I went to see Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett at ACT last night. Where I sit is normally pretty empty on a Thursday night, but I was surrounded by kids from Sonoma State on a field trip to the city to see the play.

One of the girls told me they were all in a general theatre study course, like a 300 level course, and that they made regular field trips to the city to see plays.

I wonder what their teacher told me about Samuel Beckett and his famous play. I took a whole course on Samuel Beckett in college, and we studied and even acted out "Waiting for Godot", since my theatre professor was a Stanford grad Beckett scholar.

I had already seen the Gate Theatre of Dublin's production of "Waiting for Godot" a few years in Berkeley along with "Krapp's Last Tape", which is a play about an decrepit old man listening to tapes he made of himself as a young man. Talk about a frightening and depressing play!

Imagine yourself as a toothless lonely drooling old codger listening to tapes of yourself as a young man, where you talked about your life and the girlfriends you had. So scary!

I liked this version of "Waiting for Godot" because they really concentrated on the vaudevillian aspect of the play. You could see echoes of Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, and other famous vaudeville routines which Beckett loved. I'd never seen a production emphasize the more comical aspects of the play, although when you start to really listen to the play you realize how depressing it really is.

Didi and Gogo together for 50 years, waiting for Godot in some god forsaken place, doing anything to amuse themselves to make the time pass and then continually saying "Nothing happens".

If you think about it, so much of life is like that really. Nothing happens, and we keep waiting for death, some say God to save us, to tell us that all of it has been worthwhile. That we haven't been traisping around in the barren wilderness for nothing, that the promised land is somewhere out there for us to get to, if only "God-ot" (this is how the irish say it" will come.

But he doesn't come and so we wait, and we go on, and nothing happens.