Waiting for Godot as an Impatient Schoolgirl

Seventeen and Catholic, I knew how to wait.

Palms pressed together, head bowed, I waited for Christ to return. I waited for Melissa to finish her eyeliner, for Matt to notice me. But the most exquisite anticipation, year after year, was waiting to find out what the school play would be.

In my senior year, there was a spectacular bit of theater drama: The cast list for the annual One Act play was tacked to the call board, and my name was on it. But no show had been announced, just five names printed on a white piece of paper. To the small group of us to whom the One Act play mattered desperately, speculation became an extracurricular activity. Someone suggested that the play would be a condensed version of The Diviners. Perhaps it would be Twelve Angry Men—with doubling. Maybe The Crucible, but we’d play both the accusers and the accused.

What we wanted most was one of the Greeks. “Medea, can you imagine?” We’d be on par with the public schools then. The public schools did real plays about alcoholism and the Vietnam War. A private Catholic school, our One Act plays were usually a series of slapstick vignettes. Scenes of lust and murder and war and betrayal were not ours to put on.

I prayed. “Please, dear God, don’t let it be a whodunit written specifically for high school students.” “Please, please God, don’t let it be a comedy set in a supermarket with a title like The Terrible Truth About Tuna Fish.” I had turned to theater in part because I had only one life, and it was being lived in the body of Catholic schoolgirl. I wanted to live again and again, to experience so much. The book of Psalms said, “My days are like an evening shadow; I wither away like grass.” Life would be short, but I was alive in a body that knew hunger, and theater felt like a permission to trespass. In the scenes we put on in drama club (if not in our full productions), there was kissing and divorce and rage and death. We could be so near our own unruly natures.

At an all-school mass, I sat on blue plastic risers in the gymnasium and tugged at my skirt, trying to focus on the miracle taking place. This was a time in my life when I believed fervently in a loving God, when I wanted to be obedient, and obedience meant waiting. Being able to live in a state of anticipation was not only an expectation of my faith; it was a way to embody a love for Jesus. God offered me life eternal, and I in return could give my patience, my trust in His perfect timing.

But even as I watched the priest venerate the altar with a kiss, I held a biting wish to know what it might feel like to be Eve cast out of paradise, what it might feel like to be anything other than what I was, a babysitter obsessing over the absence of anyone outside her bedroom window. Inwardly, I was contending with a sense of urgency for life that I didn’t know what to do with.

As I prayed at mass, I meant to ask God for patience. But as soon as my eyes closed, I found myself begging that He in His almighty wisdom would make Matt fall in love with me—or maybe just look over his shoulder in my direction—when I felt an elbow digging into my ribcage. Brigid stood beside me and cocked her head toward Alice, who was mouthing the words Check. Your. Phone.

My backpack sat on the floor between my feet. I reached into the front pocket, and there on my Nokia was a message: I know the show.

After a moment, my phone vibrated again: It’s . . . Waiting for Godot.

*

At home that afternoon, I opened AOL Instant Messenger, set my away message to carefully chosen Stephen Schwartz lyrics, and began a cursory internet search for Godot, which turned up terms like “Theatre of the Absurd,’’ mentions of the Cold War and homoeroticism, and controversy over what the play might be saying about religious themes.

I messaged Alice: What? Is? Happening? I’d prepared myself to spend weeks wearing wings and a weird headpiece in a comedy about flies coming to terms with their life expectancy. Something silly. Something we could perform for elementary school students. Waiting for Godot seemed like an impossibility.

Written by Irish author and playwright Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot premiered in Paris in 1953. A pair of tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, spend the entirety of the two-act tragicomedy beside a bare tree waiting for a man called Godot. “Let’s go,” Estragon says. But they don’t go anywhere, afraid the enigmatic man they wait for might arrive after all. “Nothing to be done.” They hope Godot will deliver them from the futility of their days.

My only previous encounter with the play came from Sesame Street’s Monsterpiece Theater in a segment called “Waiting for Elmo,” which aired in 1992 when I was five years old. Cookie Monster introduces the piece by saying that it is “a play so modern and so brilliant, it makes absolutely no sense.”

A message from Alice: We’re the only seniors in the cast. So . . .

I wrote back: Vladimir and Estragon?

She sent back a series of exclamation points.

This was a play I imagined I could understand. High school felt like a stasis. We waited for messages and emails. We waited in the hallway in the morning, our backs against blue lockers. I was past the stage of being given pamphlets labeled “Help! Is This My Body?!” Out of childhood, but stuck in painful limbo and grasping at gestures toward adulthood. I made my avatar on The Sims kiss everyone. I regularly threw myself across my floral bedspread in dramatic fashion to weep the way I thought grown women might. Adolescence felt like a string of denied desires on top of perpetual craving for things I couldn’t yet articulate. I was all frustration and lip gloss.

A message from Alice: “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful.” That’ll be one of your lines and you’ll be the best at saying it.

*

On the afternoon of our first rehearsal, the five members of the One Act cast sat in a serious circle on the floor of the dance studio. The Godot rumor had spread, and we were all wearing shades of gray and black without any irony.

A tall woman, our visiting guest director, entered the studio carrying black binders with scripts inside, five of them. I listed Beckett’s five characters in my head: Vladimir, Estragon, Pozzo, Lucky, a Boy. We folded our hands in our laps and straightened our backs.

I’d already begun imagining Alice and me: a pair of seventeen-year-old girls in well-worn bowler hats and dusty overcoats. Our faces would perhaps be paled with clown white and our bodies would swim in dirty suits too big for our frames. We would struggle with ill-fitting shoes and play off each other beautifully with bits of physical comedy, a teenage vaudeville.

But something was wrong in the director’s face. It was pinched, and she smiled tightly as she said hello and handed out the binders. On the front of each, in thick black letters, were the words All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Alice looked at me with wide, panicked eyes.

This was a play I imagined I could understand. High school felt like a stasis. 

“I haven’t had time to assign parts yet,” the director said. “There were some last-minute changes. I’ll just . . . make some decisions as we go.” The play was a revue made up of monologues, skits, and songs. It was meant to be heartwarming. We read it through our teeth.

The next day, I followed Alice’s car to Waffle House, where we sat side by side in the blessed and sticky booth, sharing her earbuds and an order of hash browns (scattered and smothered), listening to Dashboard Confessional on an iPod Shuffle, and pouting.

“It’s got suicide and erections,” she said. “That’s why the administration pulled it. That’s my guess.”

I pursed my lips, thinking. “Can’t they cut that stuff? This play is . . . important, right? We could make a case for it. Tell them it would . . . broaden our minds?” I pushed a forkful of potatoes into my mouth.

She shook her head. “No. And anyway, I saw online—the Beckett people? They sue anyone who does the show with people who aren’t . . . men.” This was—and still is—true. The Beckett estate is notoriously litigious, suing companies that cast women or nonbinary performers in Godot against the dead playwright’s will.

There would be no earnest conversations with the administration. It would have been a hopeless endeavor, and we knew it.

Being denied Godot felt like a strange humiliation. Who knew better than us high schoolers about waiting? That evening, angry, I searched for the text of the play online, reading snatches of it in a frenzy before closing the tab quickly and deleting my browser history. I’d grown up in an environment in which the will of authority figures was something close to the will of God. If the school administration didn’t want me near this play, then surely God didn’t either. Not yet. Not until I was in possession of greater spiritual maturity. I had to remind myself, again and again, that to delay an action was holy. It demonstrated a willingness to endure.

In my bedroom, I found myself listening to Paula Cole’s “I Don’t Want to Wait” on repeat. After the third time through, I turned to my youth-study Bible. Luke 12:36: “And be like men who are waiting for their master to come home from the wedding feast, so that they may open the door to him at once when he comes and knocks.” But I did not want to be the waiting men. I wanted to be the wedding. I wanted to be the feast.

This continued for weeks—the illicit opening of the internet browser and searching waiting for Godot full text play, then click, and suddenly Beckett’s words were in my mouth: “Hope deferred maketh the something sick, who said that?” This is a question Vladimir asks, and I knew the answer: Proverbs 13:12. “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.”

Rehearsals for the One Act progressed, and instead of building Beckett’s skeletal tree, we put together a small play structure on wheels that tipped precariously when someone pumped their legs too hard on the swing. We wore our hair in braided pigtails and had matching bright T-shirts and colorful sneakers. All this time, waiting to grow up, and we were playing children.

*

Onstage at the Georgia High School Association One Act Play State Championships, we refused to feel the palpable boredom of the audience and instead gave absolutely everything of ourselves in the performance of Kindergarten. The time would come for other plays. After all, as Saint Augustine said, “The entire life of a good Christian is in fact an exercise of holy desire. You do not yet see what you long for, but the very act of desiring prepares you, so that when he comes you may see and be utterly satisfied.” Utter satisfaction, he said. We shall be filled, he said.

After the performance, there were many hours to wait while the other schools performed and the judges tallied their scores before the awards would be announced. I sat in a long corridor of a sprawling performing arts complex and watched packs of students skipping up and down the hall in matching T-shirts that were either emblazoned with cast and crew signatures on the back or said, I can’t, I have rehearsal. In a nearby bathroom, I could hear someone punctuating her vocal warm-up with bits of “Defying Gravity.” Everywhere, there were teens in little herds, playing Zip Zap Zop or adjusting the placement of mic tape or laughing in awkward and charged massage circles.

All this time, waiting to grow up, and we were playing children.

Across from me was a girl, the only other person by themselves. Sitting tucked beside the vending machine, she had dark hair and enviable eye makeup. I saw what she was reading and my heart thudded in my chest. I retrieved a crumpled dollar from my backpack and purchased a small bag of Twizzlers from the vending machine, lingering beside her. I pulled open the plastic and offered her a piece of red licorice, which she took.

“Thanks.”

“Has your show gone yet?” I asked.

She closed her book and a scowling man peered out: Samuel Beckett on the cover of a collection of his plays.

“They’re in there now. Kentucky Cycle. I’ve seen it a million times. I designed the set.”

“Can I . . . do you mind if I check out your book?”

She shrugged and handed it to me. Because I knew what was inside, this felt akin to touching a Ouija board or tarot deck or cigarette: like my soul was at stake. I imagined the bright, round faces of the virgin martyrs looking out from my prayer cards and shaking their heads in disapproval.

Opening the book and flipping to Godot, I held my breath and said a line aloud. “Our Saviour. Two thieves. One is supposed to have been saved and the other . . . damned.”

“Saved from what?” she said, smiling. It was a play she knew well. I read on.

“Hell,” I said.

“I’m going,” she said.

We each took bites of our candy, grinning.

“I’m applying to colleges with designs for Godot,” she said. “For scholarship stuff.”

I turned the pages, one after another, looking for a capitalized name. There was VLADIMIR, ESTRAGON, and the others beside the words they would speak. But—I kept flipping pages until I reached the final line—the name GODOT appeared nowhere. It didn’t matter that the character wasn’t listed among the dramatis personae. It hadn’t occurred to me that Godot would not come, that he would never arrive. All this holding off, and for what?

I handed her the book, then spun for a moment, looking for the exit.

“Oh, okay. See ya,” she said.

I walked out into the sunlight feeling like a caricature of revelation, like a Victorian woman recovering from a faint with smelling salts, as if my goth tech-girl fairy godmother was standing over me with a gentle reprimand, Be careful what you wait for. I had not understood that the gift of my restraint could be misplaced, that there was such a mistake as waiting misguidedly.

Sitting on a concrete ledge, I covered my face with my hands and heaved an angry groan into them before tearing the elastic bands from my hair and shaking out my braids.

To wait could be hallowed and pure, but it was not an inherently holy state. My youth-study Bible had many passages about discernment, and I was learning a new kind—when to offer my patience, and when to snatch the object of desire and make a run for it. If I did not wish my existence to be an exercise in endless anticipation, I needed to learn to make mutinous decisions, however small.

I returned to the lobby, my new friend still lounging by the vending machine.

“Hey, sorry, can we . . .” I shook my head. “Will you read this with me? Can we like . . . you take Estragon, and I take Vladimir? No one wants me to do this play, and I . . .”

She looked up at me with fierce, dark eyes that said, Fuck yeah. She moved her bag, and I sat beside her and leaned toward the book as she rested it on her bent knees. A country road. A tree. Evening. She handed the book to me and took her sneaker into her hands, pretending to try in vain to remove it from her foot.

“Nothing to be done.”

“I’m beginning to come round to that opinion.”

“We can skip this part,” she said. “It’s boring.”

She flipped a few pages in the book and handed me a Twizzler. For a moment, I was not heartsick, not stuck in hormonal nothingness. I was dizzy and bright and electric.

“Okay,” she said. “Here we are. Let’s go.”

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