Brandon J. Dirden Is Over The Moon Being Back On Broadway In WAITING FOR GODOT, and This Time It’s Personal

When you put together excellent stars and longtime friends Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, one of the most buzzed about directors on Broadway and the West End, and one of the most iconic seminal classic plays, you get one of the most highly anticipated productions of the fall season.

Enter Brandon J. Dirden, who stars opposite Reeves and Winter as Pozzo in Waiting For Godot. Dirden, a Broadway veteran, sat down with Theatrely to talk about working with Jamie Lloyd, the play’s impact, and what it means to him to follow in his father’s footsteps by taking on the role.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

To start, what made you want to dive into this play? 

I knew I was going to learn something. It's so outside of my wheelhouse, and although I've been a lover of Beckett for so many years, but being able to actually wrap my mouth around in my body, it’s a physical thing too. I mean, his physical language is almost just as important as his words. To have an opportunity, after so many years in theater, to do something I've never done before with just an ace team — you can't pass that up. 

How has it been working with Jamie [Lloyd]? 

It's really activating. What I mean by that is, sometimes you work on a play and you're just trying to do the thing. You're trying to do the play as best as you can to the playwright's intentions or to the group's intentions. But with Jamie, it's more than just doing the play. It's why are we doing the play? It’s a constant conversation of continuing to make sure that it is intentional and purposeful and what we're doing is necessary and that it is landing in a way that is without affectation or ornamentation. He really asks you to get very clear about what it is we're doing. 

Is there anything on or Off-Broadway you’re looking forward to seeing on a day off? 

My son, who is 11, is just really into musical theatre. Now he went down this rabbit hole, and watched a documentary about the making of Chess, and I was so fascinated by all the drama that went into the original production of Chess. Like, why would somebody want to revive this after this story. I'm so curious as to see what, what is it about it that people feel like, “Oh, I gotta return to that thing.” 

Is your son going to come to see this show? What are you hoping he might take away from it? 

He'll probably be there opening night. My son, he's been going to the theatre all of his life. He actually took some of his first steps backstage at the theater where my wife was doing You Can't Take It With You, the Longacre, I believe, with James Earl Jones in the cast. I was filming a series and she was still nursing, so I'd have him and I'd run to the theatre on her two show days and drop him off at the theatre, go film and the understudy cast would be keeping him around backstage, so he's pretty used to the theatrical scene. And so it's just in his DNA. It's probably not a fair assessment on what this 11 year old is gonna take away from the play just because he's so ingrained in the nature of what we do. 

I was talking to a friend last night about this play and why he thought, like, what is the value of doing it today? My friend’s an actor who's done the show before. I'm at a point in my life where it's really important to me that when I make theatre or when I tell stories, the attempt is, and I have no control over the absolute outcome of this, but I want to approach it with as much integrity as I possibly can. And that means that I'm helping to create something that's useful to society. I know it sounds really lofty and aspirational, but why not? I mean, why not be aspirational and lofty when we do a play? It's asking a lot of people for money and time to come and commune this way. I was asking this friend who had done this play, what value do you think doing this play is for our society today? And it was really hard for him to pinpoint a specific codified answer for this play in its simplicity of sorts, it really does cover the spectrum of humanity. It speaks so much to the universal experience of being a human. But that combined with the person's life experience that they bring into them when they watch this play, when they come and experience this piece, that's wholly gonna dictate what they get from it. 

My character Pozzo has this line that is just so haunting: “they give birth to stride of a great age. Light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.” And what else is there? Like you were born to die. But between that, birth and death, there's light. And we are living in the light right now. So what do I hope my son takes away or what I hope anyone who takes away is that we have light right and there are absolutely forces and people who are trying to deceive us to think that, no, it's all dark and there is no light. 

This has to be so fascinating to sink your teeth into.

I think so. Being a part of this production is my first time performing Beckett. I read it. I've studied it. I even taught it at NYU. But being on the inside of it now and having to really get in the muck with it. When I was talking with my friend, it was gonna be like a quick 30 minute phone conversation. We talked for an hour and a half before I was like, “I got dinner ready. I gotta go, man. But yeah, we'll talk again.” I feel like it is a type of fraternity once you break that seal of performing it the first time, no matter what level — Broadway or community theater production. My dad did in 1970 — he played Pozzo — and he talked about this play for the rest of his life. He passed away in April of this year. 

I'm sorry. 

Oh, thank you. It was, it was sudden, but coming to this play at this time in my life, and then I just lost my father-in-law. My wife lost her father a month ago. So while there is grief and there is loss and pain, this play has come at the exact time I needed it to understand, to give me context for what it is we're doing here. This play is so useful to me right now as I'm navigating both of my father's passings. It is really quite serendipitous, the timing of it all for me personally. That was another answer, but you didn't even ask a question. Sorry. That’s what this play does. You just start vomiting up all of those thoughts, those larger ideas of what it is to be human. You can't help because it just keeps teasing it out. To be in conversation with this play, to be in a conversation with your own mortality and also your own immortality.

This work is coming at such a serendipitous time. I'm curious if sharing the role with your dad has had an effect on you on how you've been approaching the work. 

In a way, it has. The word that keeps coming up, and it came up for me as soon as he passed, is integrity. While I try to be an artist with as much integrity as I can possibly muster for anything that I'm doing, because the audience is deserving. And I don't want to shortchange myself in this unique experience either. But I have a different understanding, a different personalization of what that means to me now. Looking at it through my dad's lens, or now through the experience of having lost him, and wondering and being in constant conversation, I do feel like I'm in constant conversation with him throughout the process. This is a show that I would probably have called him and asked him about this and asked about that. I don't have that ability to do that, but I still have his years of influence on me and his years of wisdom and his use of his own questioning. 

I played sports when I was young and I wasn't great. But when I came home from a game, if he wasn't able to be there for whatever reason, my dad only had two questions. It wasn't about, did you win or lose? It was: “Did you learn anything and did you have fun?” Those are the only two questions he ever cared about. I'm really taking that in on this experience. I'm learning a massive amount and I'm having a ball in this room. I'm having a ball knowing that I am exploring a character in a play that he got a chance to do 55 years ago 

You've mentioned a couple of times this theme of learning through this process, is there anything in particular that you feel you've learned about yourself as a person, as an actor?

To name a few, I’m really learning that I'm enough. The play really demands that I bring forward a piece of me that is appropriate in the telling of the story. And it could only abide the truth. It cannot abide a facsimile or an approximation of a character. This role is so unlike what I would have considered to be a wheelhouse. The language, the thought processes, I just don't have a lot of experience in inhabiting characters with these concerns. I'm learning that that's inside of me too. I’m learning we are all, and this includes you, boundless in our humanity. We're infinite in our possibilities. We are rich, we are deep, we're, and most people choose to operate in a very small sphere of safe sphere of what's possible within their humanity. 

What else am I learning? I'll name the, it's probably not an elephant in the room, but the thing that sometimes we don't talk about: what is it like to share space and to share a story with these juggernaut celebrities? We can't pretend that large swaths of the population aren’t curious about what's happening in this room. Like, Bill and Ted are doing this? Is it really earnest? I am learning from them, those two actors and fine human beings, that it is possible to live harmoniously with your legacy and what that is and that iconography and still be quite intentional and specific and truthful with this other thing. 

I'm curious, when you think back on this process, say, 10, 20 years from now, what do you most hope that you'll remember? 

I most hope that I remember that I did everything I could. I left it all out there. I was spent, like there was nothing else that I could have done with the allotted time. That's what I hope. I hope that left no crumbs. I don't make the same choice twice. And it's not like, oh, let me just try to make a different choice and see. No. It is living in the moment of just taking the inspiration and what I'm learning each pass and it may go a completely different direction. And I'm grateful for Jamie Lloyd that he gives us enough rope to do that, to follow that instinct. 

I never imagined that I would be doing Beckett, let alone Beckett on the stage this size with these gentlemen and this director at this time. If you told my 12 year old self who wanted to be an actor, this is what you've been doing, like I would have been over the moon just as I am today. 

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