Samuel Beckett | Happy Days / 2019

winnie on speed

by Douglas Messerli

 

Samuel Beckett Happy Days / Los Angeles, Mark Taper Forum / the performance I saw with Deborah Meadows on May 22, 2019

 

This past week I saw two famed plays each at opposite ends of Los Angeles, downtown and on the west side, that reminded me just how difficult it is to do iconic plays—works so memorable through previous productions or movie versions of them that it forces a knowledgeable theater-goer to compare them with what has come before them. Both Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (performed at the distinguished Mark Taper Forum, the play directed by James Bundy) and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (at one of the most prestigious LA independent multiplex theaters, Odyssey Theatre Company) recalled similar problems I had recently had with a local production of Long Day’s Journey into the Night, wherein, unfortunately, I kept comparing the actors to the impressive movie production, starring Kathleen Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards, Jr., and Dean Stockwell, directed by Sidney Lumet.

      Fortunately, the case of Happy Days, the central actor was the remarkable Dianne Wiest, one of my favorite actresses on both stage and screen. Moreover, I was too young to have seen the famed Ruth White performance of 1961. But I did, in 2014, see a quite marvelous production of this play in Pasadena’s Boston Court with Brooke Adams as Winnie, and her husband Tony Shalhoub playing a the one-line roll of Willie.

      Whereas Wiest sped through her role, making the partially buried Winne a bit like a train wreck that has left her in the chasm from which she cannot escape, bringing into focus all of Beckett’s hilariously absurd lines—the Taper audience was clearly alert to even the subtlest of the author’s humorous jabs—Adams had performed the play in a kind of slow-mode, revealing the endless repetitions, a bit like Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, of a daily life performed while waiting to die, or to be buried alive.

      It’s not that Wiest isn’t almost perfect for this role, surely one of the best of her now long career; it’s just that I couldn’t help but compare the two performers and the bits and pieces I have seen on archival sites of Ruth White’s version. If Wiest brings out Winnie’s comic embracement of “the best of all possible worlds”—she is, indeed, a kind of student of Voltaire’s Pangloss if there ever was one—Adams was able to demonstrate the poignancy of living while yet representing the absurdity of the Beckettian trope of “I can’t go on; I will go on.”

     Similarly, Michael Rudko as the Taper’s Willie, is a wonderfully comic figure, popping up from his hole just often enough to make Winne believe she is not truly speaking only to herself.     

    And in the second scene with Winnie buried up to her neck, Weist and he came into their own, as the couple finally gently confronted one another and their fears. Weist’s attempt to encourage Willie to come near her so that she can better see him is a touching moment of love and utter frustration, which adds a dimension to her character that almost redeems what I had felt previously as her lack of voiced modulation. And that, in the end, have been the major problem for me: Weist is a genius when it comes to certain roles that demand a kind of one-level type of character: the Woody Allen wide-eyed and somewhat innocent woman or in the role of Honey in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or even the wide-eyed Emily of Our Town; but although Winnie may be a Candide-like figure, she is also a salty pragmatist who has perhaps driven her husband and herself into their tapped lives. I never felt I heard in her voice the full dimensions of these two extremes.

 

Los Angeles, May 26, 2019

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (May 2019).