If you’ve ever seen Waiting for Godot, maybe you’ve been mystified by Lucky’s gibberish tirade halfway through Act One, an eight-minute speech that begins “Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua†and gets weirder from there. And if you’ve spent any time in a synagogue, maybe you’ve also been mystified by the droning chants of a self-dramatizing cantor, speak-singing in a language you don’t understand. Now you can be mystified by both together — and perhaps understand each a little better as well — as the New Yiddish Rep revives its world-premiere production of the authorized Yiddish translation of Beckett’s 1953 classic. We’ve provided a little video sample here.
Vartn af Godo (leave off the last t for tsuris) is not as unlikely a mash-up as it may at first seem. Beckett, who had been in the French Resistance, began writing the play around 1948, in part responding to the horrors of World War II; it takes no wrenching of the text to situate its action in a post-Holocaust landscape. He certainly had an interest in Jews; in early drafts, Estragon was named Levy. Regardless of Beckett’s Judaic intentions, the play seems natural in Yiddish, never more so than when Rafael Goldwasser, as Lucky, delivers his thousand-years-of-sorrow monologue. (In Yiddish, it begins: “Ongenumen in der svore di hevaye vi derklert in di efntlekhe verk fun Zetser un Voserman fun a perzenlekhn got kvakvakvakva mit a vayser bord kvakvakvakva.â€) As the translator Shane Baker (an Episcopalian from Kansas City who also plays Vladimir) says, “Who’s better at waiting than the Jews?â€
Vartn af Godo, in Yiddish with English supertitles, is at the Barrow Street Theatre (as part of the Origin Theatre Company’s “1st Irish 2014†Festival) September 4 through 21.