A country road. A tree. Evening.

Last night I saw an unusual production of "Waiting for Godot" at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. I'd seen the play before, but this production, by the Classical Theatre of Harlem, has a Katrina overlay -- in 2007 it was staged outdoors in the devastated Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, and now, as it tours, it features sets evocative of that place, and a cast that is predominantly African-American. At the ICA, the set included not only hints of the country road/tree/evening prescribed by playwright Samuel Beckett, but also a bunch of debris and the shell of a house spray-painted with the now-iconic search and rescue marking that indicates, among other things, whether anyone was found dead inside. There was a certain surreal aspect to the ICA staging, because, through the windows of the museum, we could see the booze cruises motoring by in the harbor, offering a strange contrast to the bleak and forgotten landscape re-created onstage.

Barrels of ink have been spilled on the religious themes of "Waiting for Godot,'' so I'm not going to travel too far in that direction, except to admit that I had forgotten how much explicitly religious language is in the play. At one point, Vladimir analyzes the different descriptions in the four Gospels of what happens to the two thieves crucified with Jesus, and later, he muses, "To every man his little cross. Till he dies. And is forgotten." Estragon imagines his previous, but forgotten, interaction with Godot as "a kind of prayer" and "a vague supplication,'' and at another point poignantly asks, "Do you think God sees me?" And then there are the allusions.

This particular production, though, actually invites the audience to step outside the religious realm, because the post-Katrina New Orleans setting suggests that men wait for something more tangible than the divine. The hunger and pain and isolation and abandonment of Vladimir and Estragon, and the madness of the world in which they live, is not in some abstract, far away place, but here, in our own time, in our own country, and it seems possible that what they wait for is us.

(Photo, by Paul Chan, shows J Kyle Manzay as Estragon in the New York production of The Classical Theatre of Harlem's staging of "Waiting for Godot.")