"Not Such Happy Days"
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Stars range from 5-1. |
Ever since its world premiere at New York’s Cherry
Lane Theatre in 1961, starring Ruth White, HAPPY DAYS, Samuel Beckett’s brilliant
metaphoric depiction of man’s existential plight, has received countless
productions. New York’s many revivals have starred a wide array of topflight character
actresses as Winnie—the aging woman who lives out her days partly buried in a
dirt mound—among them Jessica Tandy (1972), Irene Worth (1979), Ruth Malaczech
(1998), Joyce Aarons (2002), and Fiona Shaw (2014). Some of these performances
have been hailed as triumphs, others considered respectable, and yet others dismissed as failures.
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| Brooke Adams. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
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| Tony Shalhoub, Brooke Adams. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
The production, directed by Andrei Belgrader—whose
DOCTOR FAUSTUS is currently at the Classic Stage Company—originated at Pasadena’s
The Theatre@Boston Court and was seen also in Los Angeles and Boston. Its publicity
materials suggest that the play is “newly relevant to a generation burdened by
climate change and environmental doom,” which may be true, but there’s nothing
on stage that specifically calls attention to this or that draws attention away
from Beckett’s original intentions. Beckett, so fastidious about how his plays
were presented that he provided scrupulous stage directions for every movement
and even took to directing them himself (his 1979 staging of HAPPY DAYS with
Billie Whitelaw can be viewed on YouTube), might have argued with some of Mr.
Belgrader’s choices. Essentially, though (unlike Mr. Belgrader’s problematic DOCTOR
FAUSTUS), this is a straightforward, respectful mounting that follows most of Beckett’s
requirements.
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| Brooke Adams. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
I suspect, of course, that Beckett would not have been
happy with having the scene where the partly visible Willie, facing upstage, not
only examines an erotic picture (as in the script) but vigorously masturbates
while looking at it; where Winnie, having asked Willie for an encore after he
sings a bit, breaks the fourth wall and encourages the audience to call for an
encore as well; and an extended nose-blowing bit by Willie that goes on ad
infinitum. But such moments are thankfully few and, in general, there’s an air
of Beckettian authenticity to the proceedings.
HAPPY DAYS,
a landmark of the great Irish author's minimalism, is
set in a desolate, uneven wasteland (designed by Takeshi Kata) dominated by a
large mound of scorched grass in which Winnie, a woman of 50, is
embedded up to her waist. The landscape is surrounded by a cyclorama on which
blue skies, clouds, and distant mountains are painted. The lighting, by Tom
Ontiveros, is, as per Beckett’s dictum, “blazing.” This barren world may be
intended to evoke a world of environmental ruination, but it’s exactly what
Beckett asks for; however he may have sympathized with them, issues of climate
change don’t seem to have been one of his main concerns. Other productions have
attempted to suggest environmental issues by incorporating reminders of modern
man’s despoliation of the earth’s resources in the setting, but nothing like
that is apparent here.
To Winnie’s left is a large leather bag in which all her daily necessities are kept, including a pistol, a worn toothbrush, a
magnifying glass, eyeglasses, a bottle of patent medicine, a hand mirror, lipstick,
a music box, and the like, each of which she makes deliberate use of as she
rambles on. To her right is a parasol. At the rear, we can often see the back
of Willie’s head and shoulders, or his raised hand, a ratty straw boater on his
head worn rakishly directly over a carefully draped handkerchief. He lives in a cave,
reached by a tunnel, behind the mound. Beckett makes no attempt to explain
Winnie and Willie’s circumstances; they just are, and it’s the audience’s task
to comprehend the meaning behind the play’s rather accessible concerns as Winnie natters away to the unlistening Willie. She carries out her daily rituals, cheerfully insisting—when inspired by a hint of
positivity from Willie—that this will be a happy day, as human functions become
increasingly circumscribed and life creeps stealthily to its conclusion.
Her hair bright yellow, her décolletage bulging (the playwright calls for “shoulders bare, low bodice, big bosom”), Ms.
Adams, best known for her film work (Days
of Heaven), gives a fine rendition of Winnie; she brings her girlish, still
pretty charm (she’s eligible for Social Security) to bear, finding multiple ways to take advantage of the
limiting circumstances of performing while seen only from the waist up in act
one, and for act two with only her head visible. In Beckett’s own production, Ms.
Whitelaw had her neck exposed in the second act, but Ms. Adams’s mobility is even further
constricted by having her neck covered and only her head seen, thus further
increasing our focus on her face.
She handles all this quite well, is expressive enough
to capture Winnie’s many subtextual transitions, has a lovely smile, and convincingly
conveys the air of a personality whose eternal optimism and fondness for “the
old style” refuses to let her deteriorating condition defeat her; on the other
hand, she emits a rather low-beam intensity, partly because of her voice quality and partly because of the air of lassitude caused by occasionally draggy pacing.
Of course, she can be harsh, joyous, ironic, scared, angry, hopeful, and
despairing, and even hums “The Merry Widow Waltz,” but too often she comes off
as someone who chats mindlessly because there’s nothing better to do than as someone
who’s determined to get something off her chest. Beckett
offers Winnie many funny lines, some rather earthy, but, while Ms. Adams's performance
rolls on by more or less amusingly, there’s a dearth of laughs in it. There’s also
not much of the pathos needed to move us.
While it’s important to convey the tedium of Winnie’s
endless days in a world where the sun never sinks and sleep is incessantly
interrupted by the raucous ringing of a bell, the audience itself shouldn’t feel
the dullness; this, however, especially in act one, is what happens. Ms. Adam’s portrayal of this now iconic role, while far from a failure, misses
being a triumph and falls into the category of “respectable.”
Mr. Shalhoub is totally unrecognizable as Willie; he's scruffily bearded, wears a
comical hairpiece suggesting baldness and stringy, unkempt, gray hair, and looks
like a homeless man, unlike the more elegant look of shaved head and well-groomed handlebar mustache affected by Leonard Fenton in the Beckett-directed version.
He grunts his few lines, spoken mainly while facing upstage and reading the newspaper, rather than sharply enunciating them, like Fenton.
In the final scene, where Willie emerges in top hat and tails and
crawls toward Winnie, seeking either the gun placed by her side or Winnie
herself (Beckett is deliberately ambiguous), Mr. Shalhoub’s Willie goes through
all sorts of physical exertions as he seeks to get traction on the mound, none
of which Beckett calls for in his script, although others (like George Voskovic
in the Irene Worth production) have done something similar. We can perhaps excuse
this on the grounds that, after all, an actor of Mr. Shalhoub’s stature needed something notable to do in a play during
which his character is largely invisible.
Other Viewpoints:
New York Times
The Guardian
Talkin' Broadway
New York Theater
HAPPY DAYS
Flea Theatre
White Street, NYC
Through July 18
Other Viewpoints:
New York Times
The Guardian
Talkin' Broadway
New York Theater
HAPPY DAYS
Flea Theatre
White Street, NYC
Through July 18