The Work of Poverty

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• How did Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot come to be performed in such places as San Quentin Prison
• Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement
• Sarajevo under military siege
• New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina
• And Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street protests
• The Work of Poverty: Samuel Beckett's Vagabonds and the Theater of Crisis studies the appeal of Godot to audiences in settings of historical crisis and suffering
• Lance Duerfahrd argues that these circumstances transform the performance and the reception of the play
• Thereby illuminating a cathartic and political dimension of Beckett's work that goes unseen in traditional performance contexts
• The resonance of one of the most canonical plays of the twentieth century within landscapes of disaster fulfills the aesthetic of ultimate penury that Beckett hones in his work
• Here the subtractive and reductive dynamic of the Nobel Prize-winning author's craft comes into clearer view