Collection of American Theater Director Alan Schneider (1917-1984)

SAMUEL BECKETT

Original poster for Waiting for Godot at the Coconut Grove Playhouse. Miami: 1956. Starring Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell. Color printed poster, 22 x 14 inches. Slightly faded, with minor surface wear and soiling.

Provenance: Collection of Alan Schneider (1917-1984); Following the death of Alan Schneider in 1984, these materials were retained by Schneider’s widow, Eugenie Schneider, who died in the summer of 2025 at 101 years old.

The rare poster for the first American performances of Waiting for Godot, directed by Alan Schneider, "the primary American director of Samuel Beckett's plays." Waiting for Godot's first American dates were originally booked for Washington, DC, Philadelphia, and New York. When advance ticket sales for these shows fell short, producer Michael Myerberg canceled the performances and instead booked Godot at a newly opened theater in Miami called the Coconut Grove Playhouse. Bert Lahr, of Wizard of Oz fame, and Tom Ewell, star of the recent hit The Seven Year Itch, had diverging and somewhat unsophisticated readings of Godot; rehearsals were tense and tedious. The play was advertised not as an avant-garde work but as a broad, vaudevillian comedy billed as "the Laugh Sensation of Two Continents."

On opening night, the cast was unprepared and the Miami audience (made up of mostly vacationers) was bewildered, overexerted, and hostile. Over the next two weeks, the actors grew comfortable with the material, and while the audience shrank, the theatergoers who did attend responded with increasing enthusiasm. Still, the damage was done: at the end of Godot's Miami run, Schneider was replaced as director, as was the entire cast except for Bert Lahr. Referring to the "shambles" of these first performances of Godot, Schneider says that he "not only wanted to shoot [himself] and blow up the Coconut Grove, [he] wanted to leave the theater forever." Bert Lahr himself described it as "the biggest flop in the history of the theater."

With all its problems, the Coconut Grove Playhouse run of Waiting for Godot marked the start of a long and very productive friendship between Beckett and Schneider. Beckett admired Schneider's treatment of the play and did not blame him for the production's failure. Schneider would, of course, go on to work closely with Beckett and to direct many of his plays, including Endgame, Happy Days and five more productions of Waiting for Godot.

This poster is scarce. We do not trace any examples having sold at auction, nor do we locate any institutional holdings. It may be a unique surviving example.