Kate Zambreno

"I wonder what Beckett would think about us opening on Valentine's Day," laughs John Jenkins. "I'm sure he would cringe."

The upcoming DePaul production of Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," directed by the performance chair of the Theatre School, coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the absurdist tragicomedy. Estragon and Vladimir are still waiting after all these years by the side of a country road. And you could say that Jenkins has been waiting for two decades to direct this play that he was once directed in by the playwright himself.

Incidentally, it's not pronounced "Ga-dough" but more like "God-ough," corrects the beret-wearing director in a stentorian tone, as we drink coffee at the plush new DePaul student center. "That's the way it would have been in French, and that was certainly the way they pronounced it in England," says Jenkins. He and his fellow American actors were corrected by the source himself during rehearsal for an international tour entitled "Beckett directs Beckett" in 1984.

Jenkins first ran into the legendary San Quentin Drama Workshop in the mid-seventies. The company was first introduced to theater when the San Francisco Actors Workshop performed "Godot" at the prison in the fifties, which had such a profound effect on the inmates that they started their own company. "This was an audience that knew about waiting. They knew what Godot was. It was getting out," says Jenkins. Their performances won so much national attention that leader Rick Cluchey's life sentence was eventually commuted and, outside of the walls, he turned the amateur troupe into a full-fledged company.

Jenkins met Cluchey in Chicago and worked with him on a production of Beckett's "Endgame" performed on the roof of a slum penthouse in Uptown. While Cluchey was on fellowship in Berlin, he met Beckett, who had heard about the productions of his plays in San Quentin. Beckett agreed to direct him in "Krapp's Last Tape," and then later in "Godot." Jenkins played Lucky, and then later Pozzo in the tour that originated in Australia; he eventually split the role with another actor as the job at DePaul had opened up.

Back when Jenkins was studying theater in the early sixties, "Waiting for Godot" was considered taboo acting material. He later saw a student production of it while doing graduate work at the University of Minnesota. The darkly comic purgatory of no exit had a cathartic effect on the young actor, the "humor of people against a wall." "I found the play intriguing--the profound effect it could have on an audience. We all become brothers and sisters in this problem of waiting for some kind of release from our situation." Jenkins also saw a Beckett-directed production on tour with the Schiller Theater in the mid-seventies.

"He was always an icon for me," Jenkins says of the Irish playwright. "I thought that his ability to talk about that inner conversation we have with our own selves and his ability to deal in some ways with the bones of life, I had never known a writer who could do that. He went after himself with such veracity."

What was it like, then, to be directed by the man himself? "His emotions were easy to read. When he liked something, it was clear, and when he didn't like something, it was clear. And you loved him so much you wanted to please him."

The production Jenkins was involved with would be the last one Beckett worked on, as he was suffering health problems and died five years later. The 78-year-old playwright made changes in the play during the weeks of rehearsal in London, both stylistic and rhythmic, like the night scenes, which Beckett directed to drag even more into monotony. "He had gotten older. I think his insight into the play had deepened," says Jenkins. As a director, Beckett insisted on just the right tone. "He knew the play so well, he knew the voices of the characters as if they weren't just things he had written down or shaped on paper but that he had heard them, you know? He knew what they sounded like, he knew who they were."

Still, it must be intimidating to relive the material of a master, especially when you have his notes always constantly in the mind's margins. "I keep remembering things, and sometimes I catch myself, thinking, no, no, you have to do it like this," Jenkins admits of preparing for the upcoming student production.

Fifty years later, does this postwar modernist work still have resonance for young actors today? Jenkins believes so. "I think that the time my generation read "Waiting for Godot," I think the stuff of existentialism was in the air, coming after World War II, that sense of the void and the necessity for human responsibility, sort of the absurdity of life. I think there's more of a return to that existentialist view. I sense a profound psychological change going on."

(2003-02-11)

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