Photo Credit: Ross E. Zentner
“Oh, this is a happy day,” says Winnie repeatedly throughout Happy Days, reassuring herself with self-distorted optimism as the world around her says otherwise. Winnie, is, after all, buried up to her waist in earth, while her husband, Willie, sits behind her, quietly reading his newspaper, barely listening to her non-stop prater and garrulous chatter.
And this, after all, is a play by Samuel Beckett, the master playwright of existentialist themes. Consider a bleak existence, creeping ever so slowly to the finality of non-existence. It is that “slow creep” toward life’s end that Beckett exhumes and places front and center: A reminder of what we all ultimately face. No wonder Winnie is such a cockeyed optimist!
Renaissance Theaterworks has mounted a courageous and comical production; “courageous” in doing a play far from the commercial crowd and “comical” in bringing out the inherent humor in Beckett’s word games, often filled with ambiguity and symbolism leaving the audience to ponder its surface strangeness.
Director Marie Kohler has mounted a remarkable production that always engages, and is at times, extremely moving. This is all the more challenging given that Winnie is up to her waist in earth in the first act, her neck in the second. Husband Willie, is rarely seen and barely heard except for grunts and the occasional verbal utterance.
But the two actors—Laura Gordon and Todd Denning—masterfully exemplify a long married couple that ignore and repeat and reassure and then ignore. And the ritual continues, much like Winnie’s ritual of emptying her purse, placing ordinary items on the mound around her and then replacing them at day’s end.
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With virtually nonstop monologues throughout the play, Gordon gives a career-defining performance among her many fine acting (and directing) roles over the years. Her Winnie is so real, so three-dimensional we forget her physical entrapment within the mound of earth. The range of emotions are so complex they appear simple, tossed off but their impact is directly felt. This is a woman who longs for just a hint of any remaining love, a semblance of companionship. But the only people paying her any real attention is the audience. And we are duly rewarded with a mesmerizing performance.
“What is one to do?” muses Winnie near play’s end. “All day long. Day after day...” All she can really do is fill the endless moments...with memories of happier days.
Through Feb. 16 at the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theater, 158 N. Broadway.
