Good morning.

Today, a play that baffled Miami audiences… and then found its perfect crowd inside a prison.

Let’s begin.

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The Play Broadway Missed and 1,400 Prisoners Got

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

S	an Quentin, California. November 19, 1957. About 1,400 inmates filed into the prison’s hall to watch a play most critics had already written off.

The play was Waiting for Godot, by the Irish writer Samuel Beckett. Two tramps wait by a bare tree for a man named Godot. He never comes. That is nearly the whole plot.

It had premiered in Paris in 1953 and caused a stir. Then came Miami, in 1956. The producers sold it as “the laugh sensation of two continents,” with the comic Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, in the lead. Many in the audience walked out. They had come for a farce.

“They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”

Pozzo, in Waiting for Godot

A troupe from San Francisco, the Actors’ Workshop, run by Herbert Blau and Jules Irving, took the play into San Quentin anyway. These were men serving long sentences. Waiting was their daily job.

Accounts of that night say the hall went still. Many men read Godot as freedom, or as the parole board, or as the outside world itself. Nobody had to explain the wait.

This is San Quentin, seen from above, where it happened.

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Aerial view of San Quentin State Prison, California

San Quentin State Prison, on San Francisco Bay, where the 1957 performance took place.

Samuel Beckett, Irish playwright and Nobel laureate

Samuel Beckett, who wrote the play in French first, then translated it himself.

One man in that hall never forgot it. Rick Cluchey was serving a life sentence for a robbery and kidnapping in Los Angeles. After the performance he started his own troupe, the San Quentin Drama Workshop, in 1958.

Governor Pat Brown commuted his sentence, and Cluchey went free in 1966. He took the troupe to Europe and kept performing Beckett. Beckett took notice. In the 1970s he directed Cluchey in Krapp’s Last Tape.

So a play that Broadway thought was a joke gave one convict a whole second career in the theatre.

The footage is worth ten minutes: Waiting for Godot at San Quentin →

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Three Things Worth Knowing

I	Art The Tree That Giacometti Built

For the 1961 Paris staging at the Odéon, directed by Roger Blin, the sculptor Alberto Giacometti made the set: one thin, bare tree. His stretched, hollowed figures fit the play’s mood exactly.

II	Literature Written in French First

Beckett was Irish, yet he wrote Godot in French and translated it into English himself. He is often quoted as saying French let him write “without style.”

III	Le Mot Juste Absurd

From the Latin absurdus, “out of tune.” The critic Martin Esslin used it in 1961 to name a whole school, “the Theatre of the Absurd,” with Beckett at its centre.

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Curious & Controversial

◆	When asked who Godot is, Beckett reportedly told the director Alan Schneider, “If I knew, I would have said so in the play.” Scholars have argued about it ever since.

◆	Beckett’s estate has often resisted productions that cast women in the main roles. Critics call the rule outdated. Supporters say the author’s wishes should stand.

◆	Was the 1956 Miami flop a failure of the play, or of the marketing? Calling it a comedy set the audience up to be angry. The prison crowd, who expected nothing, did far better.

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Connoisseur’s Diary

Worth Seeing This Week

Watch a full staging online. A good one is worth more than a bad night in a seat.

Where: YouTube, free. Tickets: none needed. Insider tip: watch Act 1 first, then read the pull-quote above again. It lands differently. Full play, Act 1 →

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