Roundabout Theatre Company (Todd Haimes, Artistic Director) announced that John Goodman (Pozzo) and David Strathairn (Lucky) will join Bill Irwin (Vladimir) and Nathan Lane (Estragon) in a new Broadway production of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett and directed by Tony® award winner Anthony Page.
Waiting for Godot will begin previews on Friday, April 10th, 2009 and open officially on Thursday, April 30th, 2009 at Studio 54 on Broadway (254 West 54th Street). This will be a limited engagement.
The cast will also include Matthew Schechter (Boy). The design team includes Santo Loquasto (Sets), Jane Greenwood (Costumes) and Peter Kaczorowski (Lights).
Waiting for Godot remains Samuel Beckett's most magical and beautiful allegory. The story revolves around two seemingly homeless men waiting for someone - or something - named Godot. Vladimir (Bill Irwin) and Estragon (Nathan Lane) wait near a tree on a barren stretch of road, inhabiting a drama spun from their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes and nonsense, which has been interpreted as a somber summation of mankind's inexhaustible search for meaning.
Tony® Award winner Bill Irwin returns to Roundabout Theatre Company for the first time since directing and starring in his adaptation of Scapin in1997 and directing George Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear in 1998, both at the Laura Pels Theatre. Two-time Tony® Award winner Nathan Lane returns to Roundabout following the production of The Man Who Came to Dinner (2000) at the American Airlines Theatre. Tony® Award-winning director Anthony Page most recently directed Bill Irwin in his Tony® Award-winning performance of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and returns to Roundabout having directed Inadmissible Evidence in 1981 and The Caretaker in 1982.
A cornerstone of twentieth Century Theatre, Waiting for Godot was Samuel Beckett's first professionally produced play. It premiered in Paris in 1953 and premiered on Broadway in 1956 at the John Golden Theatre. Beckett's language pioneered an expressionistic minimalism that captured the existentialism of post-World War II Europe.
