The Unexpected Sweetness of Bill and Ted’s “Waiting for Godot”

“Waiting for Bill and Ted”; “Bill and Ted’s Existentialist Adventure”; “Party On, Godot!” How could we not make cracks after Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, that most righteous duo from the classic 1989 slacker movie “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” announced plans to star in a revival of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”? In the 1954 text, Beckett stipulates that his tragicomedy—two Chaplinesque tramps wait for a prospective employer (or savior?) Here the set becomes a comedy generator, a set of curving sides that Reeves can lean against and slide bonelessly down. (Lloyd has Thornton wear a Hannibal Lecter-style bite mask, making his Lucky more menacing than his supposedly frightening master.) Good Night.,” a play by the German collective Rimini Protokoll, which ran for only three days in September, at N.Y.U.’s Skirball Center.