Happy Days

In the first act of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days Winnie, the heroine, finds herself telling a little story. It's about a couple named Shower (or Cooker) who stand and watch Winnie for a while, Winnie being buried up to her waist in a mound of earth. Mr. Shower (or Cooker), after drooling some obscenities, asks "what's the idea? what does it mean?" The success of Happy Days is to provide an answer so subtle and dramatic that the audience, in reaching for it, becomes a virtual participant in the play.

The power of Happy Days lies in its tremendous economy and concentration. Society is almost gone, having been reduced to Winnie, who is slowly sinking into a mound of earth, and her husband Willie, who is rarely seen or beard. Time has entirely disappeared; the sun shines brutally and endlessly, and silence is punctuated only by the shattering ringing of an electric bell.

Winnie, increasingly immobile (in the second act she is buried up to her neck) and denied the escape of death, is forced to assert her existence through Willie and her "things" a bag, a comb, a toothbrush, a revolver. The smallest objects become signs of life, and assume a life of their own. The parasol may burn up, the glasses may be smashed, but Winnie knows that they will mysteriously return, unharmed, to sustain her endless day, and she cries with appropriately endless irony, "That is what I find so wonderful, the way things...(voice breaks, head down)...things... so wonderful."

The major sources of Winnie's "happiness" are Willie and her "story." It is Willie who above all rescues her from the "wilderness of herself," who blows his nose, occasionally answers her questions, and finally, with a supreme effort, tries to crawl up Winnie's mound. There are long periods of time, however, when Willie does not answer, and Winnie must rely on her "story" of frightened childhood and traumatic sexual experiences, on fuzzy memories and garbled quotations to create the illusion that she is not alone.

To present this mixture of irony, absurdity, and high courage, director Richard Blau fashioned a very intelligent and well-integrated production. Technical mishaps occur, but the relationship of the actors to each other and to their objects is never sloppy or thoughtless. The set, by Joe Inglefinger, is a minor masterpiece of earth mound, rolling desert, and twilight sky (all accomplished within the technical limitations of the Adams House Dining Hall). Seated inside the mound, Diana Allen Delivers Winnie's two hour near-monologue of madness with a dazzling range of style-dirty-old man, guilty-little-girl, calm, logical lunatic. With converse skill, Armand Pohan creates a vivid Willie without showing his face or speaking more than fifty words.

Blau admits that Happy Days, with its two characters and mound of earth, is a difficult and ambitious play, more ambitious than large productions which pretend to encompass a "great event." For Beckett and Blau wish to do nothing less than tell the truth about the human condition, as they see it, and to tell it obliquely, comically, and ironically-which is perhaps the only way it can be told. They also wish to close the gaps between the actors and the play and between the audience and the dramatic production. In the few places where they fail, the audience unknowingly receives a respite of puzzlement. (What does it mean?) But where each succeeds, the audience is given an intense image of itself, mercilessly exposed under the blazing sun.

Happy Days stands apart from most Harvard productions, for it speaks not to your historical or social mind, but to something much deeper, perhaps not to your mind at all. Other plays in Cambridge can provide light entertainment, or tell you something about the American Revolution or even about human nature in general. Happy Days, in the most direct way, will tell you something about yourself.