Wet Bank Guide

"Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be?"
-- Vladimir in Act II of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot

By the time we arrived almost two hours before the show was to start, all of the tickets for the Classical Theater of Harlem's outdoor production of Waiting for Godot were long gone. We decided not to wait around under the tree at Pratt and Robert E. Lee, but instead withdrew for more drinks, starting back on the porch at Chez Folse and ending at the Circle Bar for Gal Holiday.

I heard (from someone else who asked last night) that there would be no Sunday show added as there was the first weekend. So tonight instead of seeing Becket's play, I am--after a prolonged episode of absurdist, existential angst in my friend's club level seats at the Dome--reduced to watching bits of video.

I read the script through this week during a business trip. There is something essential in it to the current experience of so many in New Orleans, the discovery that we are not suffering from post traumatic stress disorder because we are not past the thing but instead in the very midst of it, in a landscape and a plot as bleak and confusing as Beckett's, on a road of dubious prospects in a landscape swept clear of familiar geography and of hope, no prospect that over a hill or beyond a wood there is something different, something better.

Nothing to be done.

And yet we came in the hundreds last Saturday night, over a thousand; turning our back on the well-lit streets of the sliver by the river, forgoing the restaurants of Magazine and the lively nightclubs of Frenchman to go to the edge of the empty zone to try, at least, to sit through this difficult work, a comedy as black as the streets were for months in this part of town, as dark as the windows remain in so many of the empty brick boxes that line the streets. We came because all of us are so like these characters, lost in a landscape from which familiar references have been erased, clinging to the one thing that keeps us all from dropping over the brink: each other. We know Godot will not save us, that the Pollos of the world care not a whit for how we fare or fail.

The carefully crafted fictions Americans erected like the pyramids were all swept away from this place by the flood, were taken from us as the Great Wars of the 20th Century destroyed the illusions of Beckett's generation. We have peered into the abyss, an abyss where many waded or swam in desperation and too many drowned, while the newsreaders stood puzzled on dry streets and the relief trucks stopped at the edge of town, waiting for word that it was safe to come, waiting for instructions from Godot. We were not ignored or abandoned by America. Instead we were force fed the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and were driven out of the garden of mass marketing, ashamed of not of our own but of America's nakedness. We have peered into that abyss and come away filled with uncertainly and angst, equally incapable of trust in god or government. What is left? What reason is there to live here, to live at all?

And still we come home, even as we came to see Godot. The ticket rules of the prior week were changed without announcement, more were turned away than admitted, a sullen confusion hung over the disappointed. I left the site of the play not confused but reminded of the life we have found here, of the fitness of this text for our stage. We left the performance, but we can no more leave this place, this city than these characters can hang themselves: not because we are incapable, but instead because it is beyond our human nature to surrender this life we call New Orleans. Perhaps Godot will come. Just as likely he will not. All we can be certain of is ourselves: Sinn Fein. In the end, however bleak the scene, we will not give up hope.

VLADIMIR: Well? Shall we go?

ESTRAGON: Yes, let's go.

They do not move.

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