THINK AGAIN – A BIG THINK PODCAST
Think Again Podcast
ep. 22
–GODOT AIN’T COMING–
feat. Actor Wendell Pierce
(‘The Wire’)
by JASON GOTS
Free Southern Theater, a company that was created during the civil rights movement, that inspired me to be an actor, first did [Waiting for Godot] in 1966 in the Mississippi Delta. And there’s a great story where the director was standing in the back of the audience and there was a sharecropper, elderly black man who at intermission turned to him and said “excuse me, are you a part of this play? And he said ‘Yes. I’m the director.’ and he says “I can tell you something. He ain’t coming. This Godot. He ain’t coming.”
So here’s this existential play by Samuel Beckett written under Nazi occupation in Paris speaking to a sharecropper black man in the midst of the violence that was Jim Crow in the Mississippi Delta, watching the play and having it speak to his humanity. That’s the authenticity that connects disparate people across time and space.
– Wendell Pierce
Smart people. Surprise topics. Deep fun. This week, actor and New Orleans native son Wendell Pierce (The Wire, Treme), author of the new book The Wind in the Reeds about his work at the local and national level rebuilding New Orleans over the past decade since Hurricane Katrina.
Surprise clips from Big Think’s interview archives launch a deep discussion between Wendell and host Jason Gots about sexuality, generosity, and the power of art across time and culture.
Listen to THINK AGAIN, EPISODE 22 – GODOT AIN’T COMING (feat. Wendell Pierce)