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.

Every Day's A Holiday with Mary...

Saturday night was the big Halloween Fundraiser at Petaluma's Phoenix Theater when I had the honor of becoming Bert (doesn't he have a last name somewhere?) the chimney sweep (among a host of other occupations... a bit of typecasting actually) accompanying Mary Poppins to the wonderful event.

Mary Poppins, I must say, besides being wonderful company for the evening, was indeed the hit of the party. It was amazing actually... Sort of like being a Disney character (which, I guess, in a way, we were). EVERYONE, and I really do mean everyone (well, with the exception of Ace Ventura, but that's another story), wanted to say hello or have their picture taken with Mary Poppins. While the dancing was going on, Mary would often simply take off and float through the crowd as I followed along, chimney brushes over my shoulder, trying to catch up with the girl on the winds.

At one point, as we were standing outside in front of the theater a group of teenagers came by and Mary approached to discuss, "when I used to take care of you." The funniest part of this interchange was that several of the kids were the first people all night who didn't know who she was. But one of them did, and he kept trying to enlighten the others. When I walked up, his eyes got big and he said (as so many others did) "Dick Van Dyke! Bust it out man! Chim Chiminey... Come on... Bust it out!" So I did, standing on the corner of Washington, I started singing Chim chiminey, kicking up my heels like I learned 30 years ago in theater class and join by a kid who is probably ten years younger than my daughter.

And speaking of my daughter... while I was busy kicking up my heels with Mary, she and her sweety were partying in The City... Can YOU guess who they are?

On top of everything... Mary and I even won the Grand Prize in the costume competition (and there was some stiff competition) with one of our competitors telling the audience, "Vote for Mary Poppins!"

It was a SUPERCALAFRGILISTICEXPEALIDOCIOUS evening!