The setting of “Waiting for Godot” is famously vague: “A country road. A tree.”
The latest Broadway revival of Samuel Beckett’s play takes a seemingly abstract approach to this five-word description. Onstage at the Hudson Theatre is a spectacular, enigmatic form, strategically horn-like in shape and jaw-droppingly gargantuan in size. The forced-perspective set piece is at once a sublime sculpture and a theatrical canvas for actors Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves to play Vladimir and Estragon, two friends awaiting the mysterious titular presence.
“It’s still the road, and it is still definitely the tree!” Soutra Gilmour, the production’s scenic and costume designer, told Broadway News a day after the first photos of the production were released to the public and became the subject of online discussion among theater fans.
“I think they have taken people by surprise,” she said of the photos. “I guess I knew they would because the first time I saw [the sculpture built] in the workshop on Zoom, it was quite emotional. It says something about our smallness and our vastness; there's a real fullness to it, but there’s also a real emptiness. And when I first saw it [in person], I said to someone, ‘This is both soft and monstrous.’ It’s got this cyclical, ‘Groundhog Day’-like quality, that you’re constantly in the same place and maybe can’t leave."
