Beckett's "Happy Days' by the Lantern (2nd review)

Samuel Beckett's Happy Days (1961) was the last of his multi-act plays, and it forms, with Waiting for Godot and Endgame, a trilogy of reflection on the postwar, post-nuclear Western world. Like Godot and Endgame, it is essentially a two-character play in which one protagonist wants to talk (or command), and the other doesn't want to respond (or obey).

In Godot, the landscape is vaguely barren, with only a single tree on an otherwise featureless plain. This could be a nuclear aftermath, but also just moorland, or the remnants of Eden, with the tree doubling as both the one whose fruit doomed paradise, or as the one from which Judas hanged himself (Gogo tries to hang himself at the end of the play). In Endgame, the suggestion of nuclear devastation is stronger; the world outside Hamm and Clov's refuge is described as poisoned and uninhabitable.

In Happy Days, there is no form of shelter, at least for the principal character, and no remnant of hope. The world is a blasted rubble from which any distinction between a natural and human environment has vanished: neither a desert nor a ruin, but a pileup in which each seems to have run aground on the other. The only "presence" in the play is a shrill alarm bell whose ringing is a peremptory summons to a sterile and eventless day, and whose return signals the suppositional coming of night.

A signal to sleep

Actually, there is neither day nor night in Happy Days; when Winnie, the play's heroine, wakes to the alarm, the sun—"hellish," as she describes it— is already directly overhead, nor does it descend as the notional hours pass. Winnie imagines that time passes, and tries to regulate the round of her daily activities accordingly, but all that actually happens is that the bell rings again in due course, which Winnie takes as the signal to sleep, i.e., night.

But if the sun has not descended, does it simply vanish, or is it extinguished like a lamp? Do stars take its place? Since Winnie is asleep, there is no witness. Nor do we know whether the alarm is in fact a summons to wake or a command to sleep, as a prison bell might be. It's just a fact, a raw datum of experience to which, apparently, Winnie gives her own meaning.

Condemned to sight

In Waiting for Godot, the tramps argue about whether it is night or day, and in Endgame, the distinction becomes meaningless ("Bare interior" and "grey light" are all the set directions Beckett gives). Pozzo goes blind in the first play and Hamm is blind in the second, while Winnie seems, if anything, condemned to sight.

The play begins with the bell that wakes her, and her eyes pop open. The audience finds her buried to the waist in a dirt mound. Willie, her spouse, lies behind her, out of sight. What lies in front of her she is less able than forced to see, unvaried even by the play of light or weather. The only things whose position she can change are the contents of her cornucopia-like bag, and even this is taken from her in the play's second act, which finds her buried up to the neck.

Mother Courage without a war

Who is Winnie? An apocalyptic Everywoman, obviously; a Mother Courage without a war. But Beckett gives her a distinctive social position, that of a woman clinging to a middle-class respectability she has scarcely attained. One can imagine her as lace-curtain Irish, still fearful of betraying her origins and hence desperately concerned to keep up appearances. This is absurd, of course— even more absurd than the existential void in which she has been cast— but it is all she has, her only possible activity, and therefore her heroism.

Like any great role, Winnie is inexhaustible, and one can only judge a given performance by the facets of character it reveals. Billie Whitelaw was memorable in creating the role; Fiona Shaw was a bit brassy for my taste in the recent production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; Fran Hoekstra, not a professional actress, invested Winnie with humor and sweet dignity in a production a few years back in Coatesville.

Mary Elizabeth Scallen now essays it for the Lantern Theater in its opening production of the year. Her timing seemed a bit off at the beginning, but she grew steadily more assured as the long first act progressed (if that's the word).

A satire on marriage

Winnie's role is a monologue, anchored only by the largely notional presence of Willie, who throws in an occasional grunted response until his full-dress appearance at the end of the play. He is nonetheless essential to what one might call the play's inaction, since a good part of Happy Days— from a certain perspective, perhaps the most important part of it— is its savagely minimalist satire on marriage. But Winnie knows that she may have to do without Willie some day: He may die or simply fall silent, and her monologue is in large part an anticipation of that moment.

All our speech— "astride of a grave," as Beckett says in Waiting for Godot— is a preparation for solitude, and Happy Days is, in another of its many aspects, a gloss on that point. Scallen is startlingly different in Act II, her hair askew and her smudged face beaky and fierce. Her illusions have fallen away one by one, and so have her remaining options, including suicide. She is left, really, with only one: to outstare the void that surrounds her. This is, perhaps, indistinguishable from madness; but that, in turn, is the last extremity of heroism.

In contrast to Winnie, Brian McCann's Willie must put almost all of his characterization into the slow crawl he does to the front of the stage at the play's end. Whether he means to say hello or goodbye is left uncertain; but he utters nothing— the ultimate retort of the husband.

Meghan Jones's effective set utilizes the Lantern's restricted space to good effect, as does Christopher J. Hetherington's lighting. I'll carry the image of Winnie's head against the pitiless disk of Hetherington's sun for a long time. The Lantern's season is off to a good start.♦


To read another review by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
To read another review by Pamela and Gresham Riley, click here.