Barrelhouse Reviews: Waiting for God by Vi Khi Nao

Review by Jesi Bender

Apocalypse Party / January 2022 / 98 pp

Abigatra: Does time exist inside of us or outside of us?

I am not a Beckett expert but I have seen different renditions of Waiting for Godot and I have a collection of Beckett’s works in my library: Molloy, Malone Dies, Endgame, and The Unnameable. I’ve read them but can’t say I necessarily understood every element. So, everything I glean from Vi Khi Nao’s play is informed by this background knowledge but not dependent on it. Throughout this review, I try to acknowledge references but also appreciate this work for its own merit. One commonality I realized right away: what I enjoy about Beckett’s work is exactly what I enjoy about Nao’s work—it takes you on a journey where it is impossible to predict where you’ll end up. Even when the work is based on another work you’ve already read, like Waiting for God is, it is impossible to predict how it will veer or turn. I love how reading Nao’s work means never knowing where you’re going to end up.

For Beckett fans, this play is as if his two tragicomic acts were squeezed into one. Indeed, there are Vladimir and Estragon equivalents—though they are now women named Eliquis and Abigatra—and there is a lifeless tree in the form of an x-ray machine. There are also Ponzo and Lucky correlates in the form of a man named after a German turnip and a very tired goat. Nao imagines the premiere production in March of 2036 with the main roles being played by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the (male) Thai director of Memoria, and renowned poet Elizabeth Bishop, who happens to be dead. The remaining cast and crew are full of famous artists, most notably Samuel Beckett himself, 47 years after his death, 14 years in the future. The inclusion of this imaginary (or perhaps “alternative” is a better word?) production history might seem arbitrary or funny (which it is), but it also introduces a major theme, temporality, to the reader. At its root, this play is about our relationship to time and how we experience time corporally.

Eliquis: Who asked us to wait?
Abigatra: The x-ray machine.
Eliquis: The x-ray machine says that?
Abigatra: Look at the ticker on top. It clearly says, “Wait—
Eliquis: (reads with her) For God.

The characters are expressly directed to wait for God; they are given a sign. So it might seem at first glance like Nao is rendering fully literal something that Beckett made enigmatic. But Nao’s God is not as straight forward as He or She might seem. While God is named, it is not defined and it seems to exist only in spaces outside of being. Readers never understand what God is except as a space of change. A space of becoming, rather than being. Potential. In that way, I don’t see much difference between Beckett’s Godot or Nao’s God.

Nao places the action in the 6th dimension of time with an x-ray machine. She states simply:

ACT I

6th dimension of time. An x-ray machine.

This detail is deceptively important. It elicits the Many Worlds Interpretation, where many timelines/worlds exist simultaneously and they all originate from this 6th dimension. It is a womb, in other words, for literally all of creation (including all of possible creation and all that never-was or never-will-be). It is also a space where movement isn’t dictated by causality and you can travel across history as well as across different versions of the universe. The audience soon learns that the x-ray machine also seems to possess this ability.

Though the x-ray machine is referred to by male pronouns, we learn that it changed its gender when it became a time machine. When the machine is referred to as the time machine, the character uses “she” as its pronoun. As a “male,” the machine views your insides, exposes you internally. It creates images of things unseen. But, as a “female,” it takes you inside itself and transports you. Eliquis wonders if God would “be okay if the x-ray machine became a better version of himself, a.k.a. GOD?”

Throughout the play, Nao juxtaposes man and woman, signifier and sign. She reinforces how gender is complicated by the binary through these two characters and their future relationship with Kohlrabi. Without giving too much away, I can say that it is incredibly interesting how Nao plays with gender and gender performance and uses it as a tool for how the characters understand each other and themselves. When the two characters discuss Abigatra’s depression, she says “[t]here was a chemical imbalance” in her and Eliquis reasons that it was from her “binary voices fighting each to maintain one voice.” Abigatra agrees, acknowledging that the “final voice manifested as gender.” Nodding to Beckett, Nao uses this space to explore the existential absurdity of a binary, be it man from woman or machine from God.

There is an intelligence in these pages that will appeal to readers who enjoy contemplating big questions and analyzing stories important to our histories and cultures. Abigatra and Eliquis discuss foundational stories ranging from Job to Zeus to Moses to Icarus. At every turn, they question meaning and introduce new ways of understanding. At one point, they discuss Cain and try “to imagine what it is like to love someone God wouldn’t love.” Like Milton’s Satan, everyone falls in love with Cain because he was unloved and flawed and jealous and so very human.

Another challenging element, in the best possible way, is the unconventional symbols strewn throughout. Eliquis tells the others several times that she is a blood thinner and Eliquis is indeed a brand name for a blood thinner. What is never exposed, though, is that Abigatra seems to come from Dabigatran, a medical term for blood thinners. So Abigatra could be seen as an archetype or model from which Eliquis derives. Knowing this very subtle clue adds a level of complexity to their relationship that is increasingly evident throughout the play. Is it the id versus the ego materialized in their bodies? Or is it that Eliquis is the material, exterior representation of what Abigatra innately represents?

Other names are equally interesting and complex. Kohlrabi is the name of a turnip, and the women refer to him as “Mr. German Turnip” or some derivative throughout the second half of the play. I never arrived at a satisfactory reason for this appellation. I do know Nao uses food imagery a lot in her other writing. There could also be some relation between this character and a root vegetable that we harvest from beneath the ground. A person “rooted” perhaps in a specific reality or understanding. Lastly, there is the goat that comes in halfway through the performance with Kohlrabi. He is called Ngủ, which we’re told is the Vietnamese word for “sleep.” Ngủ is the Naoian “Lucky” in this work but, like a Puritan virtue name, we understand through its name and actions that Ngủ symbolizes the unconscious, at once a freedom and a void. The women rationalize that this goat might be the God they are waiting for but quickly become disillusioned when all it does is sleep. Abigatra rationalizes “[m]aybe he doesn’t know what to do with our prayers, so he shits and then sleeps.” Is God a void, ignoring them, “not loving” them like he did to Cain? Or is he just overwhelmed with our needs, tired by our wants? The latter seems to reflect an early, Buddhist-like assertion by Eliquis, who questions if “wanting things to stay the same is a sign of goodness.” Sleep might be the only place or time or space where we are free from want.

Does an understanding of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot help the audience enjoy this play? Yes. it is it necessary? No, not at all. There is obvious inspiration here, but Nao’s story is intricate and possessing and stands very resolutely on its own. Plus, I find this work more fully resolves than Beckett’s play. Though still far from a traditional plot, Waiting for God has more connection between the characters and more emotional catharsis. What these plays share is a questioning, a vague outline from a distance, and an originality of voice. The fact that neither follows the traditional “road map” for a story is where most of the similarities lie. Nao, with her creativity and singular artistry, has the potential for Beckett-level greatness, and Waiting for God encapsulates all of the best qualities I’ve seen across her repertoire.

One last note to consider—I was struck after finishing the play that Nao never says in the beginning that they are in the 6th dimension and there is a time machine. It could be understood that way, of course, but it also could be seen as Nao telling us that the 6th dimension is a time machine, a tool that essentially began as a camera and transformed into its opposite. A machine that uses our bodies as film to transport us and, with sign as signifier as signified as sign, takes us someplace completely new.

Jesi Bender is the author of the play Kinderkrankenhaus (Sagging Meniscus 2021), the novel The Book of the Last Word (Whiskey Tit 2019), and the forthcoming chapbook Dangerous Women (dancing girl press 2022). Her shorter work has appeared in Fence, Split Lip, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn, among other places. She also helms KERNPUNKT Press, a home for experimental writing. www.jesibender.com