Jesse Aaronson and Franklin Bongjio on Waiting for Godot

In true Beckettian form, actors Jesse Aaronson and Franklin Bongjio spoke with me over the liminal space of Zoom, faces floating on screen as they talked about their roles in the ongoing Jamie Lloyd Broadway revival of Waiting for Godot. Both actors are rising breakouts on the Broadway stage, with Aaronson marking his Broadway debut in Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt and Bongjio already a familiar face in the Lloyd crowd as a former understudy for Lloyd’s A Doll’s House. This season, Aaronson and Bongjio return to the stage as understudies for the respective roles of Vladimir/Lucky and Estragon/Pozzo in Samuel Beckett’s iconic play.

From the start, the actors veered away from championing the individual and instead focused on the intimate relationships and mentor-mentee dynamics that played out backstage—as Bongjio underscores the centrality of “human-to-human relationships” in reading Beckett. In these moments of reverence, Aaronson and Bongjio emerge as a duo well-suited to support The Jamie Lloyd Company’s most anticipated show of the season, with both actors taking on the literal “shoes” they have to fill and holding each other to masterful heights from a place of immense care and respect.

Even with formalities chipped away, the actors’ jokes seemed to land with a certain Beckettian verse so that Aaronson’s playful comment about the plethora of globular fruit—tangerines and lots and lots of grapefruit—in-between rehearsals felt reminiscent of the circular stage design of the production, a black hole of non-escape. In fact, both actors were in their dressing room over Zoom, standing by for another day of performances as the production continues its run. After the interview, they gave me the honor of vicariously snooping around their dressing room, panning the camera to a bowler hat, two pairs of boots, and a thousand-page Beckett biography, amongst other objects of interest.

For audiences who might not know much about what an understudy does, could you share a bit about that role and what kind of preparation it involves? Perhaps also follow this up with how you reacted to being cast in this iconic Beckett play alongside this remarkable group of actors.

Jesse Aaronson: Jamie Lloyd, our director, is one of the coolest directors working right now. He’s really an ensemble-focused director, so getting to be a part of his ensemble feels like a pretty distinct honor. I would say every understudy job can be a little different, and sometimes you may be more in the background, sometimes more in the foreground.

My experience [with Waiting for Godot] has been one in the foreground. He’s really welcomed us in, and sometimes would sidle up to us during rehearsal and sit at our table and look at us when things happened. It’s nice to feel we’re an essential part of this, though we’re not on stage every night. It’s impossible to answer how someone creates that space, but some people just have a way of creating this holistic environment where everyone feels welcome.

Franklin Bongjio: I agree completely. This will be my second time working with Jamie, and it still feels like the first time. The procedure is the exact same. All inclusivity with understudies. You are part of the rehearsal space from day one. You are at the table. You are part of every single thing. It’s a very intimate space. Jamie is such a big name, and yet it feels like a skeleton crew when you work with him. It’s almost like one-on-one. He can look at you directly during rehearsal for some unspoken input because we all seem to be on the same wavelength in that space.

Aaronson: In terms of your question about our duties as an understudy, we got to see the process from the ground up. For the first couple of weeks, our job was to absorb everything we could—watch all the rehearsals and take notes where we could. But it was also ever-changing for the first three and a half weeks, so you might draw a question mark or pencil something in, only for it to change the next day or two weeks later. Our job was to watch and be as adaptable as possible.

I’m curious about how you read Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett as actors and whether you’ve encountered his work before. When we learn Beckett in academic settings, we tend to forget that this is a play intended to be performed. I wonder how the performance aspect may have changed or enriched your understanding of the play.

Bongjio: Yes, we have come across Beckett’s work, but there is no way I thought I would be a part of this. When you read it, you tend to think of the greats that have done it—the Patrick Stewarts and Ian McKellens, these big names that have such weight and girth to them. In that sense, Jamie has these things called “drafts,” where for every take, every rehearsal pass, every scene, we could do ten of them. As Jesse was saying, we’re part of the blueprint. Copious notes. Rigorous research. Observation. We started to understand that Beckett is applicable to everyone. Age ain’t nothing but a number.

Aaronson: Yeah, I felt this imposter syndrome of I’m not 30 yet. Am I allowed in this room? Can I do this work? I don’t have enough lived experience for this. [Estragon and Vladimir] reference having this relationship for half a century, and yet it’s so universal. It’s impossible when people ask, What is this play about? because it’s literally about everything. Every theme is in this play. Life. Death. Waiting. Friendship. Love. Hatred. Everything.

Bongjio: I could say Jesse and I have known each other for a hundred years, but that’s not timely or chronologically true. But the essence of what it is—the condition of what it is—is much more than the words themselves, and that’s what we discover in this space and with Beckett specifically. It’s a really important aspect of the play that you just can’t glaze over as an actor. You can’t look at it and go, I’m such and such, I can’t play that. Because it’s really about the human condition.

Aaronson: To your point about Beckett being studied in an academic setting, I think of the example Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves have set. They spent three years with this play floating around in their heads, traveling to the Beckett archives, talking to every person who ever thought about Beckett, and really digging. There is a reference to this work. Beckett is such a classic playwright, and his work demands rigor, focus, and research. You can’t come at it casually. It would be a massive mistake and a colossal failure to come at Beckett casually.

Seeing the dedication that Alex, Keanu, Jamie, Brandon Dirden, who plays Pozzo, and Michael Patrick Thornton, who plays Lucky have thrown into mastering this text set an example for myself. This is not as case of I’m going to do my lines for five minutes every day. It’s Let’s nail this…so I can break down and understand the text because it’s hard to understand sometimes.

I understand Keanu Reeves helped initiate this production, and this feels like such a timely moment for Waiting for Godot to return to the stage. The play has taken on new meanings in different historical moments, from Susan Sontag’s staging during the Bosnian War and Paul Chan’s production after Hurricane Katrina. How does the play resonate for you in our current moment?

Bongjio: It’s spearheaded by Keanu and Alex, and their friendship and chemistry together cannot be overlooked. Because when they speak the words and perform, we’re watching two human beings who have known each other for epochs. They are Waiting for Godot.

It’s somewhat surreal now how it applies to the socio-political landscape. I think it’s more so about how we coexist with each other, especially if you have a partner. There’s always a bit of waiting for something big to happen. Say you have a partner who’s also an artist. There’s this purgatory of time in which we’re both waiting for something to happen. Maybe you’re waiting for your partner to propose. Maybe you’re waiting for your partner to do something, to go somewhere. Everything seems repetitive. Everything seems to be in a cycle. You wake up, it’s the exact same routine.

Whether it’s political or not, I tend to apply Waiting for Godot to the human condition because politics change, and yet we all remain the same throughout history. People don’t change as much; only their environment changes. It reminds me of this Adam Sandler bit on SNL where he’s like, If you go to Italy and you’re miserable, you’re still going to be miserable. You really simmer it down to who we are as people and that imaginary contract we have with each other.

Aaronson: On top of that, when you invite the audience in, they’re hearing resonances that have echoes in the world and with this political landscape. I think we’re living in this slow, boa-constrictor grip of authoritarianism. It’s like, We can all go about our days and see our little movies and come to make our little jokes. But outside, the walls are closing in.

Set and Costume Designer Soutra Gilmore’s stage—this hollowed-out tube—feels like it could cave in at any moment, and there’s nowhere to hide. I think audiences see that and see these little guys stuck on this play set. They’re stuck up there. They’re stuck in their circumstances. They’re railing against it in whatever way they can, sometimes literally banging at the walls. But ultimately they’re there, fighting what seems like a losing battle. We have hope that their love and their friendship is enough to take them through.

I think one of the most devastating moments of the play is at the very end—spoiler alert for a play published in 1952! At the end of the play, Estragon wants to hang himself, but they don’t have enough rope. So Vladimir says, “We’ll hang ourselves tomorrow. Unless Godot comes.” After all of this, there’s still a tiny glimmer of hope that this savior will come and save us. But, until then, you just have to keep trying and keep yourself alive.

There’s a wonderful Chekhov quote that says, “In life there are no clear-cut consequences or reasons; in it everything is mixed up together, the important and the paltry, the great and the base, the tragic and the ridiculous,” which I feel in many ways speaks to Waiting for Godot and its enduring relevance today. How has working on this play renewed your understanding of life, or even the art of living? Any favorite lines you keep coming back to?

Bongjio: Oh, man. For me, it’s when Pozzo says, “One day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die.” I’m thinking to myself—boy, that is miserable. But at the same time, what they have is now. What do we do now? What can we do now? We don’t know what tomorrow holds. We don’t know what just happened. But right now is what we can do.

Because things can become forgetful, which is another motif of the play. What can we do now? What is the impetus? What is so urgent for us to do right now? Now is the most important part. So that’s one of the things that really resonated with me.

Aaronson: I think that part of speech is one of the best things ever written, and the way Brandon performs it gives me chills. I watch him do it every night, and I’m just like, Man, you’ve been touched by something. I feel that way about all the people in the cast, honestly.

It’s such a hard question because you could put a blindfold on, flip to a page, point your finger, and hit one of the most profound things ever written. But one line I think about a lot is “Habit is a great deadener.” It goes with what Frank was saying about being in the now, and this slow grip of authoritarianism. Once you allow yourself to become complacent and let things wash over you and decide I’m going to be passive. I can’t fight against this anymore. I can’t do anything. Then all that is left is the tree. If you’ve read the play, you know what the tree refers to. So you have to avoid habit. You have to fight against that every day.

We’re at this point in the process where we’ve heard the play so much that in conversations on the street, music, and commercials, I hear lines constantly. When I’m on the phone with my mom and she says something, I’m like That’s a line in the play. Every night when we get ready to go, we’re like All right, shall we go? And then we’re like, Ah. We can’t avoid it. It’s burned in my mind at this point. Every single line—the air is full of our cries and our lines.

Bongjio: The music! Our composer, Benjamin Tobias Franz Ringham, who is part of Jamie’s crew, composed the entire score of this production from all of our interactions in the rehearsal space. From day one, we had sound so that we got the heft, the gravitas, the intimacy factor of this world. Benjamin composed every single word, every single motif. That’s something so inextricably integrated into the play that I cannot see Beckett in any other way.

Aaronson: Let’s say we’re fortunate enough to be cast in this play in thirty years or so. Jamie has talked so much about This is not your grandma’s Beckett and this is a new interpretation of Beckett, which I think anyone who sees the play feels. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to go back to the other way, and there’s validity to the other way—Bill Irwin, one of the greatest Beckett interpreters alive right now, comes from that kind of clownish, absurdist place, but this version is grounded in a different type of reality. It’s going to be hard for me when I next do Beckett to come at it from a non-Jamie-Lloyd approach.

These themes are so human that speaking them is like speaking to your husband or your wife or your boyfriend or your best friend—there’s no artifice in it. We’re speaking these words because these words are distillations of human emotion.

Bongjio: You would never think Beckett would apply so much to common parlance.

Aaronson: You mentioned this Chekhov quote. I think people sometimes come at Chekhov from this very buttoned-up Oh, this is a parlor drama. Ooh, pass me the tea. But no, Chekhov is Russian. He’s in his bones. He’s drinking vodka and sweating and having sex and yelling and cursing. Beckett’s the same way.

What surprised me about this Broadway production was how engaging it felt because a core premise of Waiting for Godot is the idea of boredom. But I was fascinated by how this version made boredom fun? I remember hearing audiences laugh out loud, which was not something I expected. As actors, how do you navigate this incredibly nuanced and layered tonal tension? Were there any pointers from Director Jamie Lloyd that helped you work through these challenges?

Bongjio: That’s what Jamie Lloyd is: nuanced. There isn’t a line escaped. There isn’t a line amiss. There isn’t an arbitrary moment. There isn’t some imaginary construct that we have to reach for. It’s in your bone marrow. It’s accessible so long as the space is safe for exploration. All the drafts that we did—it’s like taking a thousand roses and making perfume. It’s distilled to this clear tincture. It’s very digestible. It’s very relatable.

The laughing comes from recognizing the absurdity of a moment. Have you ever been on a subway train and see something and look around and think, Is anyone else seeing this? That’s what the laughter comes from. Of course, on the subway, you can’t laugh out loud because you know you’re guarded. But, in a theater, that safe space invites the audience in. So get your yuks in, laugh! Because that’s the moment when what you’re feeling is real and grounded in truth.

Jamie has a way of selecting people who are akin. I always thought I was offbeat in the sense that I’m sort of awkward, but I’ve never felt that way with him. Jamie is visceral. He is real. He is perceptive. He is lived. He is knowledgeable. Needless to say, Alex and Keanu are theater nerds, too. It’s unimaginable how much theater they know. You think of Keanu as this movie star, so that’s sort of a humbling experience.

Aaronson: Also, Jamie’s core tenet is speaking at the speed of thought. If you read Beckett’s script on paper, he writes all these silences. Sometimes he even distinguishes a long silence from a silence. We played with drafts in the room where we honored every silence, sometimes with thirty-five seconds of silence in between lines. But then, as the rehearsal went on, Jamie went through with a machete and whacked away all of the silence. Dead pauses. He’s like We don’t need to luxuriate in this pause. Think at the speed of thought. Don’t inhibit yourself, and I think that’s what the audience is hearing. They’re hearing this play go at the speed of thought.

We treat the audience like they’re smart. We don’t glad-hand them. We just let them understand what’s happening. You don’t need to understand one hundred and five percent of the lines to get what’s going on. There is recognition. You see what appears to be a domestic marital spat at the top of Act Two, and you can understand that without understanding the twenty layers of subtext or Joycean references. If you get that, all the better. But you don’t need that to understand what’s happening in this play.

Bongjio: You earn those pauses. You can purchase silence by not seeking it. The same is true for the laughs.

Aaronson: I think both of us have to remind ourselves that we deserve to be here, but at the same time, Michael and Alex for me, and Keanu and Brandon for Frank? They have left these shoes to fill. What Michael does with Lucky’s speech is, for me, the most difficult piece of text I’ve ever had to work on. Michael gave me a head start because he did so much of the interpretive work and handed me this rubric that I can execute. But, my god, watching him perform this speech is just incredible.

Bongjio: You know when Vladimir tells Estragon, “Then you can keep [the shoes]” and Estragon replies, “They’re too big?” Every time I say that line, I’m like Keanu’s shoes are too big. So when I say they’re too big, I mean it. But when you ask yourself Am I worthy?, I may not be, but that’s not for me to choose. All I can be is prepared.

Aaronson: Let’s bring the metaphor even further. Vladimir responds with “Perhaps you’ll have socks someday.” For us, those socks are Connor Wilson, Johnny, Veronica, the stage managers, the designers, the other actors on stage, those on lighting and sound—everyone who pushes us over the line.

As we wrap up, are there any moments or memories from your time with the cast that stand out to you? And what would you most like readers of Frontrunner Magazine to take away about you or this production?

Bongjio: Between the two of us, we definitely have a lot. The most memorable thing for me is watching Jesse do Lucky’s speech. I’ve seen him do it here in the dressing room, put on his headphones, and go through it. It’s actually plastered on the mirror as I’m looking at right now. He’s staring at it every single day. But watching him decipher it in such a short period of time was amazing. We used to look at this script as if it were hieroglyphics.

I felt like this is the pantheon of what I aspire to. This is the level. This is the threshold that you have achieved. Because he just did that in his own way with his own fingerprint. It was mind-blowing. I was like What? When did this happen? I’m in the dressing room with this guy all the time. You spend countless hours with him in the rehearsal space, sharing tangerines and grapefruit. So, watching him do that was amazeballs.

Aaronson: I keep thinking of our first rehearsal and looking up at Frank—Frank is much taller than me so we make a good casting pair—to say “You should have been a poet” and him responding “I was. Isn’t that obvious?” I just looked at him and I was like, Man, you are a poet.

In our put-in-rehearsal, which is basically the final dress rehearsal for understudies, there’s a moment at the end of Act One where Estragon says to Vladimir, “How long have we been together all the time now?” and I say, “I don’t know. Fifty years maybe.” You could throw that line away, but I’m looking at Frank like, We’ve known each other for 50 fucking years, dude. We’ve only known each other for a couple of months, but this goes way beyond just two months. We’ve spent so many hours connecting, but I felt this real bond in that moment.

Bongjio: Not to mention that whole run. Jesse saved me from myself so many times.

Aaronson: You saved me right back.

Bongjio: With Beckett, the lines can get repetitive, and there were moments where I was beside myself thinking Have I said that already? But I kept chugging on, and this man knew what was going on in my mind. He saw the panic and supplemented it in such a way that there was a moment where I said Jesse’s line, and then he repeated it back to me as another line. I remember looking away and thinking, Yes. He’s got my back like spinal cords right now. The same thing happened a moment after because I was still reeling from what just happened. But then he did it again. I was drowning at that point, but that desperation was something that he read into as well.

I remember during intermission thinking, I can’t believe he did that. In the darkness of it all, I was just wide-eyed, pupils dilated, trying to seep in everything in, like, I can’t believe he just did that.

Aaronson: That’s the play, man. We have to be holding each other. You got me, and I got you.