Nothing to be done...

This weekend on an empty street in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans and again the weekend after, in front of a deserted house in Gentilly, a group of actors will present my favorite play in my favorite city - Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett.

Two quotations about Beckett which I found on a Samuel Beckett website describe not only why I dearly love this curmudgeonly Irish playwright, but frankly come very close to worshiping him.

"The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him.
He’s not fucking me about, he’s not leading me up any garden path, he’s not slipping me a wink, he’s not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he’s not selling me anything I don’t want to buy — he doesn’t give a bollock whether I buy or not — he hasn’t got his hand over his heart. Well, I’ll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty.
His work is beautiful. " -- Harold Pinter

" Samuel Beckett is sui generis...He has given a voice to the decrepit and maimed and inarticulate, men and women at the end of their tether, past pose or pretense, past claim of meaningful existence. He seems to say that only there and then, as metabolism lowers, amid God’s paucity, not his plenty, can the core of the human condition be approached... Yet his musical cadences, his wrought and precise sentences, cannot help but stave off the void... Like salamanders we survive in his fire." -- Richard Ellman

This is the real deal, and though I have seen Godot performed many times and in many settings, this is the production I would give my eye teeth to see. Put on by CreativeTime, an experimental dramatic arts group from New York City, in conjunction with a number of arts and education groups in New Orleans, these performances (which are free by the way) are being presented in what has to be the best possible contemporary context for this play; a play about confusion, torpor, and despair, but possessing within that context an amazing and incongruous hope in, and at, the base of life.

The mounting of this presentation, in and of itself, contradicts the first spoken line of the play, "Nothing to be done." This performance, and the energy, creativity, and life that has gone into its creation is SOMETHING to be done.

See it if you can... or, if you can't, at least grab a copy and read (or re-read) Godot this weekend. It might just be the most important piece of literature for our time.