What Winnie Finds Wonderful

DESPITE ALL of Samuel Beckett's considerable sympathy for the plight of humankind, his plays show little pity for the people who would undertake to produce them. Almost without exception, his theater pieces require magnificent acting and brilliant directorial interpretation for them to work half well on the stage. With little action to portray and only a few clues to Beckett's true intentions, a theater company, particularly one that's not thoroughly professional, sets itself up for tremendous risks when it tries to give life to the playwright's philosophical musings.

Happy Days, with only one genuine character and no plot to speak of, is Beckett's most theatrically difficult full-length play. It opened in New York in 1961 and closed after only a half-month's run. Since that time performing groups have shied away from it, opting instead for the more popular and more stylized Waiting for Godot. The Harvard Summer School Repertory Theater, which has been ambitious in its undertakings all season long, has taken up the challenge of putting on a dramatically successful Happy Days, and the effort--while admirable--isn't all that exciting.

Beckett's two-act play is a highly abstracted vision of existence and of an enduring human spirit. The major character is an aging and chatty woman named Winnie who is buried, first up to her waist and later up to her neck, in a mound of sand. In spite of her tortuous condition Winnie maintains a constant banter of praise for her life, always hitting upon one thing or another that is "wonderful" about her circumstances. Her day, the start of which is signaled by a mysterious bell, is begun with a prayer, almost too ironical, "to a world without end, amen."

As if her sandy prison were not enough cause for suffering and despair, Winnie is faced with an ungodly personal isolation. Her only company is her husband Willie, who usually remains silent and unresponsive to Winnie's periodic pleas for reassurances. Willie is his wife's opposite; his silence is cynical, a more common, perhaps more reasonable, response to the infirmities of age and isolation.

For almost the entirety of the play, Willie remains hidden behind Winnie's mound of sand--all that is to be seen of him is his bald head beneath a straw hat. But at the play's end, Willie, robbed of life's energy, makes a last ditch effort to make contact with his wife. In a most pitiful manner he crawls around to the front of the dune, only to be greeted by Winnie's cheerful, "My, what a pleasant surprise." The impropriety of his wife's politely jovial remark seems to do Willie in, while Winnie is left operating out of her optimism, happily awaiting the day she is melted away by the sun.

Although Winnie has about 95 per cent of the play's lines (most of Willie's lines are a series of grunts), the couple are co-equal as characters, and the contrast between them is anything but insignificant. Each character presents alternative ways of facing this vale of tears, and Beckett's play only begins to make sense as an exploration of the human condition when the counterpoint of their relationship is fully established.

THE DIFFICULTY with the Loeb's production of Happy Days is largely a problem of interpretation. Director George Hamlin, a leading figure in the drama center's rise to regional prominence, doesn't ever really do very much with the relationship between Winnie and Willie, part of a more general and more alarming failure to allow the questions raised by Beckett to come out in any clear light.

The most crucial element in any stage treatment of Happy Days is the way Winnie's optimism is portrayed; therein lies the play's real philosophical substance. Winnie's happy and resigned demeanor is the thing that sustains her through her travail, and it must be taken seriously. The task facing the director and the actress playing Winnie is to explicate and elucidate her faith, and this is the Loeb's major failing in the current production.

It is hard to fault Joanne Hamlin, the director's wife, for her perforance in Happy Days because she manages to sustain her character in the most difficult circumstances. The role of Winnie is enormously difficult, but Hamlin carries it off with extraordinary finesse. Still, Hamlin's rendition of Winnie's lines comes in a rather sing-songey fashion, and this only detracts from the seriousness of the character. Winnie, though partially a comic personage, is no buffoon and her plight deserves more sympathy than this production gives it.

Willie, because of his dearth of real lines and because he is hidden from sight for so much of the play, is also a hard subject to bring to life, and Dan Strickler never quite rises to the challenge. Willie's desperateness is vital to the play, but Strickler, who has a fine moment as he climbs up toward Winnie at the end, mugs the character rather than really acting him. Willie is also costumed terribly, looking more like Bozo the Clown than a human being worthy of serious consideration.

Happy Days is a play with much comic potential, and for the most part Hamlin and Hamlin realize the play's essential comic value. Beckett, who was 54 when he wrote the script, also has some valuable things to say about the terror of aging, and the Loeb production makes these statements for Beckett with great eloquence.

The Summer Repertory took on considerable risks when it decided to give Happy Days a go; despite some fine comic and theatrical moments, the risks just didn't play off. Beckett's play, intellectually difficult as well as theatrically so, must work as a philosophical exposition on the human spirit in a hostile world if it is to work at all. For that to happen the acting must be especially sympathetic and the play's principals must have a thorough grasp on the deep conflicts that come to the fore. That the Loeb's production is not a total success is only to be expected given the difficulty of the material. Nonetheless, the end product remains disappointing.