Beckett's "Happy Days' by Lantern Theater (1st review)

The late Rowan University professor Richard Mitchell, better known as The Underground Grammarian, used to motivate his students by describing what would become of their bodies after death. Ultimately their brains and flesh would rot away, he reminded them. "And when that happens," he added, "the only thing left of you will be your words. So choose them carefully."

Mozart, Rembrandt and Marian Anderson might beg to differ about the primacy of words. But for 99% of us, words are the tools by which we define ourselves for posterity. And not just any words. Observers as diverse as John Lukacs, Al Gore and Erica Jong have noted the advantage of print as opposed to talk: Letters, you see, are abstract symbols that the mind must form into words. Thus when you set words on paper (or read them), you trigger a thought process that doesn't occur when you merely open your mouth or listen or watch. That why the Internet— yes, even Twitter— offers the Western world the hope of resuscitating analytic thinking after two generations that were nurtured on TV.

A sun forever at high noon

Winnie, the virtual one-woman cast of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, is a poster girl for Mitchell's maxim. Fate has buried her to the waist in a hole on a barren and rocky plain (a superb set by Lantern Theater's Meghan Jones) where she can't do anything but talk. Since spoken words constitute the only tool at her disposal, Winnie produces a steady stream of cheerful chatter in the hope of making the best of her ludicrous situation. When she talks of happy days or the long-awaited end of the day, she is careful to note that she speaks of "the old style," for in this place the sun is forever at high noon.

The items in Winnie's handbag— cosmetics, medicine, toothbrush, nail file, even a gun— are useless because she's alone and can't go anywhere. Aside from powdering her nose and applying her lipstick, there's nothing else Winnie can do to maintain the delusion that she's still alive. She animates herself by talking animatedly. It is silence that terrifies her. She speaks, therefore she is.

A limited verbal arsenal

Unfortunately, Winnie never took Richard Mitchell's class. Her verbal arsenal consists largely of clichés ("Can't complain— so much to be thankful for"). Her husband Willie is plunked behind her, but she can barely see him because she can't turn around. Besides, Willie is the silent type— buried, perhaps literally, in his newspaper. "You were never one for talk," she concedes. So Winnie does the talking for both of them, just as she always has, albeit without being able to watch his reaction. "I dream you'll come 'round this side where I can see ya," she tells him.

Beckett seems to perceive the afterlife as a place where people's true natures are amplified and exaggerated without the filter of civilized manners. Winnie is above all a talker; Willie is above all a reader; and so they will remain for the rest of time. Neither of them will produce words that Richard Mitchell might consider worth remembering.

Revisiting The Great Divorce

In this respect Happy Days reminded me of another thought-provoking Lantern Theater production last season— Anthony Lawton's one-man adaptation of C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce, which conceived the afterlife as a place where souls are condemned to heaven or hell not by God but by their own psychological baggage. (Lawton's hell bore an uncanny resemblance to suburbia, where by constantly moving farther away from the center of town, everyone gets what they want, except a community.)

A true talking head

By the end of Happy Days Winnie is literally reduced to a talking head, buried up to the neck so that even her arms and upper torso are useless. Now her face is scratched and sunburned, but no matter: She can't see what she looks like anyway, because she can no longer hold up a mirror.

As Winnie, Mary Elizabeth Scallen performs the remarkable task of seizing our attention while remaining immobile through the entire play. She somehow manages to demonstrate simultaneously both the importance and the irrelevance of words. But of course her words are those of Samuel Beckett— one mortal, at least, who passes Richard Mitchell's test with flying colors.♦


To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read another review by Pamela and Gresham Riley, click here.