Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2008 - (Page 96) Waiting for Godot while waiting in New Orleans Under a tent in a darkened, overgrown neighborhood, I scoop bowlfuls of rice and hand the bowls to the British kid next to me, who tops the rice with gumbo and hands a bowl to person after person in a line of hundreds. Mosquitoes hover outside the tent, but candles and bug spray keep them away from us. I cannot see the end of the line, nor where the people go after they leave the circle of light. There is a barrier about 40 yards away which they cannot yet pass, though anticipation builds as a brass band prepares to march. This is no refugee camp, but the prelude to theater. We stand in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, but no one huddles on a rooftop, nor hammers at new frames, nor tears out the innards of wasted homes. Instead, the mood is celebratory, the event so extreme in its simultaneous defiance and embrace of the present situation that all are emboldened, infected with a feeling that we should march and applaud. The crowd is huge, with between 700 and 1,000 waiting to get in, with actual room for an audience of 300. Most likely, tonight marks the highest population in this neighborhood at any one time in two years. As I pass bowls to those in line — the bouncy children and the infirm, the hip spectator and the exiled resident, the wary and the eager — I wonder how they all got here, from where, and why. Conceived and steered by the artist Paul Chan, the outdoor productions of Waiting for Godot in the flooded neighborhoods of the Lower Ninth Ward and Gentilly, over two weekends in November of 2007, was not simply the artistic event of the year in New Orleans, but a litmus test and perhaps even a portent. What it forecasts is dependent on the people of the city. However, the results of the test show the inverted nature of life here, the way so much of the pre-storm world is now flipped upside down, or rather spun like a compass so wobbly that we reject the coordinates and find an identity in that loss. Because of that unsettled condition, the realization of a site-specific work of existentialist theater is as powerful and troubling a performance spectacle as any we’ve witnessed here in the last two years. In the tent, I scoop and pass, scoop and pass, greeting every other person with a “how y’all doing?” followed by the thanks, followed by the British kid’s “you’re welcome,” which we agree can be alternated with “No sweat,” “You bet,” or the stage-Brit-speak of “cheers!” When the line ends, a lone police officer walks up and accepts the final bowl. As the stage crew begins a relieved discussion, another volunteer and I sneak off to the end of a second line parade. The Rebirth Brass Band leads the crowd through the space between two sets of bleachers. The band continues to play as the audience settles in, then marches down the makeshift aisle, in front of the crowd. The song ends, people howl, and then the band disappears into the night. A voice through loudspeakers introduces a man from the community and he gives his blessing to the production and remembers those that died. And then Waiting for Godot begins. Briefly: To do Waiting for Godot is not to do uplift, romance, history, tangential, local, or chance. Waiting for Godot involves lack of control, the indistinguishable character of life’s moments, enslavement, pointlessness, the better option of bullshitting with your friend and waiting. Not doing, but waiting. Not to be saved, for there is nothing to be saved from. Not by another, either, since his only promise is to show up, not to deliver the message or a solution. This play offers no prescription, and that is fine. It offers damnation. It offers futility. It offers yet another night. On the way to the bleachers at the tail end of the second line, I think, “Well, get ready, y’all, ‘cause now here comes Beckett and Beckett is a real punch in the face.” Didi: Where else do you think? Do you not recognize the place? The very specificity of the site seems to work against the text. We do not ask, “Where are we?” because we know. We know now that we’ve come here to the Lower Ninth Ward, know that we’ve shown our intent. We know that. Over there is the canal; there, the silhouette of a bridge, the pink sky familiar and ever-vanishing. At no time would we ask, “Is this the place?” But do we recognize it? Oh, yes — the name The Lower Ninth Ward is large print and world famous at this point. Doomed to haunt history books in the chapter, “Late Evening of the American Experiment,” this neighborhood could not be more specific. Against the play’s spatial waiting — a limbo in which the characters don’t know their way and grasp for the distinguishing features — the weight of this site’s unique condition is unyielding. Yet to say we recognize this Lower Ninth Ward is invalid, unless we work or live here today. Physically, but also in our society’s life, in the places not-open, in the unsureness of house and home, in the missing and the unfamiliar, the entire city is utterly changed. No one is as lost, more lost in America than we are in today’s New Orleans. The once rich, overburdened slate is swept clean. We are adrift in the distinctive, peculiar insecurity of this present. One slice of ingenuity of this Godot was the decision to hold the first weekend in the Lower Ninth Ward, and the second in Gentilly, the slightly suburban, more recently constructed neighborhood that suffered just as terribly, if not as visibly in the national/historical/cause célèbre eye. The two sites cover both the desolation at the play’s center and the half-forms of its speech and events. Where are we? We know … no we don’t know … no, well, we knew …who knows? As an audience we must be humble enough to recognize the myopia of our outlook, the way the storm and the aftermath shape our critical faculties and judgments. One of the joys of the play was its alien quality, the fact we couldn’t compare it to “pre-Katrina.” At the same time, we received this play because and through the lens of Katrina, and we should value the scratches and clear spots of that lens if we are to trust our vision in the continuing fog. “Abandoned, unfinished!” Like the levee before us and the ground around us, New Orleans was abandoned before the storm to its own devices, and the solution after the storm remains unfinished and torturous and no one is riding in to save us. The State recedes, tripping over its laces and humming the anthem, Pozzo-like in its bloodied garments and blinded eyes. And so this Godot departs, leaving behind its uncanny imprint on the scarred, ever-shifting landscape. Brian Boyles is Executive Manager at the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. 96 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Spring 2008
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