WAITING FOR GODOT to Open Catastrophic Theatre's 5th Anniversary Season, 3/22

The Catastrophic Theatre has announced the first play of its 5th Anniversary Season: Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

Last year Catastrophic artistic director Jason Nodler directed Greg Dean and Troy Schulze in an award-winning production of Samuel Beckett's Endgame, which led the Houston Chronicle to ask, "Does Beckett Get Any Better?" and the Houston Press to declare "The magnificent Endgame gets magnificent treatment from Catastrophic.

This year, Beckett is again the lead off hitter in Catastrophic's landmark 5th anniversary season. Nodler directs Dean and Schulze, along with Charlie Scott and Kyle Sturdivant, in the most enduring play from the unwitting inventor of the Theatre of the Absurd: Waiting for Godot.

There is a common misunderstanding of Beckett's work that goes something like this: his plays are heady and serious, and his message is dreary. In truth there were three things that Beckett loved above all else: his wife Suzanne, a good Irish Whisky, and the comedy styling's of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. So much more than a messenger of gloom, Beckett also belonged to the music hall tradition. He loved to laugh at a proper pratfall. As he has Nell say in Endgame, "nothing is funnier than unhappiness."

That a woman laughs on one side of the audience while a man cries on the other, at the selfsame line, is unique to a Beckett play.

It would be virtually impossible to overstate the importance of Waiting for Godot as it relates to the history of world theatre, art, and philosophy. But let's leave that aside for a moment because it would be entirely impossible to overstate the new ways in which Godot taught us to laugh, and also to cry.

In fact Beckett's early plays are perhaps the only tragicomedies truly deserving of the title. For Beckett melted together those famously outmoded theatre masks as if to say that life is not happy or sad; life is short and we are dying so let's have a laugh on our way out. Yes, death is nearing always, our prospects are bleak, and our prognoses are bleaker, but we are here. And we must find our amusements along the way, if only to pass the time. Vladimir, Estragon, Pozzo, and Lucky do a fine job of entertaining themselves and us, in spite of (or perhaps owing to) the tedium of their local situation.

Nodler says, "I was only 27 years old the first time I took a crack at the seminal work of the artist that most profoundly affected the course of my life. I've been waiting 44 years now for my own Godot to arrive. He hasn't of course--it's not his nature--but I felt it might be time to wander around in that particular dark again... to stand unknowing on a country road with barely a rock and a tree and a sky to guide us."

In this special year, an anniversary for The Catastrophic Theatre and an anniversary of the first collaboration between Nodler and Catastrophic associate director Tamarie Cooper the company looks forward and back.

We begin with Beckett because we dearly love to work on his plays and because, if not for his work, we wouldn't be producing plays at all.

We bring back audience favorite, 2010's There Is A Happiness That Morning Is by Mickle Maher, in a very limited run with its original cast.

We present back-to-back original plays, never before seen in Houston or elsewhere: Cooper's Tamarie Cooper is Old as Hell rules the summer. And on its heels is the long awaited premiere of The Pine, also by Maher. We've been talking about this one ever since we received the commission from The MAP Fund.

And we round out the year by reuniting Nodler and Cooper in their original roles of director and actor: Marie and Bruce, perhaps Wallace Shawn's most devastating play and possibly his funniest to boot.

Whether developing new work for the theatre, introducing contemporary playwrights to Houston audiences, or producing the classics of the avant-garde theatre movement that continues today, The Catastrophic Theatre is guided always by Beckett's creed, by this creed:

"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

We cannot think of any better play with which to inaugurate our new theatre.

Samuel Beckett's masterwork stars Greg Dean, Charlie Scott, Kyle Sturdivant, Troy Schulze, and Ty Doran. It opens Friday, March 22, and runs Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays through April 13. All performances are at 8 p.m. at The Catastrophic Theatre. All tickets are Pay-What-You-Can.

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