Is it a tree trunk? Is it a void?
Those are some questions “Waiting for Godot” set and costume designer Soutra Gilmour asked during the creative process of bringing Samuel Beckett’s beloved play to Broadway.
“Waiting for Godot” has been a mainstay of the New York theater scene. Past revivals have attracted A-list stars such as Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Nathan Lane, Bill Irwin, John Goodman, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves starred in Lloyd’s revival as the two men who sit around and wait for Godot to show up.
Gone are the park bench and the tree. Instead, there’s now a concrete tunnel that looks like a giant piece of abstract art. It’s minimalist to say the least, and the show’s director Jamie Lloyd agrees, “I always think there’s a lot of information on stage. It’s not literal. There was still a road in ‘Waiting for Godot,’ it just wasn’t literally a road.” He adds, “It’s our version of that.”
Lloyd is no stranger to revivals. His most recent projects include “Sunset Blvd” and “Evita.” With the latter, Rachel Zegler stood on the balcony of the London Palladium singing “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” to the public, while theater patrons watched the show’s big number on a screen.
Putting a spin on things was exactly what he wanted to do with “Waiting for Godot.”
Lloyd says, “There’s no point in doing a revival if it just looks vaguely similar to the last production, and especially when you’ve got something that is produced all over the world all the time, like ‘Waiting for Godot, what’s the point in doing a near replica of the previous five productions?”
Gilmour’s inspiration began in an unlikely places — the New York subway. At the time, she was still in tech rehearsals with Lloyd, on “Sunset Blvd,” but the duo was already thinking about their next project, the revival of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.”
She says, “I saw this guy get on. He was clearly a guy who was homeless, in some sense, inhabiting and living in the subway. He sat down. He had a bag with him, and he really carefully took off his top layer of clothing, and underneath he had a second layer; an all-black outfit that was almost his nighttime attire.” Gilmour watched as he carefully folded his clothes and put them into his backpack. As she got off, she had a “Waiting for Godot” moment. “I was struck by, even in this very specific environment, this need for a way to mark the day ending and the night beginning,” Gilmour says.
Marking time and how one marks time and gives purposes to time were all relevant to Beckett’s classic play “Waiting for Godot.”
That’s when the creative questions arose as she tried to get to the essence of the play and understand what their version would be: “What’s our experience of a country road? Is it the Irish idyll of the tree, fence and bench, or is it being under a freeway? Is it being next to some industrial space?”
As the show was being workshopped, Lloyd, Winter and Reeves were struck by the lack of a naturalistic or realistic space.
That raised more questions.
“Where are they? Is it an experiment? Are they being watched? There’s a real sense of the theatrical space, and being able to see the edges of the space, all of these things,” Gilmour looked at more images, this time of concrete tunnels and pipes.
Gilmour never set out to not have a tree or a bench; but along the way, she landed on a big hollow circle, a void, where the two characters have their conversations.
The tunnel-like sculpture was on a scale so large that one could see into it. “It had meaning,” Gilmour says. “They looked so small inside it, and yet that tiny little boy felt really powerful inside it. So there were these really interesting things going on spatially between the architecture and the actors.”
During the show, Winter and Reeves make use of the space. “They experimented with it. They pushed themselves within it, Alex moves around it, and they started giving all these other qualities of hamster wheels and all of those other things that, as humans, we understand that feeling of being trapped, and they were also bold in terms of engaging with it.”
Gilmour explains, “It’s a circle, so it has a softness, but the scale of it was kind of monstrous. There was this weird juxtaposition, where it holds you and yet it also traps you. It frames you, but it also exposes you.”
As the show’s costume designer, she also made a deliberate choice with the Boy character. “I dressed the boy in a little cream hoodie. It was almost like he and the space were one thing, and he was a personification of it.” She adds, “I played with that nuance between people and the relationship of the space to the audience and the space to the theater. “
The set remained a talking point during its run. Gilmour says, “Many people asked, is it the inside of the tree? Lots of people interpreted it like that. We managed to encapsulate something people wanted from the visual and scenic life of the play.”
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