Happy Days
Reviewed by Taylor Kass
Center Theatre Group – The Mark Taper Forum
Through June 30
RECOMMENDED
“What are you meant to mean?”
That’s the question posed by a passerby when she sees Winnie, an ordinary woman in an extraordinary position — that is, covered up to her waist in sand. And that’s the question likely posed by any given audience member at this alienating, amusing, and confusing Samuel Beckett play. The 2016 Yale Rep production of the simultaneously hilarious and depressing Happy Days is now at the Mark Taper Forum under the direction of James Bundy. This well-executed rendering is one you won’t be able to forget.
The premise is simple: Winnie (Dianne Wiest), a perennially-positive housewife with a philosopher’s soul, has become impossibly submerged in earth, a single speck of life in an unforgiving Mad Max–style landscape (Izmir Ickbal). Yet she goes about her daily routine, chatting to her silent and ultimately useless husband Willie about memories of life in “the old style,” about the varied contents of her purse, about her favorite quotes from literary greats. Still, the never-setting sun is punishing, and the only distinction between day and night is the ringing of an unseen cosmic bell.
A dystopian Mary Poppins with a revolver in her magical bag and a combustible parasol, Wiest, a veteran of Beckett, is simply spellbinding. While this play can veer towards the tedious, her command of language adds nuance, specificity, and immense importance to even the most trivial of comments. Her graceful gestures are imbued with a sense of childlike wonder, and her singsongy voice is as hypnotizing as it is disarming. Not surprisingly, given her vast and impressive stage and screen career, Wiest conquers this demanding role.
Happy Days invites the audience to gawk at the strangeness they witness. Throughout the play, Winnie repeats how comforting it is for her to have someone — anyone — listen to her. There are endless metaphors and meanings to unearth in Happy Days: the apocalyptic effects of climate change, the crushing monotony of time, the triviality of life itself. But Beckett’s plays are also strange for the sake of being strange, for seeing what happens when the mundane is translated into the bizarre, and for relishing what happens when an Academy Award–winning actress like Wiest has only her face and voice to tell a story.
The Mark Taper Forum at The Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave., Downtown L.A.; Tues.-Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2:30 p.m. & 8 p.m.; Sun., 1 p.m. & 6:30 p.m.; through Jun. 30. (213) 628-2772 or CenterTheatreGroup.org. Running time: two hours with one 15-minute intermission.
