The good folks over at Vulture just shared a terrific video excerpt from the New Yiddish Rep’s production of Waiting for Godot, which is playing in New York until September 21, and which—as you may have guessed from the company’s name—presents Samuel Beckett’s classic 1953 play entirely in Yiddish (with English supertitles).
The video picks up in the middle of act 1, at the beginning of Lucky’s theological soliloquy. As Vulture‘s Jesse Green aptly points out, Lucky’s meandering, stream-of-consciousness philosophizing is transformed by Rafael Goldwaser’s mournful rendition, which evokes the tones and rhythms of traditional Ashkenazi davening (prayer).
[h/t Jesse Green at Vulture](Image by Ron Glassman, via New Yiddish Rep)