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Two friends wait for god beside an x-ray-cum-time-machine, eating invisible shirts and speaking into their bras like megaphones. They’re joined in their theological vigil by a man named after a vegetable and a narcoleptic goat who just might be god. Welcome to the sixth dimension of time, a place where cartoon physics rules and the stage collapses into the page. Bodies fold into fictions. Samuel Beckett switches places with Sarah Kane. Welcome to Waiting for God, a realm where the laws of literature are superseded by apocrypha’s fever dream.
Vi Khi Nao’s latest is a closet drama in which the closet is the mind, the mind’s eye, the cosmos, an x-ray, an x-ray machine, an intimacy, a little cell that wants to split in two but can’t make up its mind. Is it I, or is it AI? Only the most infinitesimal instrument can tell, and she’s not telling.
-Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne
In Waiting for God, Vi Khi Nao blows up the who’s on first humor of Beckett’s classic, creating a hypertrophic aperture through which all of our current moment-our disappointments, our romances, our violences, and, yes, our deities-pours out. At times it is philosophical, hilarious and dadaistic. It is a bawling, brawling portrait of our time that refuses to ever cohere into the kind of static quality that portrait of our time suggests.
-Johannes Goransson, author of Poetry Against All: A Diary
Take this x-ray / time machine. This body. Its desire to reconcile its inner and outer selves. Its gender that misses its old gender. An ancient depression. A conversation about God or a goat or a goat God and the myth that we most constantly live in through all dimensions-the one about how and why we go on if no one loves us. If not ourselves. In Waiting for God, Vi Khi Nao brilliantly calls into question all of our beliefs, our many ways of being, with a blood-thinning, acid-slick humor that tremors through a lively wild and sometimes wooly cast of characters as they quite literally roam across the page. Vi Khi Nao’s work demands a kind of attention we so rarely give to the multilayered reality written into the body. Is this a play that queers Beckett? Perhaps. Is this a play passionate about the art of carrying story? Its shock collar of pain? Its screaming into the bra cup void of delight? Absolutely.
-Jen Rouse, author of Riding with Anne Sexton
Nao’s play takes Beckett’s canonical Waiting for Godot and masterfully has it perform magic she taught it in secret (via radiography, in the galvanic space between surgeon and patient). You may find yourself flabbergastedly confronted with the cinema of time. It is an absolute delight.
-Sarah Burgoyne, author of Because the Sun
