Just-right production of 'Waiting for Godot'

EgoPo's Beckett festival ends with a big and brilliant bang:

Waiting for Godot

, the famous 20th-century play, in a charming, playful, and unpretentious production. Samuel Beckett's tragicomedy often becomes too clownish or too grim or too weirdly high-concept; at the risk of sounding like Goldilocks, this one is just right.

Under Brenna Geffers' smart and crisp direction (she is brave and persuasive in taking the script's long pauses), the surprisingly young and very accomplished cast delivers the goods.

Two men, Vladimir (the excellent Ross Beschler) and Estragon (Robert DaPonte) hang around day after day, waiting for someone named Godot to keep his appointment before nightfall. To date, he has not turned up. Each night the disappointing news arrives via the Boy (Julian Cloud), here not the usual child but a creepy person of indeterminate age and sexuality.

Didi and Gogo are tormented by endless waiting, lack of sleep, boots that hurt, and hats that irk; they struggle with the cruelties of the outside world and with the boredom of daily life, habit being the "great deadener" that it is. But, heroic copers that they are, they invent ways to pass the time: they eat, they exercise, they reminisce, they forget, they argue, they make up, they put clothes on and take them off, they fantasize about suicide, they sing. Their friendship is palpable.

Just when things seem desperate ("I can't go on"), two more guys show up: pompous Pozzo (the impressive Charlie DelMarcelle) and his put-upon servant, Lucky (Doug Greene in a startlingly original interpretation of the role), who carries bags and recites a long, wild philosophic rant.

When they return in Act Two, Pozzo is blind and Lucky is dumb: "That's how it is on this bitch of an Earth." Time passes, bringing suffering, hope, and disappointment. But mainly repetition. Again. As Beckett famously said when asked why the play had two acts: "Three would have been too many and one would have been too few."

Though the youthful cast's references to age seem incongruous, they are charming and nimble, and they handle this very physical production's vaudevillian choreography with style and grace.

Production values are clever and dazzling: Dan Soule's white arena, with a black tree and black rock, is lit with warmth and sly humor by Matt Sharp. Brian Strachan's costumes are witty, and the tension between presence and silhouette is both eye-catching and meaningful.

Godot endures. Play it again, Sam.

Presented by EgoPo Classic Theater at the Latvian Society, 531 N. 7th St., at Spring Garden Street. Through March 28. Tickets $15-30. Information: 1-800- 595-4849 or www.egopo.org.

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