WAITING FOR GODOT opened for the first time in America at Miami Beach at a luxury hotel's theatre. It was billed on the marquee as "The Laff Riot of Two Continents." Appallingly, the Loeb's Godot seems to have followed this Miami-Shlock school of drama approach. Everything is played for a laugh: the broadcast techniques of burlesque and vaudeville. Bob Hope-like gag timing, facial mugging, and borsht-belt delivery make for a jolly evening in the theatre. Unfortunately, this has transformed Godot from the blackest and best of our existential absurdist dramas into a Marx Brothers romp.

Director Harold Scott's conception of Godot is fuzzy at best. He appears to believe that the play is about the brotherhood of man, and the production has been so ethnicized that it makes Beckett into a kind of emcee for United Nations Day. Leland Moss' Estragon seems to have been imported from a Catskills road company of Fiddler on the Roof. His gestures might have been modelled on Menasha Skulnik's, his lines threaten to slip into Yiddish, and the "nu's" and the "oy's" and the Diaspora world-weariness almost crown Beckett the prince of pushcart playwrights.

Roger Robinson's Vladimir is efficiently played, and he seems to capture the right balance of character and lack of identity. Robinson is black, and the idea of a black Vladimir is stunning and certainly feasible. However, it is mind-boggling that Estragon's speech describing Vladimir's world view as "black" clicits from Robinson a clenched, upraised fist. Moreover, such a gesture is tasteless in context.

George Ede's Pozzo is probably the best-played role: simply because he is orthodox (i. e., he follows Beckett's intentions) the part is convincing, assured, and professional. But George Sheanshang as Lucky, Pozzo's bearer, presents a special problem. Sheanshang acts intensely and well, is properly demented, and has bestowed on his character just the right Marat/Sade touch. Yet because his buckskni leggings, his moccasins, his headband, his pigtails, and his blond fright wg make him look like an albino Apache, the spectre of Lucky-as-oppressed-Red-Man is aggressively and offensively present on stage. As an additional ethnic touch. Godot's angelic messenger is portrayed as a Mexican-American, whose appearances are accompanied by throbbing rascados on the Desi Arnez classical guitar.

PUTTING Jews, blacks. Indians, and Mexicans in a play about Everyman may be Scott's way of universalizing Beckett's message. It's not at all clear that the play needs such leaden-fingered tampering. But it is clear that Scott's changing the ending of the play is a perversion of intent. In Beckett's text both acts end the same way.

Vladimiir: Well? Shall we go,

Estragon: Yes, let's go.

THEY DO NOT MOVE.

At the Loeb, however. Vladimir and Estragon smile, exchange hearty fratternity-house slaps, advance eagerly toward the wings as if to leave, and fall short of taking a full exit only by freezing into a tableau. The'Loeb's Waiting for Godot has a happy ending!

As if this bastardization were not sufficient, a robust Lady Soul-like rendition of Let It Be swells through the theatre on the "exit" line. The play also opens with a recording of Let It Be, flooding the Loeb like a gust of Ban. Because Scott's show opens and closes so similarly, the play derives a structure which its content denies, it resolves issues which ought to remain at loose ends, and it manufactures corrugated conclusions where there should remain the gnawing anxieties of ambiguity. And what can Let It Be possibly have to do with Waiting for Godot? The voice of that song is, at the very least, peaceful, and McCartney's crystal words of wisdom are light years from Beckett's terrifying existential despair. Godot isn't about the brotherhood of man; it's about the spirtual death of mankind.

AN ART which trades cruel honesty ett's black universe, in our universe, for happiness is self-delusive. In Beckeven the possibility of happinses is a lie.