Happy Days (2017)
Opening Night: May 4, 2017
Closing: May 28, 2017
Theater: Polonsky Shakespeare Center
Academy Award winner Dianne Wiest (Hannah and Her Sisters, Bullets Over Broadway) plays Winnie in Samuel Beckett‘s masterpiece Happy Days. Buried up to her waist and sinking into the earth, Winnie is considered modern drama’s pinnacle female role, an endlessly fascinating spirit of buoyant resourcefulness and unassuming grace in the face of inevitable oblivion. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, compassionate and ferocious, this extraordinary Happy Days, which also features Jarlath Conroy as Willie, originated at Yale Repertory Theatre and is staged by James Bundy, its artistic director.
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May 4, 2017
Who is Winnie? “About 50, well preserved, blond for preference, plump,” Samuel Beckett wrote in his stage directions for “Happy Days,” the 1961 how-bad-can-life-get tragicomedy in which she appears. Or partly appears. When the curtain rises, Winnie is up to her waist in a scorched mound of earth. As embodied by the heartbreaking Dianne Wiest in this otherwise conventional Theater for a New Audience revival, she looks like a weathered Barbie growing out of a Barbie doll cake. Your personal imagery may take you elsewhere. Weirdly, a friend who attended with me thought of Hillary Clinton.
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