Much has been made this month of its being the 50th anniversary of the first production of Waiting for Godot, which Samuel Beckett wrote in the late 1940s in reaction to a newly post-nuclear world. But the influence of Beckett’s metaphysical vaudeville has been so profound that it’s hard to believe the play is only 50 years old. What did we use to refer to when confronted with pratfalls and the void? What were the wrecked Lear and Gloucester, kibitzing near Dover, before they were " Beckettesque " ?

Of course, Beckett’s tragicomedy has become an icon of the Absurd. And unlike iconic works by, say, Shakespeare or Chekhov, which are regularly wrapped in auteurist concepts, it always looks more or less the same. ( " A country road. A tree. Evening. " is how Beckett’s terse description of the play’s barren landscape reads.) The late playwright, in an attitude maintained by the guardians of his estate, was notoriously insistent that his plays be performed as written, right down to the setting and stage directions.

Beckett himself directed Waiting for Godot in Berlin in 1975. His assistant on the production, Walter Asmus, subsequently transposed the staging to New York in 1978, with Sam Waterston and Austin Pendleton as symbiotic tramps Vladimir and Estragon. Now Pendleton steps to the other side of the burnt-out tree, trading pained feet for urinary trouble and halitosis to play Vladimir to John Kuntz’s Estragon at New Repertory Theatre. Rick Lombardo is the director of the production, which appears to marry Beckett’s idea of the play, which he described in Berlin as " a game in order to survive, " to the notion of a makeshift theater in which the piece becomes a sort of performance game. But some of the master’s ideas, particularly those pertaining to what Asmus describes in a diary piece (included in the 1986 Grove Press anthology On Beckett: Essays and Criticism) as " themes of the body, " appear to have trickled down. Kuntz’s excitable Estragon reacts the same way every time he’s reminded that the pair are chained to this spot in suspended time, whiling away the hours deprived of carrots and suicide, because they are " waiting for Godot " : he winces and hugs his head.

It is perhaps a mark of its greatness that, though Godot has been famously described (by the critic Vivian Mercier) as a play in which " nothing happens . . . twice, " and I have watched that nothing happen a great many more times than that, it never loses its baggy-pants beauty for me. This is not a brilliant production, and it eschews the Irishness of the film version recently seen on PBS’s Stage and Screen that was directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg and starred Barry McGovern and Johnny Murphy. But it’s good enough, with Pendleton better cast as the more rational and reflective of Beckett’s companions in limbo, Vladimir, than he was as King Lear (to whom he brought an Alzheimer’s-like frailty in the 2000 New Rep production). Vladimir is the caretaker among Beckett’s tramps, and the 62-year-old Pendleton seems almost a father figure to the pique-inclined Estragon of Kuntz, who is in his 30s. (The age difference is unusual, but, hey, these guys are timeless.)

In terms of personality, Pendleton’s Vladimir is laid-back, almost avuncular, though Pozzo’s maltreatment of Lucky rallies him to a fighting stand. Pendleton may bring too much intelligence to his half of Beckett’s universal-schlemiel team, executing their comic routines to avoid existential panic; he sometimes seems more professorial than vaudevillean. But his intensely quiet delivery of the speech near the end of the play, in which Vladimir comes to grips with his and his friend’s meaningless place in the nested eggs of a meaningless universe ( " Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? " ), rings with a lovely, ironic understanding. Kuntz, on the other hand, executes some very funny business, as when he makes a protracted meal from a carrot the size of your pinkie. But his Estragon at times exhibits a manic quality that’s more Kuntz than Beckett.

As the master-slave duo of Pozzo and Lucky, who show up in each act to pass the time and deliver the news that man is born " astride a grave, " Ken Baltin and Bates Wilder work well. Baltin is a dapper, even charming tyrant who does seem to suffer genuinely at the onslaught of Lucky’s philosophic diatribe on God’s indifference. And Wilder, imposing in bald pate and big coat, is a somewhat sinister slave. His big speech, earnest but lurching increasingly out of control, suggests exegesis by Frankenstein’s monster.

Fiftieth birthday or not, it’s always worthwhile to make the reacquaintance of Godot, and the New Rep gives Beckett’s masterpiece a respectable go. So, what are you waiting for?