In 1957, when I was a boy of twelve, I appeared on stage as the angelic messenger in Samuel Beckett's difficult play Waiting for Godot.

Is Mr. Godot coming today? Tomorrow? He'll get back to you on that one.

That was my role, night after night, in so many words. Godot isn't coming. You can wait, or not, it doesn't matter. Vladimir's breath stinks and Estragon's feet stink. Or is it the other way around?

Heady stuff for a boy of twelve. I had a great time dressing up in rags for this San Francisco Actor's Workshop production. My father, Joe Miksak, played Pozzo, who enters stage left leading Lucky, his servant, on a leash. In one act Pozzo is stylish, smart and in control. In the other, Pozzo is in rags and blind, and Lucky can't speak. Or was it the other way around? It's Absurd, that's what it is.

Much of this came back to me recently when I sat in a motel room in Willits with film maker Jake Adams. He's making a movie about the night the Actor's Workshop took Waiting for Godot to San Quentin prison.

Noisy prisoners smoking in a big room with a linoleum floor. Bright lights, chatter, tension. On the way in we passed displays of convict-constructed model ships and interesting licence plates they had made. In those liberal days of "rehabilitation" inmates were expected to make things, learn a trade, even think sometimes.

We were treated like celebrities -- Sam Beckett at San Quentin -- what a concept! The theme -- waiting, waiting and more waiting, and for what -- couldn't have been more apropos in a room full of lifers and long-timers. They liked it. They didn't throw things at us. They applauded for a long time.

A young film student from the Midwest, Jake Adams, has interviewed surviving cast members, and the director, Herb Blau, and some of the inmates, and a guard. He's collected stories about Waiting for Godot, like the time a group of German prisoners performed the play in a local church, with the connivance of the warden, and scored a smash hit, no one realizing that the actors lived by day in the local prison. This really happened, Jake assures me, and he's interviewed some of THEM, too.

It's going to be quite a movie, if Jake raises the funds to finish it and has the luck to get it shown at festivals.

Jake suggested I take a look at The Theatre of the Absurd, a book by Stanford professor Martin Esslin, first published in 1961 and still in print in a Penguin paperback edition.

Esslin begins his book with a description of that infamous San Quentin Godot performance.

Esslin's chapter on Beckett's life and work brought back memories and helped me figure out, after all these years, the role I must have played. I had the perfect Absurd experience, an enigmatic role in an enigmatic play. I knew little, understood less, and played a character unable to answer questions other characters desperately tossed up.

Professor Esslin notes there were 1400 convicts at the performance. It was the first live play performed in San Quentin since 1913, when Sarah Bernhardt had made a celebrated appearance. I wonder if anyone in the room that night remembered the great Bernhardt from 44 years earlier?

Esslin writes: "The curtain parted. The play began. And what had bewildered the sophisticated audiences of Paris, London and New York was immediately grasped by an audience of convicts."

"Godot is society" one convict told a Chronicle reporter. "He's the outside," said another. A teacher at the prison reflected, "They know what is meant by waiting... and they know if Godot finally came, he would only be a disappointment."

For me there is another important lesson: don't underestimate your audience, and don't ever write anyone off. They'll surprise you every time.

Aired Friday December 1, 2000 at 8:35 am and Sunday December 3, 2000 at 6:55 pm