The Circle Theater brings hilarious existentialism with 'Waiting For Godot'.

Kenneth Kelleher simplifies Waiting For Godot down to two ideas – comedy and despair – and says both concepts are balanced in playwright Samuel Beckett’s bit of existential perfection.

“If you fail to appreciate the humor, you are swept under the carpet of bleakness,” Kelleher says of the play, which he directs. “The point is you just don’t know what the next day is going to bring – all we can do is muddle through.”

The two-act play follows two friends on a lonely country road as they wait endlessly for Mr. Godot – who they have never met, but are told by a young boy that he will come to visit them. The two men, Vladimir (played by Cassidy Brown) and Estragon (played by Brian Herndon), fill their days with absurd conversation about Mr. Godot and their own existence in the world.

Kelleher has been working with Carmel’s Pacific Repertory Theatre for 15 seasons and despite a fondness for Beckett, this is his first time directing the play. He started reading Irish literature in college and became hooked.

“I like his sense of humor and his acceptance of the bleak aspect of nature,” Kelleher says. “Beckett is a reductionist. There’s a lean muse that really gets to the marrow of his storytelling.”

On stage, that is seen in bare set design and muted, darker colors, so the dialogue can stand out. But that minimalism can cause audience members to see only the desolation and miss the humor in the post-modern writer’s work.

“At the heart of Beckett is a wonderful sense of compassion,” argues Kelleher of Godot. “It’s basically a married couple spatting and going over the mundaneness of each day.”

That mundaneness is the point of much of Beckett’s dramatic work – daily routines in the human condition that are very difficult to break.

The play will be in the Circle Theater, the more intimate, downstairs stage at PacRep’s Golden Bough Playhouse. While the company has a long tradition of producing popular musicals likeThe Buddy Holly Story and Billy Elliot, Kelleher wants to see more absurdist theater and notes that Beckett’s work has been particularly enduring, still remarkably popular and produced worldwide, 70 years after the script was written.

“All I can do is present it how I read it, which is as a comedy with deeper tones,” Kelleher says.

Discounted previews run May 16-17, and the show opens Saturday, May 18.

WAITING FOR GODOT at 7:30pm Wed-Sat and 2pm Sun, through June 2. Circle Theatre, Casanova between Eighth and Ninth, Carmel. $8-$38. 622-0100, pacrep.org