Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure icons Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter recently reunited to continue being excellent to each other and delve into Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot on Broadway.
But as Stephen Colbert pointed out of the existential tragicomedy, it’s both one of the most famous plays in of the 20th century and one of the hardest to describe. In a nutshell, the Irish playwright’s 1950s classic is about two characters Vladimir (Winter) and Estragon (Reeves), who wait for the eponymous and enigmatic Godot to hurry up and arrive. In the meantime, they unpack the meaning of well, everything.
“Take a stab, one of you, explaining to the audience, if you don’t mind, what it’s about,” the Late Show host requested of his guests on Monday. The answer Reeves and Winter give is an absolute trip, describing it as “the human experience in the blink of an eye.”
“It can’t just be one thing,” says Reeves. “If Hamlet is ‘to be or not to be, that is the question,’ Beckett in Waiting for Godot says that is not the question. ‘What are we doing here?’ That is the question.
“In a broad sense, it talks about our relationship to a personal god. And it’s like, can we be seen? Will we be judged? But really, will he really, save us, punish us? Will we be seen in a broad sense? And then there is friendship, codependence, yearning, waiting — what are we waiting for? What can we do? How do we relate to each other?”
“You end up playing all of life in the course of two hours, which is kind of a trip, to be honest with you, because it’s so beautifully written,” says Winter.
“We did talk about the fact that we were both going to turn 60 around the time we hit the stage,” he adds. “And it is a play about reflection, about life and mortality, and where you are, what does it mean, what have you done, and where are you going. To be in that every night and to say those words, but to do that with a very close friend, is is pretty extraordinary.”
