Written by Paul W. Brennan. Photos by Timothy Hiatt. Premiered at the Prop Thtr as part of the Rhinofest play festival, February 2020. I performed as Eugene Ionesco, Actor 1, and Estragon.

You just can’t do justice to Samuel Beckett, everyone's favorite bleak 20th century playwright, until you’ve given him his own sitcom. Join a bastardized Beckett and all the antics with his wacky neighbor across the hall, Ionesco, as he fleshes out his pessimistic masterpiece, Waiting for Godot, with hilarious results, in this theoretical pilot for the tragi-situation-comedy nobody asked for!

This show was where I got to cut my teeth as an actor for the first time in 10 years. I’d been performing in solo clown pieces and short plays up to this point, and I saw this longer-form role as a chance to test myself.

To make Eugene come to life, I used everything I had learned from clowning and the Conspirators’ Commedia-driven “Style”, but I knew I needed more. Behind me throughout the whole process was the most supportive creative team—with director-playwright Paul Brennan and my cast consistently inspiring me to go further in my work.

Eugene Ionesco was a mixture of the real playwright himself, Seinfeld’s Kramer, and Waiting for Godot’s Estragon—with behaviors from my dad added for good measure. He was a good-natured and sensitive goofball set against the uncompromising, moody figure of Samuel Beckett. True, these aspects of him made him clownish, and that was my “in” for approaching the character at first; but, the script showed him to have depths I needed to access in new ways. As a measure of how far I had come as a performer in such a short time, I’m incredibly proud of the work I did on this project.