Tom Hanks, Playwright (Part 2)

 

[Below are three reposts that constitute Part 2 of “Tom Hanks, Playwright.”  The first piece is excerpts from the interview of well-known film star Hanks by Stephen Colbert, host of CBS’s Late Show, on 3 November 2025.  Following on that posting are two reviews of the Off-Broadway production, the première of This World of Tomorrow, the play cowritten by Hanks with James Glossman, which ran at The Shed from 18 November to 21 December 2025.

[In Part 1, which I recommend reading before the installment below, I posted three articles from the New York Times announcing the coming production, covering the opening night, and presenting Hanks’s own discussion of his inaugural venture as a dramatist.  Those articles contain information that will be referenced below and explanations and commentary from me, including the background and details of the play, that I have not repeated in the second part.]

STEPHEN COLBERT INTERVIEWS TOM HANKS
3 November 2025
(Late Show with Stephen Colbert; Season 11, Episode 31)

[Below are excerpts from the guest appearance of Tom Hanks on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (CBS-TV; Channel 2 in New York City) of 3 November 2025.  Hanks talks extensively about This World of Tomorrow, which was in previews at the time of the broadcast, but he talked also about a number of other, unrelated subjects as well.  I have, therefore lifted only the passages concerning the Off-Broadway play for this posting. (Omitted sections of the show are marked with ellipses.)

[There is no video of this LSSC episode that’s in one take, so this post is taken from YouTube, which posted the show in segments, four of which are devoted to the Hanks interview.  (When the show was broadcast. Colbert did his customary opening, including a monologue, before the first break and after the Hanks interview, he had a musical guest, Mavis Staples, a rhythm and blues and gospel singer and civil rights activist, who performed the last segment of the show.)

[The YouTube videos are broken into separate posts at each point in the show when Colbert takes a commercial break.  (The link above, for those who want to view the whole interview, is the first segment (“It’s ‘Tom Hanks Riding The Subway’ Season In New York City”); the following three segments are at: #2 – “‘They Are Gonna Have A Real Hard Time Firing Me’ - Tom Hanks On His Play ‘This World of Tomorrow’"; #3 – “If You Could Spend 12 Hours In The Past, Where And When Would You Go? - Tom Hanks”; #4 – “Why The Original ‘Toy Story’ Movie Had To Be Thrown Out - Tom Hanks.”  I didn’t look for videos of the opening or closing segments, Colbert’s monologue and Staples’s performance.)

[The transcript published on Rick On Theater is based on the verbatim transcript from YouTube, which is computer-generated.  It’s full of inaccuracies, omissions, and mistranscriptions, so I emended it myself from the audio of the recordings, creating a hybrid.  It’s more accurate and complete than the ones accompanying the YouTube videos online.]

Stephen Colbert: Hey, welcome back, everybody! Give it up for Louis Cato and the Late Show Band, everybody!

Ladies and gentlemen, my friends – you know my first guest tonight, because he is Tom Hanks!

[cheers and applause]

Tom Hanks: Thank you, thank you!

. . . .

Hanks: I’m doing a play right now called – down at . . . uhh –

Colbert: I’m doing it right here [takes out playbill for this world of tomorrow].

You’re in town – you’ve cowritten and starred in a new play, This World of Tomorrow.

There you are – there it is. It’s at The Shed –

Hanks: It’s at The Shed. Directed by Kenny Leon and cowritten by James Glossman. I can’t tell you how much we love the cast.

But – you say you’re on Broadway and everybody knows where Broadway is. We are on Broadway right now. 

[The Ed Sullivan Theatre, where The Late Show is recorded, is a 1927 theater at 1697 Broadway at West 53rd Street, formerly a legitimate Broadway house first named Hammerstein’s Theatre (and then under various names). The Columbia Broadcasting System leased it in 1937 as a radio studio; it was converted for television use in 1949. The theater housed The Ed Sullivan Show from 1953 to 1971, as well as other CBS shows; it was renamed after Sullivan (1901-74) in 1967. The Sullivan was purchased by CBS in 1993 and has housed The Late Show since that year, first under David Letterman, then under Colbert since 2015.]

Colbert: You’re literally on Broadway.

Hanks: Anybody in the world can come to New York and say, ‘Take me to Broadway.’ Or they can walk to Broadway themselves if they know where it is.

You come to New York and say, ‘Come to The Shed,’ and they’re like, ‘What? For discount garden tools?’

It’s an art installation – it’s a space for art and it’s downtown in Hudson Yards. But letting everyone know where The Shed is, is a bit of a challenge. So if I could have a slight shuffle beat.

[scats a beat for the band. the band joins in.]

Yeah, okay.

Ready?

[rhythmic chant. hanks, seated, keeps time with hand and arm gestures as he shifts his upper body and makes animated facial expressions.]

It’s The Shed
Off the High Line
By the Vessel
In Hudson Yards.
It’s The Shed
By the Vessel
Off the Highline
In Hudson Yards.
Wanta see
A show
At The Shed?
Well, just head down
To Hudson Yards.
It’s The Shed
Off the Highline
By the Vessel
In Hudson Yards.

There you go.  So, come on down!

[The High Line is an elevated public park and greenway in New York City, built on a disused freight rail line on Manhattan’s West Side. It extends from Gansevoort Street at Washington Street in Greenwich Village to West 34th Street and 12th Avenue near Hudson Yards.

[The Vessel is an interactive public landmark and art installation in Hudson Yards. The structure is 150 feet tall (equivalent to about 12-15 stories) and consists of 154 interconnected flights of stairs, nearly 2,500 steps, and 80 landings, forming a massive, climbable, honeycomb.

[Hudson Yards is a real estate development on the far West Side of Midtown Manhattan, built over a functioning rail yard, a storage yard for Long Island Rail Road trains. The 28-acre site includes, aside from The Shed and the Vessel, a landscaped public plaza, high-rises with both residential apartments and corporate offices, and a seven-story mall with shops and restaurants. Most of the offerings are strictly high-end.]

Colbert: We have to take a quick break, but we will be right back with more Tom Hanks, everybody. Stick around.

. . . .

Colbert: Hey, everybody, we are back with the star of This World of Tomorrow at The Shed, Mr. Tom Hanks.

Tell the people what it’s about, if you don’t mind.

Hanks: it’s from a collection of short stories. Jim Glossman – I published some short stories. And Jim Glossman said we could string these together under the theme of – let’s just say time travel.

It’s about a guy who decides to – a franchise out of what is now the Milford Plaza Hotel.

[Renamed the Row NYC in 2014, the Milford Plaza Hotel (at 700 Eighth Avenue, between 44th and 45th Streets, in Midtown Manhattan) opened in 1928 as the Hotel Lincoln. It changed hands many times, and was renamed by each new owner. In 1956, it became the Hotel Manhattan; in 1969, it operated as the Royal Manhattan; and it reopened in 1980 as the Milford Plaza Hotel.

[Somewhat typical of the reviews the hotel received over its lifetime, New York magazine said in 2022 that “the reason most people stay here is location; its proximity to the city’s brightest [Broadway theater] marquees ensures theatergoers can be in bed shortly after the curtain drops. Otherwise, the 1,300 rooms are slightly antiquated."]

You may not know this. The Milford Plaza Hotel used to be the Lincoln Hotel and it’s at Eighth Avenue and West 45th Street, and Room 1114 has what is called volume authenticity to allow access to a 12-hour time-bond echo to June 8th, 1939.

[I tried to decipher what Hanks is saying here, thinking he’s using standard or recognized mainstream science fiction terms. According to one source, he isn’t. He’s using terms like “volume authenticity” and “time-bond echo” as technobabble—invented scientific language—to explain the mechanics of his character’s time travel.

[“Volume authenticity” is a fictional scientific requirement in the play. It refers to the idea that for a “time jump” to work, the physical space (i.e., Room 1114 of the Milford Plaza) must perfectly match the historical details of the destination date. The more “authentic” the room’s physical “volume” (decor, smell, newspapers, and atmosphere) is to 1939, the easier it is to “tether” to that time.

[“Time-Bond Echo” is the play’s term for the actual window or “link” between two points in time. It describes a temporary connection (a bond) that allows someone from 2089, the play’s “present,” to interact with the “echo” of 8 June 1939.

[In the play, there is also a 12-hour limit for Bert Allenberry’s (Hanks) technology to allow him to access this “echo” before he is pulled back to his own time, which is why he must keep returning “again and again” to the same day to see the woman he loves (Kelli O’Hara).]

So you can go back to the World’s Fair on June 8th, 1939. And I play a fellow who does that again and again and again, because he just cannot get enough of the World’s Fair.

Now – this is a game around the dinner table. I’m gonna tell you right now, okay – here’s the rules of the game. You get to go to any time in the past you want to for 12 hours. Name the place, name the event. However, homicide is not allowed. You can’t go back and – you know.

Colbert: April 1865, Ford’s Theatre and I prevent a homicide. Is that legal?

[laughter and applause from the audience.]

[President Abraham Lincoln (b. 1809; 16th President of the United States: 1861-1865) was assassinated by actor John Wilkes Booth (1838-65) on 14 April 1865 as he and the First Lady, Mary Todd Lincoln (1818-82), were attending a performance of Our American Cousin, an 1852 farce by English playwright Tom Taylor, at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.

[Ford’s Theatre ceased presenting plays for 103 years after Lincoln’s death. It became a museum dedicated to Lincoln until 1968, when it was restored and reopened. The presidential box remains as it was in the 1860s, but is never occupied. Since its reopening, the theater has not restaged Our American Cousin, and has said that it never will out of respect for the assassination.

[(This vow is attributed to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall (1920-2010; in office: 1961-69), whose department includes the National Park Service, which is responsible for the physical stewardship, preservation, and historical interpretation of the Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site, which includes the government-owned theater building. The non-profit Ford’s Theatre Society oversees the site’s artistic programming and educational initiatives.)]

Hanks: Here’s the problem with that. I believe that show was sold out.

Colbert: So I cannot get a ticket.

Hanks: And those laws [are] adhered to. You don’t just get to appear magically. You have to eat the food and go to the bathroom and take a shower – and if you break a leg, you’ll have a broken leg.

So those are the rules. But the fellow I play cannot stop from going back to 1939, for reasons that are evident once you come see the play.

Colbert: That is the World’s Fair, 1939. Did you have a particular fascination with the World’s Fair?

Hanks: Something about the World’s Fair.

Here’s a question. There was a line from the “Futurama,” which was the most attended attraction at the fair, run by our good friends at General Motors.

Colbert: Cars of the future.

Hanks: It was 1939, showing you what 1960 was going to be like and it had this fabulous line that said: “The present is but an instant between an infinite past and a hurrying future.” And if you think about it, that’s a great theme that Jim Glossman and I’d been working on.

[The General Motors exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair was titled “Highways and Horizons.” The core attraction and most popular attraction at the fair was a massive, immersive diorama and ride called “Futurama.” Designed by theatrical and industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958), the exhibit presented an idealized model of the world 20 years into the future (around 1960), characterized by vast suburbs and extensive, automated highway systems.

[Visitors sat in moving, sound-equipped chairs that conveyed them over a massive, 35,000 square-foot scale model of the American countryside and cities. The Futurama exhibit fit closely with the fair’s overall theme of “The World of Tomorrow” and is credited with popularizing the concept of modern interstate highways.]

You cannot do anything about our infinite past. That’s gone, baby, gone, right? And the future’s going down the pike. Who knows what’s gonna go happen [sic]?

But the present, we have a little bit of control over that, don’t we? And we also know what you’re hurrying future’s going to be, don’t we [a reference to Paramount’s cancellation of The Late Show after May 2026]. And you can’t do nothin’ ’bout the things that got you in trouble, my friend.

So you’re just going to have to make hay right here, right now.

Colbert: Exactly.

Hanks: That’s right.

. . . .

Colbert: We have to take another break here, but stick around. We will be right back with more Tom Hanks, everybody.

. . . .

Colbert: Hey, everybody! We’re back with the star of This World of Tomorrow, Mr. Thomas Hanks.

You’ve done lots of theater.

Hanks: I’ve done just enough, sir, to call myself a professional actor.

Colbert: And last time you were live on stage here in New York, it was 2013.

Hanks: Yes, we did Nora Ephron’s Lucky Guy at the Broadhurst Theatre – yes.

Colbert: Now you’re back at The Shed, and we know where that is.

Hanks: Where’s The Shed again? Well, I’ll tell you where it is. It’s –

[chants as the band comes in.]

By the Vessel
And the High Line.

Colbert: Is it different to go on stage knowing that you wrote it?

Hanks: Yes, it is. Number one, because they are going to have a real hard time firing me. If I screw up.

Colbert: Have you gone up on your own line?

[In theater, ‘to go up’ means to forget one’s lines on stage during a performance or rehearsal.]

Hanks: Oh, God, yeah, year. I disappeared the other night, as a matter of fact. And when it happens, Kelli O’Hara on stage, or Ruben Santiago-Hudson – they all just kind of look at me and go, ‘Come on, Man.’

Colbert: If you don’t know it –

Hanks: ‘If I learn my lines – You haven’t – [why] haven’t you learned yours?’

The huge difference between film and stage is, in film, the director is the governor of the story. He can change it, not say it, don’t say that, don’t say this.

On the stage, if it’s not on the page, it is not on the stage. The writers are the definitive arbiters of what is being said.

So, on one hand, you have a discussion. ‘What – what sounds better: “Hey, guys, we better get going because we have a problem,” or, “Hey, guys, we better get going because we have a situation”’?

We had some previews the other night. Kenny Leon said when we’re in rehearsal, the play is ours; when we are performing, the play is theirs. Meaning, that audience gives you something that is just undeniable. And we were out there and we had a difference between blah-blah-blah-blah problem – and the audience was like hmm [making a hand gesture indicating “flat”] – blah-blah-blah-blah situation, and they go, ‘Oh, a situation?’ And this is where you start playing around with it. It’s a very, very malleable, exciting thing.

And being one of the cowriters is just a pleasure and a joy, but it is also as terrifying an experience as I have ever had.

Colbert: Why terrifying?

Hanks: Well, because you just wake up and – ‘problem,’ ‘situation,’ ‘problem,’ ‘situation’ [making hand gesture of weighing two alternatives].

And will they know how to find us. You know how they find us – well,

[chants and snaps his fingers.]

By the Vessel
Off the High Line
Is The Shed
In Hudson Yards.

Colbert: We’re gonna take another break here.

Hanks: I think we should.

Colbert: We’ll be right back with more Tom Hanks, everybody.

. . . .

Colbert: Hey, everybody.  You know who that is, that’s Tom Hanks.

. . . .

Colbert: So, Tom – wonderful to see you, as always.

Hanks: Thank you so much.

This World of Tomorrow is currently in previews at The Shed [30 October-18 November 2025]. And where’s The Shed?

Hanks: I will tell you right now, The Shed is . . .

[chants]

By the Vessel
Off the High Line
Is The Shed
In Hudson Yards.
By the Vessel
In the High Line

Colbert: Officially opens November 18th.

Hanks:

[continues]

This World of Tomorrow
Is a play you all can see
Where? At The Shed
By the Vessel
Off the High Line
In Hudson Yards.

Colbert: Tom Hanks, everybody.

We’ll be right back with a performance by Mavis Staples.

*  *  *  *
TWO REVIEWS OF THIS WORLD OF TOMORROW

“THE WORLD OF TOMORROW REVIEW –
TOM HANKS RETURNS TO THE STAGE 
FOR TIME TRAVEL CHARMER”
by Benjamin Lee

[Of the two reviews of This World of Tomorrow I selected to repost, the one from The Guardian of 18 November 2025 was the more positive.  The critical reception of the play was mixed, most giving some form of praise for the performances accompanied, but less enthusiasm, as you’ll read in the second example, for the production (that is, directing and design) and the script.]

The actor indulges his love of the past in a breezily enjoyable play about a man falling for a woman from the 1930s, played by a standout Kelli O’Hara

Tom Hanks [b. 1956] is a star who’s always had one foot squarely in the past. As an actor he’s forever been likened to James Stewart [1908-97; years active: 1932-91], a reincarnation of the charming, essentially good American everyman, a from-another-era lead who’s increasingly been more comfortable in period fare (in the last decade, he’s appeared in just four present-day films [see note below]). As a producer, he’s gravitated toward historical shows such as Band of Brothers [2001; HBO], John Adams [2008; HBO] and The Pacific [2010; HBO] his directorial debut was 60s-set music comedy That Thing You Do! [1996; Twentieth Century Fox] and his undying obsession, outside of acting, is the typewriter, collecting and writing about its throwback appeal.

[Between 2015 and 2025, Hanks’s “present-day” films (out of 19 productions, including the animated Toy Story 4) have been A Hologram for the King (made in 2016, set in 2010; Lionsgate, Roadside Attractions, Saban Films), Sully (made in 2016, set in 2009; Warner Bros. Pictures), Inferno (made and set in 2016; Sony Pictures Releasing), and A Man Called Otto (made in 2020, set in 2020 – with flashbacks to 1960s and mid-2010s; Sony Pictures Releasing).]

In his new play, The World of Tomorrow [sic], his fondness for the “good old days” has led to the inevitable, a story about a man with a fondness for the “good old days” who actually gets to experience one of them for himself. It’s a loosely familiar tale of time travel, based on a short story written by Hanks that tries, and half-succeeds, to bring something new to a table we’ve sat at many times before.

[Several press outlets mislabel the play by substituting ‘The’ for ‘This.’  As I note in Part 1, the play’s title, This World of Tomorrow, is distinct from the official motto and theme of the 1939 World’s Fair, which was “The World of Tomorrow.”  The choice by Hanks and Glossman was deliberate to distinguish their creative work from the historical event it depicts and to shift the focus from a broad, corporate vision of the future to a specific, personal reality experienced by the characters.]

The gimmick here is that while time travel might be possible in the future, it comes with hard restrictions. Firstly, it’s prohibitively expensive, leaving it up to the select few to take advantage (asides about the state of the world in 60 years time are . . . not optimistic). Secondly, it’s only possible to go back to specific places at specific times, reliant on certain spaces remaining the same and certain “echoes” allowing for movement. Hanks plays Bert, a scientist whose trips to the 1939 world fair in New York become more frequent after he meets Carmen (Kelli O’Hara), a local woman treating herself to a day off with her precocious niece (Kayli Carter, a 32-year-old actor fighting a losing, and increasingly grating, battle playing an 11-year-old).

It’s not just love at first sight that keeps him going back, it’s also his fetish for nostalgia (Newspapers! Lower prices! People saying “swell”!) and the alluring promise of a future that never really came. Each time he returns to the present, after a strict cutoff of 11pm [sic], he regales his skeptical colleagues with ideas of how to forge ahead differently. While whimsy is mostly prioritized [sic – British spelling], the dark shadow of reality often threatens to intrude. Bert’s fawning over the past is briefly interrupted when Black colleague and longtime friend M-Dash (played by the wonderful Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who tries hard to add weight to a lightly written dynamic) tells him that the idea of travelling back is less appealing for him, a sharp reminder that the good old days weren’t that good for many people (as he predicts, almost all of the service jobs during Bert’s visits are taken on by Black workers). It’s also the summer of 1939, just weeks away from the second world war [German troops invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, marking the start of World War II in Europe], and Nazism has already started to appear in the US, the dreaded swastika showing up on pin badges.

But Hanks, as ever, chooses light over dark and his focus, with co-writer James Glossman, is the thrill of an impossible romance, a choice that takes a little time to convince (the setup, like in his classic romcoms Sleepless in Seattle [1993; TriStar Pictures] and You’ve Got Mail [1998; Warner Bros.], could have easily warped into a creepy thriller). Before intermission, it’s hard to fully understand why Bert would make the expensive, and increasingly dangerous, choice to keep going back for Carmen, as effervescent as O’Hara might be (like many an adaptation, the writing often suffers without the gap-filling depth of a narrator).

Yet in a far superior second half, after she’s gifted with a piercing monologue, we’re whisked along with them. Visually, the journey is smooth throughout thanks to Tony-winning director Kenny Leon guiding the way. While his recent take on Othello [2025; Ethel Barrymore Theatre, Broadway; see “Film Stars Twinkle on the Great White Way, Part 1” (27 March 2025)] might have underwhelmed on many levels, his decisions here are far more astute, working with what seems like another blockbuster budget but this time allowed to spend it on more than just A-list casting. The stage is filled with rectangular pillars switching between various video-screened backgrounds, from a futuristic conference room to a pokey Bronx apartment, and despite one hiccup (a prop that wouldn’t budge that Hanks himself helped to save), it felt as sleekly transporting as something the actor would have made for the big screen. Its commerciality does also make it an easy fit for a Hollywood transfer, perhaps one that could easily tighten the script, excising the scene-sinking niece and some extraneous diner and home scenes (it’s over two hours and could benefit from being under).

Hanks, who was last on the New York stage in Nora Ephron’s 80s-set newsroom drama Lucky Guy, develops real last-act chemistry with O’Hara, who manages to perfect period intonation without becoming schtick-y. He’s comfortably in his wheelhouse here (also nailing the delivery as expected), but there’s none of the autopilot laziness we often get from actors known for sticking to certain character types. He might be stuck in the past, but it’s hard not to get stuck there with him.

[Benjamin Lee is the east coast arts editor at Guardian US, based in New York.  He was previously deputy editor of the style and culture website ShortList.com.]

*  *  *  *
“DAWN OF A DULL DAY:
TOM HANKS IN THIS WORLD OF TOMORROW”
by Jackson McHenry 

[The review on Vulture (the online platform of New York magazine) that was posted on 18 November 2025 was a largely negative assessment of the Hanks-Glossman play.  As you’ll read, reviewer Jackson McHenry had numerous objections to This World of Tomorrow, both to the script and Kenny Leon’s production.]

Whatever is happening at the Shed right now, it’s not really a play. It’s play-shaped, and actors put on costumes and wander around onstage for a couple of hours, repeating words they’ve memorized. But I’d be more comfortable calling the staging of This World of Tomorrow — starring Tom Hanks, written by Hanks and his collaborator James Glossman, directed by Kenny Leon, and based off elements of Hanks’s short-story collection, Uncommon Type — something more along the lines of “a flight of fancy,” “a doodle on a napkin,” or “a college-drama-club project with the express purpose of making one person happy.” There are plenty of talented folks around Hanks who have been roped into making this, and plenty of people in the audience who might be paying a lot to see him, but they don’t factor into the equation. This thing is entirely about admiring its star. Hey, at least there are some fun hats.

This World of Tomorrow is not malicious in its intent. Tom Hanks, the moral nice-guy mayor of Hollywood, is the closest thing the film industry has to a Jimmy Stewart, and I’m happy to believe that his forays into writing have developed out of genuine artistic interest in good-hearted Americana. (Inevitably, a character speaks admiringly about a typewriter.) Whether a theater company should spend its time and resources developing and staging what he has written is another question. (No.) This World of Tomorrow, largely based on the Hanks story “The Past Is Important to Us,” has him playing Bert Allenberry, a rich tech titan from around the year 2100 who keeps taking expensive daylong trips to the 1939 New York World’s Fair via a company called Chronometric Adventures. He justifies the cost by telling his colleagues that he’s enthralled by the way the past imagined a better future than the one we got, but it becomes clear very quickly that he’s really doing it because he’s infatuated with a winsome divorcée named Carmen Perry (Kelli O’Hara, at home in any role where she wears gloves). Carmen is visiting the fair with her spunky niece, Virginia (Kayli Carter, fumbling for any texture to play and landing on “loud”), and Hanks runs into her by accident, then comes back again and again. In each time loop, Carmen doesn’t remember Bert, he so [sic] keeps reseducing her, using a little more information each time, an unsettling dynamic that’s a blend between Groundhog Day [1993; directed by Harold Ramis; Columbia Pictures], Midnight in Paris [2011; directed by Woody Allen; Sony Pictures Classics], and maybe even the deranged sci-fi drama Passengers [2016; directed by Morten Tyldum; Sony Pictures Releasing], all films that aren’t known for their sensitivity toward women’s agency.

There’s where you might expect a play to develop some dramatic friction, perhaps as a commentary on the dangers of nostalgia or on one extremely rich man’s sense of entitlement. Any such turn might be a current, if obvious, direction for a play like this. But one thing you can say about This World of Tomorrow is that it doesn’t do much of what you might expect. There’s little tension anywhere or really any significant attempt to undercut Bert’s rosy gaze on the past. Hanks and Glossman have written a few throwaway lines that acknowledge the racism of the 1930s — Black members of the ensemble are often called upon to roll their eyes at Bert’s cheeriness about 1939 — and in the play’s announcement, Alex Poots, the Shed’s artistic director, told the New York Times [see Part 1] that “there is reference to the rise in authoritarianism,” which I can translate as “there is a line about how Bert should have used time travel to kill Hitler.”

I wouldn’t say that This World of Tomorrow embraces Bert’s nostalgia, either, so much as it just lets his quest for Carmen happen. The script is too rudderless to navigate toward any specific theme, and Leon, who has become the go-to director for soggy celebrity-driven drama, hasn’t pushed his cast toward any specific idea. (According to a conversation in your program, Leon said the play is about “time and love”; one is a concept an actor can’t play, and the other is something no one is convincingly playing.) Somehow, despite what must have been a substantial budget, the set looks cheap. Derek McLane’s design resembles a cybernetic wilderness, a spare set of moving columns that indicate new locations and settings through screens and projections. If Bert’s so enamored with the innovations of the World’s Fair, couldn’t we see re-creations of a few of them onstage? Why not show us the famous robot or the celebrity cow?

Instead, in the space of where it could allow for wonder and enthusiasm, This World of Tomorrow tends toward overexplanation. The script is remarkably heavy on the technobabble and the scenes in which Hanks’s colleagues from the future throw nonsense time-travel-related nouns around while wearing Star Trek outfits. I couldn’t care less about the acids that supposedly accumulate when you go back and forth in time. The script’s most engaging indulgence is a series of scenes that occur in the second act as Bert and Carmen meet in the 1950s at a Greek diner, which is run by a grumbly Jay O. Sanders. Sanders almost convinces you that you’re watching a real play about a real man, commanding the stage with a gruff bark and mining humor from his character’s insistence on teaching everyone Greek vocabulary as he picks up some English. I’m not sure how his presence is supposed to relate to the rest of the story or why Hanks felt it was necessary to include it — perhaps his wife, the Greek American actress and producer Rita Wilson, had his ear — but at least it’s an interestingly idiosyncratic gesture.

Yet the audience isn’t at the Shed for idiosyncrasies. Hanks is the be-all and end-all of This World of Tomorrow, and, sure, when you’re sitting in the audience a few dozen yards away from him, it’s hard to deny his loping movie-star magnetism. He has something of the energy of a beloved and aging family dog, padding up to you to lay his paws on your lap. It’s hard to judge Hanks’s strengths as a stage actor given that this script gives him so few challenges, but when he delivers several jokes about Bert’s discovery that they have real milk at the World’s Fair — presumably, an unspoken environmental collapse has eliminated dairy — he is deeply charming. In those moments, the audience lets out a sigh of relief, as if to say, Ah, yes, the celebrity we’re here to see is giving us the performance we wanted. It’s his own persona he’s performing, not a character. We come to see plenty of stage actors for a taste of their familiar forms, from Kristin Chenoweth to Laurie Metcalf, but perhaps putting a movie star onstage and asking them to actually perform in a play is an extra hurdle we needn’t ask them to clear. Why not just revert to something more direct, more medieval and churchy? Do away with the scripts, with the directors, with the rest of the ensemble, with the pretense. Have them stand there, in pristine and golden-lit silence for two hours at the center of the stage, and bask in the awe and admiration. Audiences could think of it as a pilgrimage to visit a holy relic — or its own act of sacramental theater. He’s not performing, after all. You are.

[Jackson McHenry is a Vulture critic covering theater, film, and TV.  He’s been covering theater, film, and television since 2015, with a focus on arts and entertainment, pop culture, and cultural movements.  In addition to Vulture, Jackson’s work has been featured in Variety, Magzter, and Entertainment Weekly.]

'Waiting For Godot' on Broadway, 2025 (2)

 

[A new production of Samuel Beckett’s (1906-89) Absurdist masterpiece, Waiting for Godot (1953), opened on Broadway on 28 September, after starting previews at the Hudson Theatre on 13 September.  Its limited run, directed by Jamie Lloyd, is scheduled to end on 4 January 2026. 

[The production stars Keanu Reeves as Estragon in his Broadway début, and Alex Winter as Vladimir.  The rest of the cast is made up of Brandon J. Dirden as Pozzo and Michael Patrick Thornton as Lucky, with Zaynn Arora (also making his Broadway début) and Eric Williams alternating as the Boy.

[The scenic and costume design are by Soutra Gilmour, the lighting design is by Jon Clark, and the sound design is by Ben and Max Ringham.

[After my posting of the transcript of a PBS News Hour segment, run last Saturday, 18 October, I’m now posting another transcript of an interview with Reeves and Winter, this one of Steven Colbert’s Late Show from last week.

[A few words about the transcription below: There was only one posted transcript, from the three YouTube videos of the interview.  The dialogue, which was line-by-line—i.e., no paragraphing or other divisions—and in all caps.  The lines were broken by seconds, with the time stamp for each second on a separate line of the transcript.  It was also terribly inaccurate, with lots of mistranscriptions, missing words, misattributions of the speaker, and so on.  (Several renderings of “Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves” came out “ALEX WINTER ENCOUNTER REEVES”!)

[To fix all these and other issues with the transcript, I had to go back and listen to the DVR I’d made of the show in a stop-rewind-and-go method to reconcile them with the recording.  (It’s easier and more convenient to use my computer to type in the corrections while watching and listening to my TV than to try to shift back and forth between my word processor and the YouTube or CBS video on the Internet.)

[So, the result you will read below is a combination of the transcriber, almost certainly a machine with little human monitoring, and my own rendering of the conversation, plus my interpretation of the punctuation, capitalization, paragraphing, and other typographical considerations.  I’ve also added some bracketed explanatory and identifying insertions I thought would be helpful.]

“THE LATE SHOW WITH STEPHEN COLBERT:
KEANU REEVES & ALEX WINTER” 

[This episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (CBS Broadcasting Inc., Paramount Skydance) aired on 13 October 2025 (Season 11, Episode 19).  Reeves and Winter were Colbert’s only guests, aside from a musical performance at the end of the show by rapper J.I.D.]

Stephen Colbert: Hey! Hello, friends. Welcome back, everybody.

Ladies and gentlemen. My fellow Americans. My next guests tonight are currently co-starring in a new Broadway production of “Waiting for Godot.” You know them best as “Bill and Ted,” but please welcome back to “The Late Show,” Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves!

[CHEERS AND APPLAUSE]

There you go. Nice to have you guys here. Thanks for making the trip up from the Hudson Theatre up here to the Ed Sullivan to join on a rare night off. ‘Cause you guys are doing eight shows a week, right?

Keanu Reeves [off-camera]: We are, yeah.

Colbert: For “Waiting for Godot” on Broadway.

[CHEERS AND APPLAUSE]

Never done it, kinda jealous. Love the play. Let’s start with how some might be surprised that it’s pronounced GA-doh, instead of most people in America they think of guh-DOH. So, are you guys being fancy?

[Reeves and Winter LAUGH]

Colbert: Are we being fancy? Are you fancy [pointing to Winter] and are you schmancy [pointing to Reeves]?

Reeves: If that’s fancy and schmancy, what’s the other one?

Colbert: Guh-DOH?

Winter: Down-home? Heartland?

Colbert: Just down-home, American, heartland, existential dread.

Winter: There you go. Right.

Well, the play was written by an Irishman in French.

Colbert: Oh, there you go. There you go.

Winter: It was kind of almost mundane. There’s a lot of rhyming in the play, and GA-doh works better with the other names of the characters that are all Pozzo . . . Gogo [nickname of Estragon, Reeves’s character] . . . Godot. And he’s constantly confusing Godot for Pozzo. ‘I said Pozzo.’ ‘No, you said Godot.’ ‘No, you said Godot.’ It doesn’t work if ‘You said Pozzo.’ ‘No, you said Guh-DOH.’ What?

Colbert: You have been linked, obviously, in the public’s mind since the 1989 release . . . right there [showing photo] of “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”

[CHEERS AND APPLAUSE]

First of all, I understand you guys met in the audition process? Tell me about meeting each other for the first time.

Reeves: My recollection was there was a room . . .

Winter: . . . little room.

Reeves: You were sitting down. I walked in. Said “Hey, what’s up?” You said, “Hey, what’s up.”

Winter: Yeah. Motorcycle helmet and motorcycle helmet [pointing].

Reeves: We talked about motorcycles and . . .

Both: . . . bass guitars.

Reeves: We had stuff in common.

Winter: Yeah. And then it expanded into, like, literature and theater. And then it was, “Oh, he’s east coast and I’m east coast. We’d come from theater. There was a lot of similarities to our backgrounds, and we were two fish out of water actors in L.A. So . . . .

[Winter (b. 1965) did some Broadway shows early in his career. He made his Broadway début as a replacement for Louis Leonowens, the son of Anna Leonowens, in a 1977 revival of the musical The King and I, when he was 13, and played John Darling, the middle Darling child in a 1979 revival of the musical version of Peter Pan, when he was 14.  He also appeared at the Manhattan Theatre Club in the American premiere of Simon Gray's (1936-2008) Close of Play in 1981.

[Reeves’s (b. 1964) U.S. stage début is his role in Godot. His previous stage experience has been in Canada, which he claims as his home country (he’s a Canadian citizen, though born in Beirut, Lebanon, and spending some years in Sydney, Australia, before moving to Toronto). Among other roles, he played Hamlet in Shakespeare’s classic masterpiece in a production at a Canadian regional theater in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1995. On 12 April 1989, Reeves appeared in his only other U.S. theater role, the part of Kip in a telefilm adaptation of Richard Greenberg’s (1958-2025) 1985 one-act play Life Under Water on the Public Broadcasting Service’s American Playhouse series.]

Reeves: Yeah.

Colbert: Wow.

[CROSSTALK]

Colbert: How long had you each been in L.A. at that point? It can be lonely if you . . . .

Reeves: I was there like five . . . four . . . three . . . four years before.

Winter: Two years . . . a couple years before I come out.

Reeves: And then we got to act together. And that’s where, like, that thing happened [snapping his fingers].

Winter: It’s sort of like being in a band. You know, there’s that rhythm section. The comedy is, being who we are, we were both playing the same instrument, which isn’t how a rhythm section is supposed to work.

Colbert: Four hands on one bass . . . .

Winter: We would literally leave set and go to one of each other’s apartments with our mini amps and jam, both playing bass . . .

[LAUGHTER]

Winter: . . . for hours and hours and hours.

Colbert: How did the neighbors feel about that?

Winter: I mean, they thought we were out of our minds. But, it is kind of nuts in retrospect.

Colbert: Talking about “Waiting for Godot” – Keanu, I understand you first had the idea of doing this?

Reeves: Yeah, about three and a half years ago, I was in London, working. I had jet lag. I was in a fugue state. And, the muses kind of sang down from above and said: “Waiting for Godot” with Alex. And I went, UH! and I Facetimed you . . .

Winter: You did, yeah.

Reeves: . . . and proposed.

Winter: You did, yeah. I opened up the Facetime and this is what you always do because you always Facetime. And I’m not a Facetimer. And I’m like, ‘Oh, God, I’ve got to put on a shirt.’

Colbert: It’s not chest time. It’s just Facetime.

Winter: It’s a camera in your face.

Colbert: Oh, I understand. Yeah.

Winter: So, I open it and there is Reeves, his face jammed into this webcam: “You, me, “Godot.” I don’t know what it says that I knew what he meant by that, but I thought it was a great idea. We’d both been looking for something to do together that wasn’t Bill and Ted. We both love theater. We wanted to go back and do theater. I love Beckett. I knew what it entailed though—it was going to be a monster.

Colbert: It is! It’s a lot to bite off. You could’ve started with “The Odd Couple” [popular Niel Simon comedy, 1965 (Broadway), 1968 (film), 1970-75 (television)] and worked your way up.

Both: Yeah!

Winter: Every time someone suggests an alternative, he’s like, yeah, we shoulda done that.

Reeves: Yeah!

Colbert: We have to take a quick break. We’ll be right back with more Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, everybody.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Colbert: Everybody, we are back with the stars of “Waiting for Godot” at the Hudson Theatre here in New York, Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves. It’s one of the most famous plays of the 20th century. It’s performed all the time. It’s often misinterpreted. People don’t know that while it’s a tragedy, is a tragicomedy, very funny.

[There are a number of Godot-related posts on Rick On Theater (and a few more on other Beckett plays), but one that applies to Colbert’s remark above is “History of Waiting For Godot” (30 March 2009). I will append a list of all the Godot posts at the bottom of this transcript.]

Reeves: It is, yeah.

Colbert: Take a stab, one of you, and explain to the audience, if you don’t mind, what it’s about.

Reeves: It can’t just be one thing.

Colbert: Okay. We’ve got all the time in the world.

Winter: Settle in.

Reeves: If “Hamlet” is “To be or not to be, that is the question,” Beckett in “Waiting for Godot” says, ‘That is not the question.’ ‘What are we doing here,’ that is the question.

[APPLAUSE]

Reeves: And it starts to, in a broad sense . . . it talks about our relationship to a personal god. And it’s like, ‘Can we be seen?’ ‘Will we be judged?’ Really, ‘Will he save us, punish us, will we be seen?’ In a broad sense.

And then there is friendship, codependence, yearning, waiting. What are we waiting for? What can we do? [nb: The French (i.e., “original”) title of the play is En attendant Godot, which means “While waiting for Godot.”] How do we relate to each other? There’s elements of power dynamics with the character [sic] Pozzo and Lucky.

Winter: Yeah, there’s brutality, characters can become both brutal and loving. You end up playing all of life in the course of two hours, which is . . . it’s kind of a trip to be honest with you, it is so beautifully written.

Reeves: Yeah, and about time, the collapsing of time, the human experience in the blink of an eye. I was born . . . in one day I can be born, one day I will die, one day I will be deaf, one day . . . . The circumstances of our life and how we relate to it.

Winter: We did talk about the fact that we’re both doing it in our . . . we were both going to turn 60 around the time we hit the stage and it is a play about reflection, about life and mortality and where are and what does it mean and what have you done and where are you going. [When the production started previews, Winter was 60 and Reeves had just turned 61.] And to be in that every night, and to say those words but to do that with a very close friend is pretty extraordinary.

Colbert: The design of it, it’s an unusual and very beautiful design. [Shows a photo of the Godot set, a long horn-like tube that creates a sense of forced perspective, sculpted of blonde wood and running from upstage to down, seemingly suspended in the air.]

Reeves: Aah! That’s our set.

Winter: Isn’t that cool?

Colbert: People see a lot of things in the set. You kept a list of the various things.

Winter: He is keeping – present tense – because it’s growing every day.

Colbert: I’m just curious, what . . . .

Reeves: We have the eye, the tunnel, the vortex, the sub-woofer, the habitrail, the lens.

[I’ve never found an explanation for the suggestion of the habitrail as a name for the central structure of the Godot set, so I looked it up to see what variant meanings it might have. The one that seems most fitting to me—and this is only my own view—is from the pinball machine. The wire ramps or tubes that guide the ball back to the player are sometimes called “habitrails.” The ball is sent on a meandering journey, buffeted by the flippers (and sometimes also the jostling of the machine), but always ends up in a tube that brings it back where it started. That sounds to me like the endless journey that Didi and Gogo are on. (If anyone has a better idea, please post it in the Comments section below.)]

Winter: The lens, the sewer, the habitrail.

Reeves: Circuits of time.

Winter: The circuits of time did come up at one point.

Reeves: We have the cross section of a tree. We recently got the shell.

Winter: The conch shell, which I think is a very beautiful one . . . .

Colbert: The sphincter.

Winter: That’s not incorrect. Yeah, yeah.  I like that.

Reeves: The gun barrel from the Bond opening. [That’s what it reminded me of right away – but it doesn’t really fit Godot.]

Colbert: That’s cool. To me, it does look like an eye. Because the iris is little lower, right here, looks like the eye’s looking down so it looks like the universe or God as a providence, that sort of thing. It looms, that’s for sure. It could also be a moon being eclipsed by something small.

Winter: Yeah.

Colbert: Yeah. Your life or something like that.

Winter: Yeah. It does happen. You’ll see there is an actual – not to spoil – but there’s an actual sun that drops . . . or moon that drops down into that back space.

Colbert: So I was right?

Winter: You are correct. You are literally correct.

Colbert: I was pretty sure. I’m usually right.

[LAUGHTER]

Colbert: Alex, you made your Broadway debut at how old?

Winter: 13. “The King and I” with Yul Brynner [1977].

Colbert [to Reeves]: Is this your Broadway debut?

Reeves: Yes, it is.     

[APPLAUSE]

Let’s talk for both of you, that sense of the butterflies before – not just opening night, but walking out on stage every night.

Reeves: Butterflies? Is that like terror butterflies?

Winter: I think it’s a polite way of saying you want to throw up.

Reeves: Right.

Colbert: Do you get that? Do you get that every night?

Reeves: Every night? Yes.

Colbert: What do you do? You have any particular rituals? People have – I slap myself in the face really hard twice before , , , . I do. Once, at the same time. I don’t want to do it right now, but I slap myself twice and I know I’ve done it hard enough if I regret having done it. Because, I’m awake and I’m leaving everything else backstage, and I just come on stage.

Winter: I have prayers that I always do . . .

Colbert: Oh, really . . . .

Winter: . . . before each act. I don’t take the risk of only just praying for the get through the play [sic], it’s a very hard play.

Colbert: Oh, one act at a time . . . .

Winter: So, each act of the play gets a prayer.

[To Reeves] You have a position that you take backstage that’s interesting. You’re sort of seeded for Estragon. Like I come out of my dressing room and I see you there in sort of a state, and I’m like, ‘Oh, he’s like seeding Estragon.’

Reeves: That’s true, yes.

Winter: That’s part of it.

Reeves: I sort of sit in the thing [takes a position in his seat, facing front with his arms folded in his lap].

Winter: That is what he’s doing. That is very Estragon.

Colbert: Totally.

We are going to take another break here but we’ll be right back with more Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves, everybody.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Colbert: Hey, everybody. We are back with the stars of “Waiting for Godot” here in New York at the Hudson Theatre, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter.

You both have new films. Alex, you have a movie directed, “Adulthood.” What’s “Adulthood”?

Winter: It’s a black comedy with Josh Gad and Kaya Scodelario, Billie Lourd, Anthony Carrigan [released 23 September]. It’s a wonderful cast. It’s an ensemble film about the impossibility of adulthood in our current society.

[APPLAUSE]

Colbert: [Inaudible] . . . social media keeps us . . . .

Winter: It’s hard . . . it’s hard out there for adults.

Colbert: Keanu, you have “Good Fortune” which opens on Friday [17 October].

[APPLAUSE]

Colbert: Is it true that after everything you’ve done, after all the “John Wicks” and all the “Matrices,” that this is the film that got you injured?

Reeves: Yes.

[LAUGHTER]

Colbert: If you don’t mind sharing . . . .

Reeves: I mean, comedy’s hard, right?

[Winter LAUGHS]

Colbert: Sure. Death is easy, comedy’s hard.

[The saying “Dying is easy, comedy is hard”—Colbert is paraphrasing the now-famous line—is attributed to British actor Edmund Gwenn (1877-1959) on his deathbed. The line has since been widely circulated and credited to other actors, but Gwenn is the most commonly cited source.]

Reeves: I fractured my patella.

Colbert: Your kneecap.

Reeves: My kneecap. I had a vertical break like a potato chip.

Colbert: I’m sorry, like a what?

Reeves: Like a potato chip.

Colbert: Did you hear it happen?

Reeves: I did not hear it pop because of the scream.

[Winter LAUGHS; Colbert GROANS]

Colbert: How? What were you doing? Pratfall or something?

Reeves: Okay – uhhh. I was doing a scene . . . we were doing a cold-water plunge with [writer, director, and cast member] Aziz Ansari and [cast member] Seth Rogen. And then, I was going back to the dressing room, they had a carpet – covering the carpet, there was a little thing and I caught my foot. I had a towel and I was cold and I was shuffling in my little ding-ding [sic]. And I caught my foot, and then I was like, whoa! And then I spiked and landed right on my knee.

[GROANS from audience, Winter, and Colbert]

Reeves: And then pain ensued.

Colbert: Potato chip.

Reeves: Yeah. Then it did that, then I couldn’t walk. But then I went to the hospital and they drained the blood.

Winter: And then you being you, you just kept shooting.

Reeves: I kept going.

But yeah, it made a lot of people laugh.

[LAUGHTER]

Colbert: That you potato-chipped your patella?

Reeves: They just said like, “You’re John Wick, and you just . . . .” I can’t swear, right?

Colbert: We can always bleep it.

Reeves: [BLEEP] broke your [BLEEP] [BLEEP].

Colbert: Sadly . . .

Reeves: The director’s like what? Aziz is like what? I can’t film because you broke your [BLEEP] kneecap. Sorry.

Colbert: We sadly lost, as I showed the interview before [in the Late Show’s segment before the Reeves-Winter interview], the great Diane Keaton [1946-2025; she died on 11 October at 79].

Keanu, people loved you two together in 2003, “Something’s Gotta Give.” Do you have a memory you can share of Diane Keaton in shooting this with her before we go?

Reeves: You know [to Colbert], and you know, too [to Winter]. We all know what an extraordinary, unique, special person and artist Diane is, was, and is. It was cool for me. I got to shoot the scene. Nancy Meyers directed. But it was Diane and Jack Nicholson at a table in a restaurant in Paris. And just watching those two legends, not only act, but insult each other.

[LAUGHTER]

You got a taste of it, I saw the clip that you shared. [An “attempted” interview on 30 April 2012 from The Colbert Report on Comedy Central.] She was almost like the same thing that she did to you, which was just like, she would turn to Jack, ‘You’re just a . . . you are a blah, blah, blah.’ And he’d be like, ‘You dirty, rotten . . . .’ They’re just grinning and they are insulting each other with love.

Winter: It sounds like our play.

Reeves: Yeah. The intelligence, the humor. But just watching them just be themselves and with the history and art that they worked.

Colbert: Alex, Keanu, thanks so much for being here. “Waiting for Godot” is currently at the Hudson

Theatre. Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves, everybody.

[The Godot post I cross-references above is a brief development and production history of the play.  Allow me to say a few words here that may reiterate what I wrote in 2009 on that post.  (Then I’ll list all the posts on ROT that pertain to Waiting for Godot.)

[First, let me pick up something Alex Winter mentions above: Samuel Beckett was an Irish writer who wrote often in French.  After studying modern languages at Trinity College Dublin, he took up a teaching position in Paris.  There, he was introduced to the Irish writer James Joyce, with whom he worked for years as a sort of assistant-cum-secretary.

[Beckett remained in Paris until 1930, when he went back to Dublin as a lecturer at Trinity College.  He stayed only until the end of 1931.  He traveled through Europe, writing essays, reviews, and novels, some of which were published and some were not.  As he did all this career, he wrote in both French and Englis—often in French first.

[After another short visit to Ireland in 1937, he returned to France to settle permanently in Paris in 1939, despite the start of World War II.  Though he made trips to England and Ireland, Beckett never lived there again.  When Germany invaded France and occupied the country in 1940, he joined the Résistance, and eventually had to flee Paris for a small town in the south, where he remained for the rest of the war.

[Beckett never stopped writing throughout the war and even his refuge and resistance efforts in the south.  He wrote Godot in French between October 1948 and January 1949.  (As I note above, the French version of the play is entitled En attendant Godot.)  After 1947, he wrote most of his works in French first.

[The point want to stress here is that Beckett didn’t just write Godot and his other works in French and then translate them into English.  He rewrote then in English.  The variation in the titles of En attendant Godot and Waiting for Godot isn’t the only difference between the to versions of the play.  Throughout the texts, there are differences—some small and subtle, some more prominent and significant. 

[The play’s titles can be a hint.  Waiting for Godot is a play about ‘waiting.’  But waiting is a static action.  When most people wait, they sit and read—the waiting rooms of offices everywhere are full of old magazines for people to read!  Maybe the waiters people-watch.  Still not active.  Today, with portable computers and internet-connected cell phones, maybe they work or play.  Not active.

[But En attendant Godot, as I noted above, means “while waiting for Godot.”  It’s about what Didi and Gogo do while they wait.  And remembering that the two characters are clowns—tramp clowns in the mold of Chaplin’s Little Tramp or Emmet Kelley’s Sad Willie—what wild activity would ensue . . . and does!  (Beckett loved music hall and clowns.  He was taken with the Marx Brothers and his 1965 movie Film starred Buster Keaton, the great silent-movie pantomimist.)

[And now, that list:

       •  “History of Waiting For Godot” (30 March 2009)

       •  “Thoughts on Waiting For Godot” (1 April 2009)

       •  “More Thoughts on Waiting For Godot” (3 April 2009)

      •  “Is Waiting For Godot Trash?” (17 April 2009)\

      •  "Beckett by the Madeleine" by Tom F. Driver (25 January 2018)

[And two that might be of less interest, performance reports on two productions:

•  “Waiting for Godot (Gare St. Lazare)” (31 October 2015)

•  “Waiting For Godot (Druid Theatre Company)” (21 November 2018)

[Don’t forget the post on 18 October, the News Hour transcript of the segment with Reeves and Winter of 10 October.]