Groundless optimism via Beckett

Some six years ago, Charlotte Rae did it on the same East 13th Street stage where the new staging, a co-production of the Classic Stage Company and the Worth Street Theater Company, is currently playing through March 13.
More recently, the great Irish revue artiste Rosaleen Linehan did an unforgettable Winnie when the Gate Theatre, Dublin, brought the full Beckett theatrical canon to New York for one of Lincoln Center’s ambitious summer festivals.
In the new production, directed by Worth Street’s artistic director, Jeff Cohen, DeLaria appears, at least sporadically, to be demonstrating the play, “showing” Beckett’s text to the audience, rather than inhabiting it and living within its parameters.
This is perhaps unavoidable when the role is cast with a comic performer of the broadest stripe. DeLaria, after all, first earned wide attention when she played Nancy Walker’s old role, that of the man-hungry cab driver, in the Public Theater’s revival of “On the Town,” after which she went on to appear in Paul Rudnick’s “The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told.”
In her rendition of Beckett’s foolishly optimistic heroine, there are traces of Ethel Merman and Groucho Marx, not to slight a generous assortment of dialects and cadences heard regularly in the city’s streets and aboard its buses and subways.
As is always the case with Beckett, an argument can readily be made as to the actual meaning of the play. “Happy Days” is perhaps easiest to read as an ironic investigation into the nature of blind, foolish optimism enduring in a cold, indifferent world.
In the first of the play’s two acts, Winnie is buried up to her waist in a gigantic mound of earthen materials. In the second portion of the play, her confinement has reached her neck, and she complains of “tightness” in the rubble, which now engulfs her breast and her arms, which were visible and free at the start of the work.
In the massive set provided by David F. Gordon, the heap of refuse that holds her, an earth-colored monochrome, seems to be constructed of soil, mud, sand, and a liberal number of pieces of fractured masonry. The effect is a little as though she were a shopper who had been the victim of a horrible construction accident.
Much as “Happy Days” may hang in the memory as a lengthy, two-part solo for an actress of a certain age, there is, in fact, a second briefly seen second character, namely Winnie’s husband, Willie, well-played here by David Greenspan.
DeLaria is newly blonde for the occasion, with a pale lime green summer frock, its color repeated in her hat, liberally adorned with daisies.
Winnie’s parasol, probably the play’s most identifiable prop, is a flaming scarlet in this production, matching the hue of the headband of the straw boater that Willie plops onto his shaven head.
The items that Winnie carries in her bag are familiar: the toothbrush, the toothpaste, the hand-mirror, and, of course, the Browning automatic pistol that, in the first act, she keeps within reach, just in case.
This particular Winnie tends to laugh at her own jokes more than is usually the case, and to employ a greater-than-usual range of accents and dialects. At one point, DeLaria seems to be doing a brief impression of Tennessee Williams’s heroine Blanche DuBois.
A bit later, vowing to speak no more, Winnie makes a gesture indicating she has zipped her lip and then thrown away the key. After a moment, she unlocks her mouth and carries on, as garrulous as before.
Another interpretation that is sometimes applied to “Happy Days” is that it is in part an ironic meditation on a long-term marriage approaching extinction.
Cohen’s production emphasizes this possibility by the use of Franz Lehar’s familiar “Merry Widow Waltz.” There is always the suggestion, somewhat heightened here, that when Willie struggles up the pile of rubble in which his wife is entombed and fails to reach her, that he dies. As the lights dim out, Greenspan, dressed in striped, formal trousers and a tailcoat, lies, unmoving, at the bottom of the mound of debris.
Willie is, as Winnie puts it, not the “crawler” he once was. In this staging, the heroine views what may be her husband’s final collapse with what appears to be a form of passive indifference, even as she anticipates “another happy day.”
This comedy, written in 1961, about a third of the way through Samuel Beckett’s career, seems to have been composed in English, as opposed to the handful of plays he wrote in French and then translated into English.
There is in the play, as in a number of Beckett’s plays, a number of suggestions of the writer’s fondness for overt comedy ranging from vaudeville to the antics of the great comics of the silent screen, with particular emphasis on his devotion to Buster Keaton.
While “Waiting for Godot” is undeniably a form of clown show, “Happy Days” is laced through with comic bits, most notably, perhaps, in the second act, when Willie attempts to determine whether or not she is still able to see her nostrils, the tip of her tongue, her puffed-out cheeks or even the arch of her eyebrows.
Most of Winnie’s physical comedy, of course, occurs in the play’s first half, when she still has sufficient freedom of movement to perform, among other things, a few simple calisthenics and a breathing exercise or two.
“Happy Days” is probably not one of Beckett’s more profound plays, but it nevertheless, since it possesses the longest female role he ever wrote, will, in all likelihood, continue to exert a powerful magnetism for mature actresses.