Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 231
In a poll of eight hundred playwrights, actors, directors, and theatre journalists taken by England’s National Theatre
in 1999, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was voted “the most significant play of the twentieth century.” Yet its
American premiere, at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, Florida, in 1956, was a complete disaster. On opening
night, half the audience left at intermission, and the next morning when the box office opened, dozens of people
were standing in line to return tickets they had bought for future performances! But times have certainly changed
for this play about two elderly tramps who wait for a mysterious figure who never shows up. Shown here from left to
right are the celebrated British actors Sir Patrick Stewart playing Vladimir and Sir Ian McKellen as Estragon waving
their farewells to the mysterious Pozzo and Lucky in front of what becomes a highly symbolic tree in the Broadway
production in 2013. © Sasha Gusov
Artaud’s apocalyptic vision has stimulated many subsequent
theatre directors, including Jean-Louis Barrault
and Roger Blin in France, Peter Brook in England, Jerzy
Grotowski in Poland, and André Gregory in America; his
influence can also be seen in the plays of Jean Genet and
the productions of Robert Wilson. His notion of a theatre
of cruelty, though not fully realized onstage in his lifetime,
has been more closely approached by each of these
artists and may still be achieved.
Philosophical Melodrama: No Exit No Exit is one
of the most compelling short plays ever written. In this
one-act fantasy written in 1944, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–
1980), the well-known French existentialist philosopher,
establishes a unique embodiment of Hell: a plain room
without windows or mirrors. Into it come three people,
lately deceased, all condemned to this netherworld
because of their earthly sins. The three are brilliantly
ill-matched in their identities: Garcin, the sole man, is