‘Waiting for Godot’ Breakout Michael Patrick Thornton on Keanu Reeves, What Happened to ‘The Savant,’ and Sian Heder’s Next Film

One of the most iconic moments of 20th century theater isn’t two men sitting under a tree, waiting for a God that won’t come, in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”: It’s a long, unpunctuated speech delivered by the character Lucky that makes James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” look like Ernest Hemingway.

In “Sunset Blvd.,” director Jamie Lloyd’s ongoing Broadway mounting of “Waiting for Godot,” also starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter aka Bill and Ted, that speech is delivered by actor Michael Patrick Thornton, who plays Lucky as the mostly silent, muzzled end of a slave-master relationship with Pozzo (Brandon J. Dirden). But the twist here is that, with Thornton being a wheelchair user himself, so is Lucky, which casts the character into a new 21st century perspective.

“That speech is typically looked at as a speed and volume parlor game, like, ‘Holy shit,…