the various productions. (Lahr would never see that den or realize that Berghof kept a picture of him, frozen in a wild grimace, on a bulletin board in front of his desk.) Berghof’s extensive research on the play and his fluency with the characters as well as with the personalities of the actors playing them made rehearsals much smoother than the Miami production.
A cast was assembled quickly. In early April, two months after Miami, rehearsals began. “One of the rules I established with the cast was that I was not going to intellectualize the play, but work.” Privately, Berghof interpreted the play on a very intellectual level, but he feared that any discussion of ideas would limit the human experience he was trying to evoke from his actors. “I studied Bosch and Brueghel in detail. I used certain attitudes in the paintings for the visualization of the images in the play. I’d never tell actors that. But in Brueghel and Bosch, you have actions pertinent to Beckett. They are doing something very strange and often very silly, but with great intensity and naturalness. I go to such things because you absolve yourself from theater gimmicks.”
Berghof also did not tell Lahr that he kept pictures of all the actors pasted throughout his script. “I like to see what actors look like in others parts. If I’m supposed to help an actor to be good, I have to understand him: his face, his cheekbones, his arms. I like to understand everything, so that when I ask an actor to do something, I know his responses.”
The other members of the new cast were better acquainted with Beckett and the problems of production than the Miami entourage. E. G. Marshall had seen the play twice in England; and Kurt Kasznar, who played Pozzo, flew to England to view the production before going into rehearsal. Berghof capitalized on the enthusiasm and expertise of his actors. A seriousness of purpose and a sense of direction pervaded the rehearsals. For Lahr, it was like discovering a new play. “With Herbert’s direction the play began to open up. E. G. was brilliant; Kasznar was right. I began to function properly.”
Berghof tried not to push Lahr into false significance, but let him discover his own emphasis. Lahr responded with confidence and immense energy. “Bert has a way of rehearsing,” recalls Berghof, “that I wish other actors would learn. He came to rehearsal half an hour before it started, got into his working clothes. He was very anxious to get to work. He kept saying to me, ‘Let’s get on the floor.’ And he worked—sometimes seven hours straight. We got an unbelievable amount accomplished. In two weeks we were practically ready.”
Berghof worked hard at building Lahr’s confidence. He had realized long before rehearsals that his main task would be assuaging Lahr’s fear of another failure in the role. Alvin Epstein, whom Berghof had signed as Lucky, remembers that the director made him come down to his studio to go over his part two weeks, before the production went into rehearsal. “Once we go into rehearsals,” Berghof told him, “I can’t spend any time with you.”
Berghof’s method of directing the play gave run-throughs a special flavor. “He would prod you and push you and giggle and laugh,” recalls Epstein. “It was like making love to the actors, a constant dance back and forth. He’d get up and show you. Then he’d say, ‘You do it better. You do it b
etter, darling,’ and then you did it, and he’d say, ‘Oh, that’s wonderful!’ It was like that for four weeks.”
In rehearsal, Berghof was often astounded by Lahr’s ability to respond to a dramatic suggestion. “When you looked at him (sometimes I was only two feet away) he was absolutely true, unfailingly true. Every experience—the crying—everything. It was absolutely unheard of. He never knew how he knew; it came to him. His instincts to look for where he could get emotion were there. Gide once said, ‘All the tedious research becomes worthwhile if you have one inspired moment.’ Lahr was inspired. I believe acting is a game of make-believe, like children play. Bert plays that game; he goes into a rehearsal like a child going to the park. I found Bert’s style came from content. I hate ‘style.’ Everything Bert did came from an experience and made a form. He didn’t find a style first, but rather the experience made a form.”
Lahr’s face took on new dimensions in the play. He ate a carrot with hungry joy; he took off his shoe with a peace beyond satisfaction. He crawled; he whined. Berghof was amazed to see how he could convey insight without extraneous gesture. “Bert once told me that as a young actor he was called ‘one-take Lahr.’ He had only to look at an object once and he’d get a laugh. What is a double-take anyway? You look at an object; you see it, but you don’t understand its meaning. You leave it and walk away from it. While you are walking away, it dawns on you what the object really is. You look back. Delayed recognition. Now Bert was able to look at something—a tree, a carrot, a shoe—see it, and it suddenly dawns all over his face. He doesn’t need to go away from the object. That is fantastic. It shows an immense acting sensitivity.”
Lahr’s gestures found the rhythm and purpose of Beckett’s prose. He was used to doing funny things with his arms and legs, turning the costume into part of his personality. Epstein, who had worked with Marcel Marceau and studied with Etienne Decroux, was amazed. “So much had to do with the kind of clothes he was wearing, the shoes, the hats. The idea of his movement, the physical feel of it seemed to me the perfect Beckettian tragicomic gestures. It wasn’t campy. In another context it might have seemed like a puton. It wasn’t. It was absolutely right within the framework of the play, sluggish and sloppy, but precise.”