Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” began to be staged in prisons within a year of its debut. Incarcerated performers, and audiences, saw Vladimir and Estragon’s condition as their own: suspended in limbo, subject to caprice and cruelty, forever anticipating an endlessly deferred judgment. “It caused [a] stirring,” recalled Rick Cluchey, an inmate of California’s San Quentin State Prison in 1957, who listened to a performance from his cell and later acted in many plays by Beckett. This is the set designer Sergio Gerstein’s copy of the script for the original production of the play.
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), En attendant Godot: carbon copy of typescript, Paris, 1952–1953. Purchased on the Drue Heinz Fund, 2001. MA 5071.1
© Samuel Beckett