Old Age

Reading this play is like spending the weekend with my parents. For the last three months I have been talking with my parents about my trip to visit them this coming weekend for their 68th anniversary and my dads 90th birthday. Sunday when talking with them about the weekend plans mom mentioned that dad vacuumed the house and my guest room the travel trailer in the backyard. Then when I asked about sunday 6:30 dinner dad asked if I was going to be there. I relived all of my conversations with them in the last few years as I was reading about waiting for Godot. It is a lot of repeated conversations, sometimes within a span of only 5 minutes. And sometimes the stories get blurred and the players interchanged.

I started reading and was completely lost, put it down and reread it a week or two later and it actually started to make more sense as I was able to keep the characters straight. I'm not sure what the author was trying to portray, but it was very real to me and symbolic of the changes that many of us will go through as life passes us by. Our memories fail, body changes, and we get lost in our purpose. My mother had a difficult adjustment over several years of back surgeries finding her purpose in life. She lived with an inner sadness waiting for her Godot which was the magic surgery or pill that would bring back her youth and her life.

I wondered too if Pozzo was symbolic of life and how it pushes and pulls us forward. Sometimes we get lost in the middle of too many rules and lose our strength to define our own destiny. He also portrays the perfect abusive master who feels that the slave or person they are in control of has no capacity to function on their own, no right to opinions or freedom. We have witnessed this through slavery, verbal and physical abuse and other controlling situations. And in the end, Pozzo ended up no better than his "dog" who had to now lead him through the darkness toward nowhere. Abuse makes everyone a loser.

All the potential symbolism aside, reading for face value, it was very hysterical visualizing the various characters lost each in their own space going around in circles.