Waiting for Godot in Production

The struggle that people of faith have with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is its nihilistic context. The play seems to undergird the claim that God is distant to humanity, perhaps even nonexistent. So, for our production of this iconic show, produced at Gardner-Webb University in 2009, we attempted to make the invisible visible. To do so, we created the world of the play as a single cutout of earth. This small patch of ground was then held up by a giant hand. In framing the action of the play in this way, a new theme emerged suggesting that God is always present, even when he is not seen, understood, or recognized. As the scriptures would suggest, it is in God that we “live and move and have our being.” In the words of Erasmus, the Dutch philosopher & scholar of the Renaissance, “Bidden or unbidden, God is present.”