Michael Shannon, Ajay Naidu, and Paul Sparks in Waiting for Godot.

There are certain folk songs, like “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” that shock you when you realize they were written not that long ago, in a world with cars and telephones, by a specific human being with a bank account, an address, and a name that isn’t “Trad.” In the same way, I’m never not taken aback by recalling that Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot premiered in 1953. How can an ageless thing be only 70 years old? How can it be seven years older than the Beatles, and also ancient, and also perpetually new? Like all objects in the rearview mirror, Godot is closer than it appears — but whether a production can make it feel close is another question. To take on Godot now is to tackle two major hurdles from the outset (yes, out of several hundred, but bear with me). First: encouraging audiences to laugh — despite the craggy, serious portraits and the potentially unhelpful filing under E for “existential,” Beckett the dramatist had more in common with Buster Keaton than with Kierkegaard. And second: endeavoring—at the same time, in the same breath, and in the face of this aura of ageless familiarity — to make sure the play still hits where it hurts.

With film and TV regulars Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks donning the dirty bowlers and too-tight boots this time — as Estragon and Vladimir, respectively — Arin Arbus’s Waiting for Godot feels vigorous and down-to-earth. It leaps right over hurdle No. 1 (the night I saw it, it kept several little kids in the audience giggling regularly — a pretty marvelous sound to hear while watching Beckett). If it doesn’t always clear hurdle No. 2, well, that one’s very high. And perhaps, in this particular moment, we walk down the street with enough clear and present dread weighing down our pockets. Perhaps we’re already aware that every street is, eventually, Vladimir and Estragon’s empty country road and what we need most right now is to hear the play’s humor — its dry reminder to speak neither well nor ill of our generation, for “it is not any unhappier than its predecessors.”

In an interview with Jonathan Kalb, the resident literary adviser and dramaturg at Theatre for a New Audience, Shannon and Sparks dig into how personal this Godot is for them. The project started with Shannon pitching it to the theater, where he and Sparks (who’ve made several movies together) performed in Ionesco’s The Killer in 2014. After that project, Sparks told Kalb, “I put a mental note beside Mike’s name that said, Just do whatever he says to do from now on.” Shannon adds, “I rely on Paul to help me get through my life … I can’t imagine playing Estragon with someone playing Vladimir I barely know. I can’t imagine that — it seems so weird. It seems like you shouldn’t even be allowed to do this play with somebody you don’t know. That’s ridiculous.” He’s not wrong. The play requires a pair of actors whose relationship feels lived in, as worn and frustrating and hard to let go of as Estragon’s boots. Infinitely open and structurally shatterproof, the play lends itself to any number of interpretations, and Arbus and her Didi and Gogo have gravitated toward a particularly bittersweet one. Here, Godot feels like a play about a marriage.

Of course, our clown couple begins, as they always have and always will, on that country road with its leafless tree. Since the look of Beckett’s play is lodged in our psyches as deeply as its language, any choice a director and her designers make, no matter how subtle, is going to have red flashing arrows pointing toward it. Arbus and scenic designer Riccardo Herdández’s raked road splits the audience like a runway, stretching all the way through the house, marked along the length of its dark, dirty asphalt with a double yellow line (we shall not pass). Immediately, it jolts us into time: This is a world with traffic, or perhaps it used to be. The long throw of the playing space and the glare of Christopher Ackerland’s footlights — which sometimes bring to mind an approaching semi that, needless to say, never arrives — seem to place us somewhere vast, arid, flat. This isn’t postwar Europe. As far as we are anywhere, we’re in the United States.

And when Sparks and Shannon open their mouths, this hovering sense of Americanness solidifies, landing with the twangy thud of a dropped banjo. Shannon — with his square, stone-cut face and dark, flat slashes for eyes and mouth — has an unmistakable nasal drawl, level and unhurried but never casual, always edged with potential menace. Hunched uncomfortably atop a rock (where he’s been as the audience enters), he tosses his famous first line — “Nothing to be done” — to Sparks’s Vladimir like a guy several beers deep, chucking pebbles at train cars. In response, the lanky, twitchy Sparks leans back on his heels, squints upward and tastes the air, tucking his thumbs into the waist of his pants like a prospector. His “I’m beginning to come round to that opinion” spurs a couple of laughs right away: This guy feels like he belongs in Deadwood. There are whiffs of Walter White in the room, and it’s easy to remember that this Didi and Gogo starred together in Boardwalk Empire.

The fact that Shannon and Sparks carry shades of the Great American TV Nihilists with them isn’t a bad thing here — in fact, it’s remarkably liberating. Unfairly to Beckett, an Irishman in exile who originally wrote Godot in French, the play often feels colonized by a plummy British classical tradition (just listen to Patrick Stewart roll the r in “crucified”). Here, Didi and Gogo have none of that potentially distancing — or self-shielding — erudition. Their clowns are exposed to the elements: We believe that they stink, bleed, and have trouble urinating. Shannon shuffles and deadpans, occasionally erupting with fury, and Sparks — raspily verbose with eyes that glint just this side of crazy — prances about the room with a weirdly endearing mania. Some Vladimirs are very clearly the alpha of Beckett’s pair, but Sparks is finding something a little softer and brighter, a little more wriggly and vulnerable. If he often appears to “lead” Estragon, it’s because he’s still clinging, ever more desperately, to hope. He keeps them here, waiting for Godot. He pushes and cajoles and postulates and tries. Estragon, meanwhile, is the one who turns up each morning having been beaten the night before: He doesn’t share Vladimir’s illusions.

They’re “Tigger and Eeyore,” Sparks told Kalb — and it works. As a duo, he and Shannon have all the chemistry you would hope for from a long history of friendship and collaboration. They play easily with each other, and they render Beckett’s heightened text — which, in less dexterous hands, can fall into monotony — extremely legible. In short, they’re doing what every Intro to Acting class tries to teach, but it’s much harder than it sounds: They’re playing actions, not states. When faced with a run like this —

Estragon: All the dead voices.

Vladimir: They make a noise like wings.

Estragon: Like leaves.

Vladimir: Like sand.

Estragon: Like leaves.

Silence.

Vladimir: They all speak at once.

Estragon: Each one to itself.

Silence.

Vladimir: Rather they whisper.

Estragon: They rustle.

Vladimir: They murmur.

Estragon: They rustle.

— some actors will paint it in a wash: It will all lilt, all sound a bit wistful and homogenous. But we know that Estragon, in some former life, used to be a poet, and when Shannon is forced to repeat himself, it’s with increasing frustration: Sparks’s Vladimir is aspiring — annoyingly — to make pretty suggestions, but Estragon knows the right word. It was his goddamn job after all.

As Pozzo and Lucky, another pair who wander through the space, encountering Didi and Gogo once per act, Ajay Naidu and Jeff Biehl add the right measure of cruelty to the show. With a wide stance, a whip he can crack startlingly well, and an air of unctuous magnanimity — which crumples occasionally into whimpering confusion and neediness — Naidu sketches a clear satire of power. (He’s well known for playing powerlessness, but here he oozes sadistic boss energy.) He’s funny, but he turns your stomach, too. So does Biehl’s Lucky, who pants and strains to the point of drooling under the weight of Pozzo’s baggage. Lucky speaks only once in the play, and when he does, it’s the unstoppable flood of a tyrannized mind, half-broken and half-sharpened by pain — a stream of consciousness churning with nightmarish debris. It’s a milestone speech for an actor, and Biehl pulls it off with sinister force. There’s nothing flighty about his delivery: He sounds stilted and lumpen at first, his tongue long unused — then the wave mounts and crashes. Some Luckys recede into the background for their long stretches without text, but Arbus and Biehl never let us forget this Lucky is there. He’s not a sentimentalized victim or an airy, unbreakable clown. He’s a savagely abused dog, and he will bite.

Near the end of Godot, after Pozzo and Lucky have exited for a second time, Vladimir is left alone for the play’s big turn. Estragon is there, but he’s asleep, huddled up on his rock. Finally, Tigger just can’t bounce anymore. Sparks has spent the second half of the show nimbly avoiding the double yellow line, like a child playing “Don’t step on the crack” — but now, he stands right on it, dead center, as Vladimir has his realization: “At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. I can’t go on. What have I said?” He will go on, of course — that is the Beckett credo: “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” But in this moment, Vladimir has actually seen the abyss, and there is no help for it. Though Sparks captures Vladimir’s horrified shock at his own despair (“What have I said?”), I wished I could have felt the full weight of his preceding revelation. He moves through it quickly without coming down out of the raspy, springy upper register he’s lived in throughout the play. Steering clear of portentousness is one thing, but missing a chance to drop in is another.

Still, the truth of Didi and Gogo is that they complete each other. Though each one wonders whether he “wouldn’t have been better off alone,” that semi has long since passed, rusted, and disintegrated into a dystopian scrap heap. And when Sparks and Shannon are playing together, they light up, finding both Beckett’s wit and his humanity. Their Godot is a play about getting through the day with the person you love the most, the person you can’t stand for another minute — and in that sense, not being able to go, but having to go on, might not be the end of the world after all.

Waiting for Godot is at Theatre for a New Audience through December 3.

That’s the Idea, Let’s Amuse Each Other! Waiting for Godot