By SUBMITTED BY BOBBIE LANHAM
Waiting for Godot, the next play offered at the Shelby County Community Theatre, includes six shows, April 12-21. The play is directed by Clint Gill and stars Ken Billings, Gabe Morrow, John Richeson, David Neil Cook and Drew Newton.
Tickets for Waiting for Godot are available at the website, shelbytheatre.org. Although tickets for Friday, April 12 are sold out, other tickets are available.
Director Clint Gill is no stranger to the Community Theatre. He has directed other plays, including Frankenstein, Crimes of the Heart, A Christmas Story and As You Like It. Gill says of Waiting for Godot, “At the time it was written, there was nothing like it.”
Author Samuel Beckett was born in Ireland in 1906. He studied modern languages at Trinity College, Dublin. In the late 1920s, he moved to Paris where he met James Joyce and other writers of new and experimental works. With the coming of World War II Beckett was a member of various resistance movements. After the war, he wrote the play as an experimental commentary. In 1956, the play opened in Miami to mixed reviews. It opened to more positive reviews in New York City. Beckett received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. He died in 1989.
Gill encourages audience members to view Godot like abstract art. “As perspectives in abstract art, it (the play) is very subjective. Be moved by the language.” Gill is confident the play will entertain the audience. “We feel it’s important to challenge ourselves and our audiences.”
Estragon is played by Ken Billings. He has done other plays at the community theater, including Tartuffe and A Christmas Story. He teaches at Martha Lane Collins High School. About Waiting for Godot, Billings said he wants the “audience to enjoy…laugh and have a good time. Bring your sense of humor.”
Vladimir is played by Gabe Morrow. “This is not the type of play you expect a community theater to do.” The play relies heavily on the challenge of dialogue, physicality and interpretation by actors and audience. Morrow says he is eager to accept the challenge. He teaches at Anderson County High School.
Pozzo is played by David Neil Cook. Lucky is played by John Richeson. The young boy is played by Drew Newton.
Cook, who plays Pozzo, a landowner, hopes audience members will see the “play is about what existing means and what relationships mean.”
One of the highlights of the play is the five-minute speech by the character Lucky, played by Richeson. The speech moves like stream of consciousness through politics, religion and history. Richeson feels it is “like a confusing dream with jumbled ideas and emotions.”
Dr. Jonathan Allison, Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, includes Waiting for Godot in his class on Modernists. “It’s really not so much a play about Godot — whoever he may be — but is a play about waiting.”
The play is presented in the upstairs venue at the theater.
