Happy Days: Samuel Beckett’s trouble in paradise, at the Taper
Dianne Wiest as Winnie in “Happy Days.” Photo © 2019 Craig SchwartzThe Woman in the Dunes Dianne Wiest is splendid in Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days” Where are we? On a scraggly, sandy, near-barren hill, with a corseted woman buried up to her waist. She’s dressed entirely in black. It’s a very bright day, the sky as blue as can be, the sun unrelenting. Samuel Beckett wrote his absurdist, existentialist “Happy Days” in 1961, and it premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1962. It’s now at the Taper and starring Dianne Wiest (an Academy Award-winner who starred in Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters” and “Bullets Over Broadway”). The production, directed by James Bundy, is simple and austere, and yet open to many interpretations. It’s a two-person play, Wiest as the middle-aged Winnie and Michael Rudko as her preoccupied husband, Willie, but for all intents and purposes it’s one incredible monologue. Within reach Winnie has a satchel and an umbrella, and from the first of these she pulls out toiletries, a mirror, a magnifying glass, and even a pistol. She reads labels from bottles (“Fully guaranteed, genuinely pure,” etc.), and chatters away: “It’s going to be a happy…
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