Kickstarter

The Godot Cycle will be a production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot that never ends.

We will loop the play in back-to-back repetition, with no intermissions, no breaks, no stopping of any kind for two marathon performances. Our first performance will last 30 hours and our second, 54 hours. The actors playing the two main characters will never leave the stage. They will literally wait for Godot for 54 straight hours.  We are looking to create a hybrid of theatre, performance art and marathon.

There are two worlds within our project, the first being a production of Waiting for Godot that is brave, honest, and completely faithful to Beckett's play. The second is the world around it: the world of the cycle.  The two worlds will mirror each other, and the struggle of the two actors will be a direct reflection of the struggles faced by Beckett's characters.

Imagine in the 54th hour of performing, when one of the actors must turn to the other and say, “Let's go” and the other must respond, “We can't.”

It will be a theatrical event - a battle of wills and a wrestling match between the two actors. Who will be the first to cave? Can they both make it? What state will they be in by the end?

Audience members will be allowed to come and go as they please, watching for ten minutes, four hours or as long as they like. They will be granted readmission with their ticket: once they have paid their admission price they will be allowed and encouraged to come back as often as they like to check on the state of the play and its actors. They can arrive in the middle of the play and leave at any time. The Godot Cycle will be a community event both social and cultural.

In addition, as the two actors playing Estragon and Vladimir endure the cycle, we will be enlisting a broad range of performers to play Beckett's remaining three characters. The characters of Pozzo, Lucky and the Boy will be played, in rotating 4-hour shifts, by as many as 40 different actors. We are gathering an array of artists, some established, some emerging, representing a cross-section of the Toronto theatre community: men and women, all ages and races, husband and wife duos, mothers and daughters, an actor will play a performance of Lucky in the original French, and we are hoping to find an actor to perform the role in American Sign Language. They will all lend their unique voices, constantly changing the energy of the piece. We believe that The Godot Cycle has the potential to be a truly shared event for an entire community of performers and theatre-goers.

It was this idea of community that prompted us to present The Godot Cycle in conjunction with the Toronto Fringe Festival. We will be staging the piece at the central hub of the Festival: the Festival's main beer tents. Two floors directly below the tents is a parking garage, which will be the venue for our piece. This venue allows people to come and go, and experience our event in a unique way. We believe this has the potential to be a stand-out event of this year's Fringe.

Our venue - the parking garage - is a bleak, forgotten, industrial space that we intend to transform into the world of the cycle. At the centre of the garage will be the square where the play will be performed. It will be a platform of wood that will subtly reference our wrestling match metaphor and will look like something forgotten from another time: dusty, broken, organic. Out of the decayed platform, the tree that is central to the piece will climb the pipes of the garage. It will look as though it has been there for years, clinging to the last vestiges of life. On opposite sides of the platform will sit each actor's corner. Surrounding this will be a collection of antique chairs, benches made from planks of wood and cinder blocks, and broken couches that will all have the feeling of worn out furniture from another time. The garage will be lit with an eclectic assortment of lamps and antiquated lighting instruments. Leaves, old newspapers and dirt will litter the floor. The whole space will have the feeling of an abandoned fairground, where the forgotten members of society would have gathered to indulge in traveling freak shows, cock fights and illicit wrestling matches.

Our audience will also be able to monitor the show's progress over the internet. We will have a webcam on the show at all times, which will be broadcasting the cycle to our website - www.thegodotcycle.com - 24 hours a day.

We want you to be a part of this theatrical event, whether it be by donating, watching the show on the internet or joining us in Toronto to witness it live.

Your donations to this project will allow us to bring our vision to life, making you an integral part of the cycle itself. Any donation, big or small, is greatly appreciated. 

Thank you for perusing our profile, and we look forward to seeing many of you in July!

THE GODOT CYCLE

BECKETT'S MASTERPIECE.

2 ACTORS. 54 HOURS STRAIGHT.