UH puts kabuki twist on Beckett's bleakness

By Joseph T. Rozmiarek
Advertiser Drama Critic

•	'Waiting for Godot' 2 p.m. Sunday, 8 p.m. March 24-25 Ernst Lab Theatre, University of Hawai'i-Manoa $9, $7, $3; 956-7655

It's Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" — known as the play where nothing happens, twice.

The staging by director Tim Gonzalez-Wiler at the University of Hawai'i lab theater gives it a kabuki twist.

Beckett's comic drama represents the human condition as bleak and abject misery played out in nonsequiturs while waiting for a savior who never arrives. It seems to fit the stylized and spare traditions of the Japanese theater, where lines are delivered in singsong intonation and movement is exaggerated and angular.

Estragon (Chi Ho Law) and Vladimir (Jonathan Egged) are a couple of bums with interchangeable lines who depend on each other despite their talk of separating.

Estragon is the bumbler and complainer. Vladimir is brighter. Neither is able to make sense of a master and slave who cross their path. Pozzo (Alvin Char) dominates and berates Lucky (Dezmond Gilla), a sleepwalking and slobbering zombie wearing a rope noose.

Later, a boy (Ken Uehara) arrives to tell them that Godot will not arrive today. Maybe tomorrow.

The action is repeated in Act Two, except that Pozzo is blind and Lucky is mute.

What's it all about? Maybe that waiting leads to boredom and then to introspection and self-knowledge. Maybe that God is found among the dregs of humanity.

But ultimately the static action and the rising and falling cadence of the dialogue begin to take their toll. We begin to long for variety in the speech, more punch, more character, and more humor.

One knows there's a lesson in the drama, but can't help but wish it came more easily.