The Katona - Katona József Theatre

"On November 19, 1957, a group of worried actors were preparing to face their audience. The actors were members of the company of the San Francisco Actors' Workshop. The audience consisted of fourteen hundred convicts at the San Quentin penitentiary. No live play had been performed at San Quentin since Sarah Bernhardt appeared there in 1913. Now, forty-four years later, the play that had been chosen, largely because no woman appeared in it, was Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. No wonder the actors and Herbert Blau, the director, were apprehensive. How were they to face one of the toughest audiences in the world with a highly obscure, intellectual play that had produced near riots among a good many highly sophisticated audiences in Western Europe? (...)

The curtain parted. The play began, And what had bewildered the sophisticated audiences of Paris, London, and New York was immediately grasped by an audience of convicts, As the writer of 'Memos of a first-nighter' put it in the columns of the prison paper, the San Quentin News: 'The trio of muscle-men, biceps overflowing,...parked all 642 Ibs on the aisle and waitedfor the girls and funny stuff, When this didn't appear they audibly fumed and audibly decided towait until the house lights dimmed before escaping, They made one error. They listened andlooked two minutes too long-and stayed. Left at the end. All shook.’”

Martin Esslin

Premiere: 18 April 2014

Duration: 2 hours and 20 minutes, with one intermission

First part: app. 1 hour and 15 minutes, second part: app. 45 minutes