A Yiddish version of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a hit for the New Yiddish Rep in the 2013-14 season, will begin a return engagement Off-Broadway on September 4 as part of Origin's 1st Irish Festival.
Presented by the Barrow Street Theatre, the show will arrive right after wrapping up its European premiere, as Vartn Auf Godo will open the third annual Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival in Northern Ireland, July 1 - August 10.
Although Godot isn't thought of as an Irish play, Beckett was indeed Irish. He wrote in both French (the language of the original version of Godot) and in English.
There'll be no Sir Patrick Stewart and no Sir Ian McKellen in this production, no Sirs at all in fact. It is instead, according to director Moshe Yassur, "particularly Jewish, the characters are Holocaust survivors, they are facing the unimaginable, and they are waiting for answers that may not come. Yiddish, the language of laughter and tears, captures this sound, this feeling like no other language."
"Who's better at waiting than the Jews?" adds Shane Baker, who wrote the authorized translation. "Interestingly, in Beckett's early drafts of the play, the character of Estragon was named Levy. That tells you something."
Most of the earlier cast is returning for the run. Rafael Goldwaser, who runs Théatre en l’Air in Strasbourg, France, is Lucky. Baker himself takes on the role of Vladimir, opposite New Yiddish Rep's artistic director David Mandelbaum as Estragon. Ten-year-old Nicholas Jenkins returns as the boy. Allen Lewis Rickman (The Coen Brothers' "A Serious Man" and HBO's "Boardwalk Empire") joins as Pozzo.
According to production notes, the Yiddish Waiting for Godot returns the play "to the historical context of post WW II Europe in which Beckett was writing, in effect tracing it to its elemental moral and social roots. Beckett, a member of the French Resistance, wrote the play in '48-'49."
Beckett, who died in 1989, was notoriously prickly about productions of his plays that made changes to his conceptions. But I'd like to think he'd appreciate this one.
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