"A Berkshire Theater Festival presentation of a play in two acts by Samuel Beckett. Directed by Anders Cato."

Vladimir - David Adkins
Estragon - Stephen DeRosa
Lucky - Randy Harrison
Pozzo - David Schramm
A Boy - Cooper Stanton

Instead of its typical bleak landscape, helmer Anders Cato's production of Samuel Beckett's famous waiting game is set in a bright, white box of a set, turning Vladimir and Estragon's world clinical and claustrophobic as they compartmentalize their daily dreads. This is a "Waiting for Godot" for our age of anxiety. Clearly, this "Godot" is not played in the usual shadows of the imagination but in the harsh light of day with no place to hide.

Sometimes this glaring front-and-center approach at the Berkshire Theater Festival's intimate second stage seems startlingly fresh and modern. But at other times the production is disconcerting, as when the characters too emphatically acknowledge the presence of the audience.

If this fourth-wall-breaking notion is in the characters' imaginations, it makes these Beckett boys pretty resourceful. If not, it makes their existential void far from lonely. Either way, it's an interpretation that skews an otherwise vividly played and imaginatively presented production.

Macon County is changed to Nappa/Crappa Valley -- an update reportedly authorized by the Beckett estate for an earlier production. And though the barren tree is still there in Lee Savage's disorienting, raked waiting room of a set, there's also an ominous upstage door which acts as a constant reminder of something yet to come -- maybe.

David Adkins as Vladimir, aka Didi, and Stephen DeRosa as Estragon, aka Gogo, bring out the comedy in this tragicomedy. But their characters aren't your standard vaudevillian clowns. These are self-aware characters from a different, more contemporary era, with their own updated comic references (Bugs Bunny, Jerry Lewis, Snoopy).

In this production, the two are less a pair of old burlesque vets and more a low-level, jokey drifter-grifter duo, victims of an endless con. Jennifer Moeller costumes the men in outfits that wittily signal them as flimflam losers.

DeRosa is a natural comedian, with a pliable, wide-eyed face and a physical nimbleness. He charms, tickles and endlessly entertains as the weary pessimist. But he is a little too facile in his comic calculations, even as he mood-swings through a wide variety of emotions, sometimes within a single speech. This Gogo doesn't quite strike the depth of despair, angst and terror that lurk beneath the laughs.

Adkins' Didi understands the fear he hides in his heart even as he tries to buoy his buddy's -- and his own -- spirits. When Gogo asks what they are waiting for, Didi responds with a child-like,  "Godot!" It's a fragile exclamation that is part punch line, part defense against the vast unknown. His idiosyncratic tics and quirks are more than comic bits of business but bursts of panic and sorrow that build to Beckett's non-conclusion.

With his bulk and vocal bombast, Pozzo (David Schramm) conveys grand menace, indulgence and power, while being quite funny, too. His relationship with the haunted, punkish Lucky (Randy Harrison) suggests master-slave roles that bring a homoerotic subtext adding to the piece's dark discomfort.

Harrison brings a masochistic and mesmerizing edge to the almost-silent servant. His "dance" is an unexpected piece of mad choreography that is hysterical as it is sad. But it is Lucky's "thinking" speech that becomes an aria, and Harrison nails it, finding an inner logic in a nonsensical and desperate search for intelligence in the universe.

Cooper Stanton brings a nightmarish, other-worldliness as "A Boy," a pale-faced towering youth who emerges from the upstage door as if he were a character from Alice's Wonderland, giving news of Godot's delay. Clearly a young adult dressed in a youth's shorts, he is both creepy and innocent at the same time, like Billy Mumy in an old "The Twilight Zone" episode.