Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, outstanding members of our artistic aristocracy have been acting on Broadway’s presentation of Waiting for Godot since September 2025. Reports of their acting have been superlative, and “enormously affecting.” I am jealous of New Yorkers and the out-of-towners lucky enough to visit Broadway to see Beckett’s masterpiece. My opinion and feelings about the play go back to when I discovered Samuel Beckett’s writings many decades ago.  

In Beckett’s Waiting for Godot two tramps sit under a tree on a lonely road, frustrated, arguing and performing any number of antics to pass the time, waiting for Godot. Their dialogue is hilarious; things they suggest they could do while waiting include killing themselves by hanging.  

I have seen the play four times, and am each time impressed by the play’s seeming simplicity. The two men’s – Estragon and a Vladimir – wait for Godot is simple and hilariously sympathetic. I was most grateful to learn that the Aurora Fox Theatre, right here in my neighborhood, planned to show the play mindful of the old caveats about locals looking down on their local poets, citizens, and prophets. I wondered if it would be as good as those I had seen in London, New York, and locally, at the Arvada Center in 2017.  

The show was well attended, a pleasant surprise and from the laughter accompanying some silliness on the stage, I presumed they all enjoyed watching Vladimir fuss with his hat, and Estragon struggle with his smelly boots. Both characters are touching and at the same time funny. Waiting for Godot includes occasional interruptions of  Vladimir and Estragon by the blustering passerby, Pozzo, and his slave — Lucky — both acted wonderfully.  

Aurora Fox theater’s presentation did a good job depicting the essence of the play that has been described by the Times of London, as, “one of the most noble, and moving plays of our generation, a threnody of hope deceived and deferred, but never extinguished; a play so suffused with tenderness for the whole human perplexity.”  

After seeing Aurora’s Waiting for Godot, I felt that the bare stage could have been a bit softer. But then again, the idea was to infer that the scenery was arid and desolate. Furthermore the producers had to be frugal. The single lonely tree gets some leaves in the second half, showing the passage of time. The two hoboes waiting for Godot upon whose coming their future fortunes depend shoot the breeze in any way they can, to kill the time.  

I thought Aurora Fox fearless when they decided to put on Beckett’s play, viewed from our current moment of avoiding most hard questions and discouragement of the search for what’s hidden under our rocks. No matter where we are intellectually and politically as a nation, this play deserves being staged and talked about.  

The genius of Beckett was that he showed how man feels the need to make sense of his life and existence on earth. It had been promised that Godot would come, and that the two miserable souls’ lives would get better when Godot came. They are disappointed, even as they continue to wait, day after day.    

Q of QAnon of the American Right wing’s conspiracy fluttered briefly in my mind as I watched the play. Donald Trump will not vanquish the imaginary cannibalistic child-molester/traffikers’ ring. “Waiting for the Barbarians,” CP Cavafy’s poem is a more apt comparison to Waiting for Godot. In it senators and other legislators stop work waiting for the barbarians to rescue them. When some men confirm that there in fact are no barbarians any longer, everyone asks, “Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?  Those people were a kind of solution.”  

There is no one to save us. In Beckett’s play, the men wait for tomorrow, almost as if waiting is their lives’ sole endeavor. In Camus’s the Myth of Sisyphus one appreciates the absurdity of human endeavor; the repetitive, futile nature of our lives. Again and again Sisyphus pushes the rock up the hill only to see it roll back down again. But he placidly and lightly goes about it,  “one must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus says at the end of the play.  

Waiting for Godot has lessons for us; Godot will not come and we must serve and save each other.  

Above it all, I am grateful to Aurora Fox for presenting the play – indeed an act of courage.  

Pius Kamau, M.D., a retired general surgeon, is president of the Aurora-based Africa America Higher Education Partnerships; co-founder of the Africa Enterprise Group and an activist for minority students ‘STEM education. He is a National Public Radio commentator, a Huffington Post blogger, a past columnist for Denver dailies and is featured on the podcast, “Never Again.”