The Celebration Barn buddies: Al Miller, Fateh Azzam and Nat Warren-White.
BRUNSWICK — The Theater Project’s 2013-2014 season will open on Friday, Sept. 6, with “Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett, featuring several Theater Project favorites on stage, including Al Miller, Christopher Price, and Nat Warren-White.
Directed by Davis Robinson, founder and director of Boston’s Beau Jest Moving Theater and professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Bowdoin, “Waiting for Godot” has a cast of long-time friends and acquaintances.
Price, regular director and designer at The Theater Project and Portland, plays Lucky to Fateh Azzam’s Pozzo. Azzam worked with Tony Montanaro and Celebration Mime in the 1970s before moving to the human rights work which he has been doing in the Middle East and North Africa for over 30 years.
Warren-White, who worked with The Theater Project and Celebration Mime in the 1970s and early 1980s, and Miller, Theater Project founder who clowned with Warren-White “back in the day,” play the two tramps, Estragon and Vladimir.
“Waiting for Godot” opened at the Theatre de Babylone in Paris in 1953. Beckett, who was Irish but moved to France, wrote it in French and then translated it into English. When it was performed in Ireland, a critic for the Irish Times wrote that Beckett had “written a play in which nothing happens, twice.”
A few years ago, reviewing a London production featuring Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart as the two tramps, an English critic wrote: “‘Waiting for Godot’ seems to have a unique resonance during times of social and political crisis … it can appear bleak … but it is also funny and poetic and reveals humanity’s talents for stoicism.”
“Waiting for Godot” has been performed all over the world, often featuring famous actors of the times. Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin starred in a New York production, and the great comic actor and clown Bert Lahr also took it to the Broadway stage.
Susan Sontag directed a production in Sarajevo during the 1993 war, when citizens there were waiting for help — their Godot. It was performed in South Africa when African citizens were waiting for an end to apartheid. When a New York cast performed it in San Quentin prison, the inmates knew who Godot was, the person or resource they were waiting for.
The English playwright Tom Stoppard called the play “a universal metaphor,” and added that the play is “like a long poem … it has its own strength.” Others have said the same, that it is “like a beautiful poem or a beautiful piece of music.”
The Theater Project’s “Waiting for Godot” will be onstage Sept. 6-8, and Sept. 12-15. Performances are at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and at 2 p.m. Sundays, with the Thursday, Sept. 12 performance beginning at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are Pay-What-You-Want, available online at www.theaterproject.com, or by calling the box office at 207-729-8584. The Theater Project is at 14 School Street.
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