Waiting for Godot is the kind of play that everyone seems to have a connection to one way or another. Many of us learn about it in school, others are theatre people, and then there are people like my mother: A woman who doesn’t do acting and yet had to memorize Lucky’s nonsensical monologue.
When Jamie Lloyd’s Waiting for Godot was announced with Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure stars Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter leading the charge, I knew one thing: The actor playing Lucky better be on point. The monologue is long and tiring but it is Lucky’s big moment within the show. And one that has connected my family despite me being the only “theatre” kid among us.
So when it was revealed that Michael Patrick Thornton was playing the role, I was relieved. I’d seen him perform a number of times, including his role in the Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga take on Macbeth. And luckily for me, this Lucky casting was perfect. Thornton does a beautiful job of engaging with the audience as silently as Lucky does and making the big Act One monologue something unique and fresh.
And in talking with him about the role, we got incredibly nerdy about nonsensical monologues (and I admit that I did one in Will Eno’s Middletown, which Thornton was in in Chicago). But one thing is clear: His role as Lucky is special and I asked him about the connection so many have to the monologue itself.
“Well, first of all, what kind of sadist would make your mother memorize Lucky’s monologue? I mean, that’s just cruel,” Thornton joked. “The other night, I was about to launch into it and someone in the front row whispered very loudly, ‘This is it, this is the famous speech.’ I was like, ‘Great, thanks so much. Really needed that on top of everything.’ I’m a pretty superstitious cat. I block out anything people are writing about me or reviews or stuff like that.”
But even if that one audience member put a lot of weight on Lucky’s monologue that night, Thornton shared that it was the response after the show that meant the most to him. “What has been meaningful is in doing stage door and meeting some like younger actors who are just saying very complimentary things about the monologue and what it means to them,” he said. “And my goal has always been with that to treat it as not absurdist and to just borrow something from Shakespeare where it’s okay if you don’t apprehend the intellectual argument of it. I’m not really interested in that. What I’m more interested in is some transference of emotion and the unconscious being at play. So it’s kind of super lingual, hopefully is the trick. And I can’t see the audience when I’m out there. I have a very bright blinding light in my face. But I can feel them with me. And I’ve done a few one person shows and you can tell when you’re all together breathing as a collective. And it does feel pretty sacred in there.”
You can see our full conversation here:
Michael Patrick Thornton is Lucky in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, now open at the Hudson Theatre.
(featured image: Kevin Scanlon)
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