1. Their names aren't Vladimir ("Didi") and Estragon ("Gogo"). They aren't near a lone tree on a country road in an unnamed location. Their isolated existence isn't interrupted by Lucky and Pozzo. Nor are they waiting for Godot.
No, their names are Marvin and Lloyd. They are alone in a shanty on a frozen bay in Wisconsin, ice fishing. They are waiting for Cubby, the host of a local television fishing show, and his crew. Their isolated existence is interrupted by Ernie the Moocher.
Much like Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Fred Alley's musical Guys on Ice explores the tedium of waiting and before long we in the audience, should we choose to, face the tired reality that much of our lives are spent waiting, waiting in lines to vote, register our cars, purchase our groceries, to go through the line at he buffet, for our food to arrive at the restaurant. We wait for the doctor to be ready to see us, wait to get our hair cut, wait for babies to be born, wait for buses and trains to arrive, wait for test results; some of us wait for a kidney; others wait for the rapture; we even have rooms with chairs and magazines designed for us to wait.
It's absurd. Both Samuel Beckett's and Fred Alley's works, very different in their approaches, explore the absurdity of waiting. How do we fill the time waiting? What do we talk about? What do we hope for? Don't we often tell ourselves that much of this waiting we are doing is worth it because, at the end of the waiting, we will be delivered into something better? We wait for the person in front of us to get off the treadmill at the gym because walking on it will improve our health. We wait in long lines to vote believing in the promise that it is a good thing to participate in a democracy and we hope that the winner will help deliver us into a better life. And so on.
Often we talk while we wait. That's what Marvin and Lloyd do in the shanty while they wait for Cubby to arrive, televise them, and deliver them from their hum drum lives. Marvin lives alone and has a crush on Bonnie a local grocery store checker who has a tattoo of a Green Bay Packer helmet on her tush and Lloyd lives a life of quiet desperation, eating frozen waffles and tv dinners. His wife has left him to live with her parents because Lloyd wants to to watch Sunday's Packer/Bears game at Lambeau Field rather than celebrate his and his wife's wedding anniversary.
So Marvin and Lloyd talk and sing about love. They discuss their dreams. They talk about fishing and fishing and fish become their way of talking about everything. Much like the gravediggers in Hamlet, who try to break up the tedium of digging Ophelia's grave by discussing philosophical questions, so, too, do Marvin and Lloyd combat the tedium of the shanty and waiting for Cubby by philosophizing and singing songs about what makes fish different than people (do fish feel pain? do they think?), about fame, about the glories of a snowmobile suit, and, ultimately about mortality, occasionally interrupted by their mooching pal Ernie.
Guys on Ice could just have easily been entitled Waiting for Cubby. Over the years, people who think and write about these things have had endless discussions about who or what Godot might be. We know who Cubby is, but what does Cubby stand for in this play and will Cubby ever arrive and will Cubby help deliver Marvin and Lloyd out of their ordinary lives into something bright and transformed?
Well, I wish I could tell you to go to the 6th Street Melodrama and Theater in Wallace, Idaho and find out. But, Christy, Everett, Carol, Molly, Travis, Zoe, Cosette, and I were audience members for the last performance Sunday afternoon. My brother-in-law, Paul, played the role of Marvin and the production succeeded in making the fun-loving audience at today's show laugh at the way this musical exaggerates and pokes fun at the culture of ice fishing in Wisconsin.
As I watched this show, though, I thought it was more than a series of satirical sketches. I enjoyed thinking about its place in the great tradition of Waiting for Godot, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the gravediggers in Hamlet, and the wide wonderful world of the theater of the absurd.
2. Before going to the play, I started to prepare my contributions to Thanksgiving dinner. I'll be making a cornbread and sausage dressing and I made a pan of cornbread, broke it up, and the pieces are in containers in the fridge. I also brought our turkey out of the basement to thaw in the fridge and began to see what I needed to do to get ready to make the cranberry sauce I'll bring over to Christy and Everett's. I think I'll make the dressing and refrigerate it on Monday so that the flavors have plenty of time to blend together. I think I'll make the cranberry sauce on Tuesday and read up, both days, and on into Wednesday on the fine art of roasting a turkey.
3. After going to the play, we all crowded around Carol and Paul's table for Sunday Family Dinner. Today was Paul's 59th birthday, so the evening began with Paul opening his gifts. Carol fixed a taco soup and a generous green salad for dinner and we had plenty of tortilla chip strips, grated cheese, salsa sour cream, and guacamole to compliment the salad and soup. We topped off dinner with pies: a keto pecan and a strawberry. It's a rare time right now in the Roberts' home as all three of Carol and Paul's daughters, Molly, Zoe, and Cosette, are home at the same time. Carol and Paul are beside themselves with joy.
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