Under "Interlude" - final

That was the last interlude.



I wanted to end "Waiting for Gadot" with an explicit reference to Waiting for Godot. I think I put mine in quotes and the original in italics because my play is shorter and obviously nothing on the level of Samuel Beckett, haha! That said, yes, I wanted to return to the original. Perhaps a performance of this scene could open with a brief intermission where the Pozzo scene from Godot plays on a screen in front of the curtain and then Pompo emerges from it. Pompo, in his wig, has become Pozmo, a weird channeling of Pozzo, who is by and large a vile man in Godot, though finding men who are not vile in Beckett's work can be difficult. It's all relative, I guess.

The mistaken identity of Pozmo as Gadot echoes viewing Pozzo as Godot, though with an added element of gender. In Godot, it's Lucky, Pozzo's human on a leash, who is called "A trifle effeminate," which I transferred over to Pozmo to play with his confusion with Gadot. Lucky, Pozzo's slave, tied to him by a rope, is now a non-existent dog named Great (and you can imagine why). I wanted to play off "dog" as "god" backwards, both as a reference to the divine and to Godot, as both are largely invisible (i.e. the invisibility of gods [God?] in the modern world and the fact that Godot never shows up in his play). Pozmo's hand holding a leash with an invisible dog could also be an inversion of the invisible hand, if you want. Reader response theory, you make up what it means! ... Wait, is that reader response theory? Hope so.

So what happens in this interlude? Suddenly, the play becomes about more than just the characters. Pompo as Pozmo seems to have moved onto a new plane of existence (just realized how "plane" there is so weird) where he can acknowledge the audience. I don't know how to direct it, because it's a Catch-22 where the audience needs to do things without knowing what they are. I don't want it to feel rehearsed, because the whole point is to throw the audience off, to show them something they haven't seen before, but they need to know that this guy shouting at them to leave means they need to leave and yet, well, just go outside--not actually leave--and then they need to be, well, I think the play uses the word "herded" at one point? I'm not sure which episode of American Horror Story: Cult it is where Evan Peters's character appears amongst a crowd of angry people and with one word causes them to cease and desist if you will (I just thought about how "cease and desist" is repetitive and learned it a whole thing) and that's what I want out of Pompo here. I want it to (a) be fun for the audience--they actually have to move as part of the play!--but also to be (b) a bit odd or unsettling with the idea of Pompo, one odd little man, leading (herding? herding with his voice... hearding?) all of these people out of the theatre.

Pompo's lines to the audience about his then unnamed fake dog are stolen from Beckett: "He's wicked... With strangers." Beckett does this great play on the reader here: while "with strangers" doesn't necessarily change what we think from his statement, we might have assumed that Pozzo saying Lucky is wicked meant for us as strange people to watch out, it fools our readers expectations. "He's wicked.": He's wicked period, and we think oh that sentence is done, and we have a stage direction in parentheses after this sentence and then oh "With strangers." He's wicked with strangers. I don't think it can be staged the same way when directed, so I think maybe this is one of the writing techniques that only works as well as it does in its current medium (basically this is another reason that "Waiting for Gadot" is a closet drama). Once we get into the dialogue between characters, there's a lot I have drawn out of the original play, so if you want to follow it through, it's all basically twists on one part of the first act and you can view it here and then, if you want, just Ctrl + F for "wicked" and you'll find the beginning of this Pozzo part. The response to this sentence from Pozzo, "Is that him?," obviously becomes "Is that her?" in my play and is spoken a bit later on.

Here's Estragon to Pozzo about this confusion:

ESTRAGON:

(recoiling before Pozzo). That's to say . . . you understand . . . the dusk . . . the strain . . . waiting . . . I confess . . . I imagined . . . for a second . . .

Which becomes Pasha's phrasing, "In the sun, you from a distance. Maybe due to part of how you walk…" and leads into him saying that Pozmo's walk is perhaps a bit effeminate (like we discussed above).

Pandrio and Pasha are Estragon and Vladimir respectively when Pompo as Pozmo, our Pozzo, comes to speak with them, but I think this quickly gets mixed up and one will speak the other character's lines or similar ones from the original play. Whereas in Beckett's play, I'm not sure if "Bozzo" or "Gozzo" really have meaning, the words that are used to mock Pozmo's name are both tied to recent insults (or something like insults) that I have heard lately. When Home Again, which is a wonderful film, came out, one of the radio fill-in hosts that I listen to consistently on ESPN, Randy Scott or Will Cain, noted how Reese Witherspoon looks like "Gizmo" the gremlin to him. That's what put Gizmo in my mind. Venmo is a money-sharing app that comes up whenever I need to pay a friend for something and we don't live near each other--I have a flip phone still, so Venmo is me referencing smartphone envy.

This is how Vladimir responds to mistaking Pozzo's name for Gozzo: "VLADIMIR: (conciliating). I once knew a family called Gozzo. The mother had the clap." Since I picked Gizmo here, I was able to say "Gizmo was in a movie once," rather than reference a sad story of a matriarch with an STD. Here is Pozzo with a sentiment that I largely steal from the play:

POZZO:

(halting). You are human beings none the less. (He puts on his glasses.) As far as one can see. (He takes off his glasses.) Of the same species as myself. (He bursts into an enormous laugh.) Of the same species as Pozzo! Made in God's image!

There's an oddity here, because Pozzo seems not to care for humanity--he has a slave and keeps him tied to himself with a rope. Is Lucky "of the same species" as Pozzo in Pozzo's eyes? Is his man that he treats like an animal also "made in God's image"?

Pozzo's questioning about Godot becomes Pozmo's questioning about Gadot. Pandrio's waiting for Gadot becomes something different through the discussion of "love" from Pasha. In writing this play, I think I figured something out about the relationship between Pandrio and Pasha, but I don't want to get into it until I write out how it goes. Boring, unknown Pandrio waiting for the famous Gadot makes me think of "Magazines" by Brand New.

The animal cruelty reference is a real life experience. I remember my father driving and me in the passenger seat on the interstate and seeing a pick-up truck with a dog in the bed going seventy on the road. I personally have an aversion to the windows being down in a vehicle from fear of everything in the car being sucked out of the windows, so I get that I'm not impartial here, but I can't help but feel that the dog must feel like it could almost fly away which would be scary enough, much less the oddity of the whole situation for the dog. When Pandrio makes his comment, I knew he would mumble about this as well.

The reference to the road and Pozmo's land is informed by the play, but I think changed fairly significantly here. The weird after scene effect that closes this post (after the ***) will be addressed in a post on its own, because I want to get into effect I'm going for in a bit more detail and I just want to muse on a specific idea rather than the whole interlude. After that, you'll get the conclusion to Waiting for Gadot.