Tonight's performance is sold out.
Godot is Coming: Beckett in Vermont this Winter
An original production of two plays, Waiting For Godot and Rockaby by the late Irish playwright, Samuel Beckett, will be staged as Beckett In Vermont in Shelburne and Burlington January 26-27 and February 2-3. All ticket sales benefit the Lake Champlain Waldorf School, a preschool through high school independent school with campuses in Shelburne and Charlotte.
Read the article in the January 24 issue of Seven Days
"Godot is laugh-out-loud funny,"
director Kenneth Peck says, "and most people forget that and only remember the two tramps standing around, endlessly, in front of a dead tree." He cites Buster Keaton, Laurel & Hardy and The Marx Brothers as Beckett's inspiration, "along with Balzac and some existentialist philosophers, but the physical comedy of vaudeville and silent movies is integral to the play." He adds that "Beckett was saying we should laugh at how ridiculous we all are, and, watching the play, we do."
Rien ne se passe, personne ne vient, personne ne s'en va, c'est terrible.
Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful.
Samuel Beckett
En Attendant Godot, 1953
- Don Smith (Estragon) & Jason Phelps (Vladimir)
Directed by Waldorf parent, filmmaker and professor Kenneth Peck of Charlotte, the two plays boast a cast of professional and amateur actors: Steve Magowan of South Burlington, Roberta Nubile of Charlotte, John Pacht of Hinesburg, Jason Phelps of East Charlotte, Don Smith and Malcolm Smith of Middlebury.
Waiting For Godot, first performed in 1953, is considered by many critics and scholars to be the single most important play of the second half of the 20th century. Rockaby is a later Beckett work, a short one-act one-woman play, first performed in 1981. Beckett's sense of tragicomic humor is closer to our contemporary sensibility today than it was when written, according to a New Yorker profile last August.
