Waiting for Godot (2023)

Since their first appearance in a tiny Paris theatre in 1953, Samuel Beckett’s iconic down-and- outs Vladimir and Estragon have rarely been off the stage. Nearly every evening, somewhere on the globe, they show up for their dubious appointment with a savior named Godot who never comes, filling time with games and musing aphoristically on existence. Hilarious and heartbreaking, Waiting for Godot is the modern theatre’s indispensable document of rootlessness, uncertainty, and perpetually postponed deliverance. Godot will be directed by Arin Arbus (Resident Director, TFANA) whose critically acclaimed productions for the company include her OBIE Award-winning staging of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. This production will reunite actors Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks, who last worked together for TFANA in Ionesco’s The Killer, directed by Darko Tresnjak in 2014.

Arin Arbus (Director) Resident Director, TFANA, and the company’s former Associate Artistic Director, for whom she directed Denis Johnson’s Des Moines, The Winter’s Tale, The Skin of Our Teeth (Obie Award), Strindberg’s The Father and Ibsen’s Doll’s House in rep, King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, Othello, and most recently the critically acclaimed The Merchant of Venice starring John Douglas Thompson. She directed Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (Tony nom. for best revival) with Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon on Broadway. Arbus spent several years making theatre with prisoners in association with Rehabilitation Through the Arts and in 2018, she directed an adaptation of The Tempest in a refugee camp in Greece for The Campfire Project.

Deloitte is the 2023-2024 Season Sponsor.

Principal support for Theatre for a New Audience’s season and programs is provided by the Bay and Paul Foundations, the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Jerome L. Greene Foundation Fund in the New York Community Trust, The SHS Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, and The Thompson Family Foundation.

Theatre for a New Audience’s season and programs are also made possible, in part, with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities; Shakespeare in American Communities, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.