Review: ‘Happy Days,’ an Unsettling Glimpse Into the Existential Abyss (original) (raw)
Theater|Review: ‘Happy Days,’ an Unsettling Glimpse Into the Existential Abyss
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Jarlath Conroy and Dianne Wiest in “Happy Days.” In the play’s second act, the earth has swallowed her up to her neck.Credit...Joan Marcus
- May 9, 2016
NEW HAVEN — The image we see when the curtain rises on “Happy Days” is as bizarre as it is bleak, even by the hardly cheery standards of the play’s author, Samuel Beckett. Winnie, the central character — really the only one — is immured in earth up to her waist. In the Yale Repertory Theater production here, the Winnie who greets us after the ringing of the wake-up bell is none other than Dianne Wiest, the Oscar winner and onetime regular in Woody Allen movies who has recently returned to the stage, where her career began.
Ms. Wiest mostly makes a mouthwatering match for the role. Her still-girlish puff of a voice is perfect for Winnie’s indomitably chipper spirit as she spends her long hours babbling merrily, keeping up a bright sheen of optimism, expecting every day to be a happy day, in benign acceptance of her strange predicament. Ms. Wiest can also, of course, drop that voice to a husky growl, as she memorably did in Mr. Allen’s “Bullets Over Broadway.” She deftly uses this register when Winnie’s veneer of satisfaction occasionally, briefly, cracks open to reveal the loneliness and fear underneath.
In “Happy Days,” Beckett presents one of his most powerful emblems of the trap that human life can become. Winnie inhabits a postapocalyptic world, and greets her predicament with an absurdly blithe attitude. But in her dogged attempts to pass the days profitably — brushing her teeth, taking her medicine, filing her nails, attempting to jostle into life her companion, the barely seen and virtually immobile Willie (a convincingly decrepit Jarlath Conroy) — she represents a mordant image of the existential struggle that can haunt us all.
“The fear so great, certain days,” as Winnie puts it, “of finding oneself … left, with hours still to run, before the bell for sleep, and nothing more to say, nothing more to do.”
Like the characters in “Waiting for Godot,” Winnie will go on with her meaningless existence until it ends — if it ever does. She is an embodiment of the unquenchable, unreasoning life force, and also its uselessness against the fates that resign us all to oblivion in the end, and sometimes a living death well before it.
Ms. Wiest and her director, the Yale Repertory Theater chief James Bundy, move us through Winnie’s rambling monologues with a supple feel for their varying texture, from high-flown literary quotations to the halting moments when the tap seems to run dry and Winnie loses track of her thoughts. Ms. Wiest is particularly delicious when she is mimicking an encounter with a couple who came upon her and stood watching in perplexity: “What’s she doing?” “Why doesn’t he dig her out?”
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