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City Tech’s Annette Saddik ‘Stars’ in Post-Performance Discussion of Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ on May 2 at Studio 54
Theatre scholar and New York City College of Technology (City Tech) Associate Professor of English Annette J. Saddik will be interviewed by Roundabout Theatre's Ted Sodd at Broadway's Studio 54 on Saturday, May 2, after the 2 p.m. performance of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, starring Nathan Lane, John Goodman, Bill Irwin, and John Glover.
Saddik will discuss the play's 1956 American reception, its tragicomic humor, and topics such as language and silence, the construction of meaning and how Beckett plays with audience expectations.
“Often viewed as a nihilist who presented a dark and depressing world view, Beckett was in fact a kind and generous person who faced the absurdities of life with humor in his work,” she says.
“His reported favorite word was ‘perhaps,’ and Waiting for Godot presents our often comic powerlessness in a universe in which we can never know anything for sure, but nonetheless must continue to construct meaning while we wait for the elusive something that will reveal the mystery and make sense out of existence,” she adds.
According to Saddik, the play’s dialogue, rather than fostering communication, simply distracts the characters while they wait, and diverts their attention from the alternative, the silence that would signify death.
“Like Seinfeld's characters in ‘the show about nothing,’ Waiting for Godot challenges us to laugh at ‘the minutia of our lives,’ as we struggle to go on in a world that refuses to conform to our expectations of meaning and truth,” she explains.
04.02.09
