Theater: Cort Theatre / 138 West 48th Street, New York, NY, 10036
Synopsis:
In No Man's Land , Harold Pinter limns memory, friendship, dependency, ambiguity and the status quo in a darkly comic piece. Beckett's Waiting for Godot features two tramps who wait for an enigmatic figure in a world where time, place and memory are blurred and meaning is where you find it. Played in repertory.
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November 24, 2013: My, how they do go on, these two. In the absurdly enjoyable revivals of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which opened in repertory on Sunday at the Cort Theater, Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart make a most persuasive case for conversation as both the liveliest and loneliest of arts.
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November 24, 2013: The sets for the masterfully acted Broadway repertory double of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot are framed by the crumbling proscenium of a broken-down old theater, a metaphor at once obvious and appropriate for two absurdist plays that present the treacherous limbo between birth and death as tragicomic vaudeville. Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart make a riveting duo as the principal performers destined – or doomed – for eternity to play out routines of existential unease and encroaching mortality that seem to be dredged up from muscle memory or from the remotest recesses of their characters’ unreliable minds.
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November 24, 2013: Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, lifelong staples of the British theater, have become famous -- rock-star famous -- as characters in Hollywood blockbusters. In a lovely turn of karmic payback, the men are extending their pop-culture magnetism to the altogether unlikely but dazzling masters of 20th century drama Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter.
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November 24, 2013: For those who crave more than a single dose of ennui onstage, rejoice: The theater gods have given you two inscrutably postmodern classics this season. They've also been so kind as to throw in a pair of theater gods.
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November 25, 2013: Trying to figure out a Pinter play is like pounding nails in your skull. Trying to figure out a Beckett play is like using a drill. But holding forth in a death-defying repertory bill of Harold Pinter’s “No Man’s Land” and Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” master thespians Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart make it all seem crystal-clear under the incisive direction of Sean Mathias. Auds are free to make what they will of the mysterious characters who figure in these two ambiguous masterpieces of existential angst, but these actors know exactly who these men are — old friends.
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November 24, 2013: It isn't often that, while paired with another play, Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot is considered the more accessible piece, but Harold Pinter's obtuse little attraction, No Man's Land (with its characters named for cricket players) has inspired its share of "What does it mean?" inquiries. The two make a fine match for a new Broadway repertory production, not just because they both conveniently consist of two major male roles and two supporting male roles, but because both plays mix comedy (absurdist humor from Beckett and erudite banter from Pinter) and ambiguous drama to suggest contrasting views of characters caught in a type of purgatory.
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November 24, 2013: Oh, so those guys are doing theater here, too? You can be forgiven if you thought Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen simply were wandering the boroughs, posting selfies and behaving like rascally old coots, albeit coots who’ve been knighted by Queen Elizabeth. The pair have been living it up for months, Stewart Tweeting images of the duo tossing back ale at McSorley’s, McKellen posting photos of the BFFs “jogging” over the Brooklyn Bridge. But yes, Xavier and Magneto also can be seen live, on stage, performing two absurdist plays in repertory, No Man’s Land and Waiting for Godot. Both have just opened at the Cort Theatre.
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