Waiting For Godot: The Transformative Power of Theatre

_{Originally published by Dine Magazine. Republished with permission as part of Resident's editorial content exchange. All rights remain with the original publisher.}

Poets love the Spring. From Shakespeare’s “When daisies pied and violets blue…do paint the meadows with delight,” to Led Zeppelin’s “It is the springtime of my loving, the second season I am to know,” April showers are auspicious while the sun lingers ever longer.

As the first wave of flowers bloom and patio awnings unfurl, stage lights switch on, curtains rise up, and the season of live summer theatre begins anew. The immediacy of theatre is an inflection point of classic tales re-imagined by new voices to be heard for the first time. There is tradition and legacy; continuity that aggregates community. And as we settle into our seats, we anticipate the electricity of the world reflected upon us—to think, perchance to dream.

^{Asher Waxman talks with Antoni Cimolini, Artistic Director of the Stratford Festival, about his upcoming role as "The Boy" in Waiting for Godot, and the value of live theatre for kids.}

This year at the Stratford Festival, Waiting for Godot speaks to us all of that unmoored reality of which Chris Cornell once sang about feeling “lost, behind…As seasons roll on by.” From the election cycle to the gas pump, the endless wars and mounting walls, to the purgatory of the politics and the absurdity of it all. But, at the end of Act I, and of Act II, there, enters a boy, a messenger, an unwitting messiah—not speaking in parables but, himself, the embodiment of one. He is a mirror, reflecting the passage of time and the reminder of hope: that it’s never too late to crack that ice and fly, to be the masters of our own fate, rather than to sit in endless wait for a moment that may pass us by.

^{Tom McCamus and Paul Gross in Waiting For Godot}

The question that Samuel Beckett asks is: how does a broken world become whole? Maybe there is no answer—only interpretations and deliberations toward an eternal cycle of wandering from which the Buddhists seek escape. Maybe the answer lies in our youth. As the late Bobby Kennedy once said, “this world demands the qualities of youth; not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over a life of ease.”

Through live theatre, the Stratford Festival forces us to confront these questions in stories with recharged purpose, rejuvenating audiences and engaging younger audience members to participate in these conversations; to inspire their own dreams of the theatre, of life; to relish their own season of renewal and the poetry of their own Spring.

Waiting for Godot, directed by Molly Atkinson, runs from May 14 - July 31 at the Festival Theatre.