His cool hamminess naturally enslaves and engulfs the braying, tic-like demeanor of the predominantly silent Lucky. Trotter, still a fresh-to-the-stage thespian, more than holds his own with his veteran costars. As soon as he enters the quartered Zoom stage, his stateliness fills all four squares. There is a haughtiness to Trotter’s wide, toothy grin, and his record-scratching lyrical patter is irresistible. This becomes all the more apparent when Vlad and Go Go happen on to the erudite, enslaving Pozzo (portrayed with icy, rhythmic grace by Trotter of The Roots) and the enslaved, rubber-faced Lucky (Shawn). When Leguizamo and Hawke trade chapeaux, scratch their imaginary bowlers and make Stan Laurel faces, it’s as if we’re transferred to a silent film comedy.īy keeping Beckett’s characters in (in)convenient squares, and occasionally pandemic-masked, director Elliott quietly explodes the deepest roots of Vladimir and Estragon’s intertwining isolationism while heightening mankind’s distance from each other and its absolute universality. Yet their movements are fluid, gently intrinsic extensions of each man’s personality (as well as their characters’ ever-present psychic quarantine), rather than mawkish improvisational studies. How John Ridley Is Helping Bring Off Broadway to Screens Sun Valley Film Festival to Honor Ethan Hawke, Shaka King and Gal Gadot Sun Valley Film Festival Trots Out Socially Conscious Fare: 'Impact With Gal Gadot' and 'The Good Lord Bird' When Estragon speaks of a life of compartments with no lack of a void, Leguizamo all but reaches out to mime the invisible wall - but masterfully pulls back, and doesn’t make the void so readily attainable. Mostly that minor-case freneticism comes from Hawke playing Vladimir as a junior league, dude-abiding Lebowski – one more caffeinated than White Russian-soaked - and Leguizamo playing Estragon as a quirkily humorous bug with tender but twitching eyes, and just a hint of the dancer about him. That Beckett’s holy/unholy chatter resembles the idiomatic colloquial-ness and cheer of longtime acquaintances (rather than the staid staginess we’ve seen in previous versions) helps the cast give off the vibe of lost Gen X-ers, now in their 50s, walking briskly toward an ever-dimming future. For this smart, lockdown-era, streaming iteration of Samuel Beckett’s show about nothing - and also everything, perhaps, and electric alienation for sure - director Scott Elliott and his tramps Ethan Hawke, John Leguizamo, Tarik Trotter and Wallace Shawn play the absurd theater classic “Waiting for Godot” as a low-lit, (mostly) subtle series of daft conversations that touch on everything from carrots and turnips to slavery, man’s inability to see, God’s unwillingness to show up, smelly feet and smellier breath.
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