"There is no customary tree as part of the scenery, for one thing, and no country road. This Didi and Gogo while away their endless days inside a kind of tapering tunnel..."

"... that has an enormous gaping mouth at the downstage end, where they perch on its lip, nice and close to the orchestra seats. Visually striking spareness is a hallmark of [director Jamie] Lloyd’s work.... What’s curious in 'Waiting for Godot' is that the textual distillation we have come to expect from Lloyd is largely missing.... [H]e doesn’t seem to have anything to say. That’s disappointing on its own, because the play needs strong directorial focus to land with any force, but particularly so at a time when surely a good chunk of the populace could identify with Didi and Gogo’s sense of exhaustion, futility and despair in the face of a relentlessly brutal world.... This Didi and Gogo speak the words, but without the weight and meaning of the thoughts they have thought countless times before...."

Writes NYT theater critic Laura Collins-Hughes, in "'Waiting for Godot' Review: Cue the Air Guitar/Jamie Lloyd’s pristinely chic Broadway revival of the existential tragicomedy casts the 'Bill & Ted' stars Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter as Samuel Beckett’s clowns" (NYT).

The idea here was to have Bill and Ted play the Didi and Gogo in "Waiting for Godot," and won't fans pack the theater to see that? Isn't that how things are done on Broadway these days? I have a sense of exhaustion, futility and despair in the face of that relentlessly brutal world.

Anyway, here's the painting — "Two Men Contemplating the Moon" — that Beckett said inspired him to write the play:

Is it hard to accept a tunnel instead of a tree and the the moon? A tunnel is sort of like a moonscape, what with the light at the end of it — moonish, no?

Here's that photo I took last March that made me think of a "Godot" set:

And here's one Meade sent me from Presque Isle 2 months later:

The tree is important!

"Keanu Reeves plans to begin his Broadway career in the fall of 2025, opposite his longtime 'Bill & Ted' slacker-buddy Alex Winter in 'Waiting for Godot,' the ur-two-guys-being-unimpressive tragicomedy."

I'm reading "How Hollywood Glamour Is Reviving the Endangered Broadway Play/George Clooney, Robert Downey Jr., Denzel Washington and Mia Farrow are coming to Broadway, where some producers see plays with stars as safer bets than musicals" (NYT).

Just yesterday, I was scanning the New York theater listings, hoping to find things worth seeing next time I make it to New York, and "Waiting for Godot" caught my eye, because I've been a big fan of the play ever since I happened to see it on TV — the Zero Mostel/Burgess Meredith production — when I was a teenager. Then I saw this new production had Keanu Reeves, and my real-time reaction was "I’m a little afraid of Keanu Reeves fans ruining the audience."

From the NYT article:

"I’ve been thinking about aging a lot lately because of Keanu Reeves and his rumored girlfriend, who is 46 and has gray hair."

"She’s gorgeous, of course, but the fact that she doesn’t dye her hair has caused an absolute cataclysm online. Everyone’s been congratulating Keanu on his age-appropriate date, — only nine years younger than him! So different from Leonardo DiCaprio! Some people have also confused her for Helen Mirren, which is somewhat reasonable because they do look alike, but also horrifying because Helen Mirren is 74. This supports my long-standing theory, developed the minute I turned 35, that people under the age of 35 think of all people over the age of 35 as 'old.' Once someone has crossed that barrier, it doesn’t matter if she’s 46 or 74 — the point is that she is not young.... I wish this were not the case, but I’m a little freaked out about turning 39. I liked being 35, right in the middle. Because let’s be honest — what we’re talking about, when we’re talking about women and aging, is losing status. Just by staying alive over the next decades, just by not dying, my value is going to drop. What a raw deal! It’s going to happen to me, and if you’re a woman, it’s going to happen to you, and it already happened to Alexandra Grant, which is why we’re all so proud of Keanu, a man with so much status, for allegedly dating her anyway."

From "Keanu Reeves’s Lady Friend Has Given Me the Courage to Turn 40" by Izzy Ginspan — which is a fantastic name for a humorist — in New York Magazine.

In a far less comic mode but on the same subject enough to keep me from making a separate post, here's Francine Prose, the 72-year-old novelist, in "Cruel jokes about the old are everywhere. When will we face our ageism epidemic?/We tolerate mockery of the elderly that we’d never allow if it targeted another group. But we’ll all be old one day" (at The Guardian):

It’s unsurprising that animosity toward the elderly has been profitably commodified... [T]he phrase “OK Boomer” is “Generations Z’s ... retort to the problem of older people who just don’t get it.” OK Boomer now appears on phone cases, stickers, pins, and sweatshirts and on a range of products that say, “OK boomer, have a terrible day.” “‘If they do take it personally’,” according to one 17-year-old quoted in the piece, “‘it just further proves that they take everything we do as offensive.’” And yet one wonders if the public would be quite so amused by a logo that said: “OK Jews, have a terrible day.” Given the losses and infirmities that so often accompany age, don’t the elderly have enough bad days without being told to have more?

The accepted explanation and justification for all this is that the old have ruined things for the young... [but] I think that the animosity toward the old is less economic than existential, less political than primal, less about student debt than about fear of one’s own ageing.... What’s striking is that the prejudice against the elderly is the only bigotry directed at the inevitable future of the bigot. Few misogynists, I imagine, fear that they eventually will turn into women, nor do racists worry that the passing decades will radically alter their ethnicity and the color of their skin. But the young will get old, if they’re lucky....

Maybe we can talk the young out of their mockery and aversion by telling them they're attacking their own future selves and magnifying their own fear of aging. I would add that we Boomers in our youth were very cruel to those who were older. We had the slogan "Never trust anyone over 30." Confront the young of today with the idea that they're acting like we did in our time. If you don't like what we are, you'd better work on being something else. And that goes right along with the cancel-culture fastidiousness about any mockery or aversion to any traditionally discriminated against group. Be that, kids, and manifest nothing but the celebration of diversity that includes the old people. OK, Zoomer?

"Sometimes you feel like an animal in a cage. But in Los Angeles, no one cares."

"There’s definitely paparazzi chasing after you, but I don’t go out much, I don’t really do anything. I’m pretty boring."

Said Keanu Reeves, quoted in "Keanu Reeves Admits He’s A Lonely Guy And Says, 'I Don’t Have Anyone In My Life'" (a "7 min read" at Bright Feed).

"And who’s this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe?/That’s tiny baby Adolf, the Hitlers’ little boy!"

Wrote the poet Wislawa Szymborska.

And who's this dashing young man?



(The book.)

IN THE COMMENTS: Bob says he's "pretty enough for Che-style t-shirt immortality." Lindsey is ready to cast the Keanu Reeves in the movie version.

So what have you been watching on TV lately?

You may have noticed I haven't been saying much about television lately. American Idol ended, and Joe Schmo was too tedious to watch. (After they decided to tone things down to cool the suspicions of one of their dupes, what was the point? The dupes believe they are on a reality show, so what's funny if the actors are acting like regular contestants on a reality show--other than that, because it's on Spike TV, the games are more sexual?) I've even stopped watching The Daily Show, and I'd been a devotée ever since Jon Stewart took over, before the 2000 election. (I just got tired of him laughing at everything that seemed to be going badly in Iraq, acting like Bush is inherently a joke, and not bothering to disguise his hostility toward guests that attempt to take the other side--especially, recently, Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard). And Dennis Miller is irking me from the other direction. (Cheering over the video of L.A. police beating a man who had obviously surrendered was just disgusting.)

So what am I watching? I'm keeping up with the new season of "Six Feet Under." I think George is sending the boxes of excrement to himself. It's clearly not Arthur, who, as Television Without Pity notes, was off buying a suit when the new package of poo arrived. I think it's George because he has had the motive and opportunity. Also, he completely underreacts when a package of crap is opened a couple feet away from him. "Six Feet Under" has its longueurs. I don't find anything interesting in the relationship between David and Keith. Both characters are incredibly bland. I can't help liking Lauren Ambrose: did you see her when she was on the Isaac Mizrahi Show and sang "God Bless the Child"? It was unbelievably good. I like the Arthur character. And I like Rachel Griffiths. The Ruth character--I don't know, how many times can an older woman break out of her repression? After the second or third time, it ought to be ridiculous. But Frances Conroy is so good, the plot line can survive a few extra recyclings.

For some reason, I've been soaking up an excess of dead body material. In addition to "Six Feet Under," I've been watching the HBO "Autopsy" series (on HBO on demand). And the other day, we needed to agree on a movie, and we decided on the old 80s movie "River's Edge," which has a lot to do with a dead body lying on a river bank. "River's Edge" was a big deal in its time: it showed how American society was on the verge of collapse because all humanity had drained out of everyone (except perhaps one drop remaining in Keanu Reeves). But here it is 16 years later, so its predictive value is gone. (Yay! We didn't go straight to hell!) We were saying things like "This movie hates poor people" and "This movie hates young people" and "When are they going to stop just driving around?" and "Where the hell are they supposed to be going now?" and "Is this thing ever going to end?" But you should see the unique performance of Crispin Glover in his prime. And it's the perfect choice if you want to wallow in 80s-style sordidness. The sets are perfect expressions of woeful misery. And there are some memorable lines, like: "I quit being a mother. It's just not worth it!"

Last night I watched the movie I couldn't get agreement on the other night, "Russian Ark." Here the question becomes not "When are they going to stop just driving around?" but "When are they going to stop just floating around?" The film is largely a technical stunt, a single shot 90 minutes long, floating through the rooms and halls of The Hermitage in St. Petersburg. We see a lot of art and costumery and try to absorb various references to Russian history. Is it arty enough? Could it be more arty? The word arty was invented for this sort of thing. My favorite movie is "My Dinner With André," which is testament to the fact that I don't need a story or any action, but I found it impossible to stave off boredom. Yes, there are some beautiful images, and the technical achievement can be marvelled at (how all the thousands of actors hit their marks and two orchestras played their pieces flawlessley--or at least appeared to), but my advice is to save this for a time when you want a purely dreamy experience. The term "moving picture" is unusually apt.