REFLECTING ABOUT YESTERDAY
Happy Days, by Samuel Becket, 1961, Mark Taper Forum
“...Winnie and Willie [may] have fallen into the careless disregard of a long marriage - critic comment
“So little to say, so little to do.. and the fear so great" - Winnie
“...The Taper stage is remade to look old-fashioned: enveloped in rich wood and outfitted with clamshell footlights and a crimson curtain. Is Izmir Ickbal’s design a nod to the elegant life that Winnie and Willie once knew? ... ... refined environment, the desolation of the couple’s predicament — baked in a white-hot glare by Stephen Strawbridge’s lighting — is like a museum diorama...Should we be forlorn as we watch? Or find comfort? Perhaps Beckett is trying to adjust our expectations so that we don’t sink.” review, LA Times
I recalled 30’s movie theaters, sumptuous red velvet and gilt clam shell cake decorations, depicted in Edward Hopper’s painting, New York Movie, 1939, and those Art Deco film houses downtown. Winnie and Willie were once affluent, genteel, refined - he wears spats, a top hat, and tails; her dress is a black strapless rubbery-looking corset,to which she adds a pert hat perched over one brow, an ornate huge umbrella, and a large dusty serviceable black tote. I thought how important my purse is to me,I tend it ferociously, and it’s the one accessory I still want to use to signal “class”.
I didn’t get that Diane Weist was genteel, refined, but I should have; the artifacts were certainly clues. Women of class always protected their skin with umbrellas and gloves.
J and I saw this play years ago at the Taper in May, 1990. Bill Moor (stage actor transitioned to Hollywood film and TV) played Willie; Charlotte Raye was Winnie. (a TV actress who played housekeeper and house mother on Diff’rent Strokes and The Facts of Life) and Part of 50/60 Vision -Thirteen Plays in Repertory; Conceived and produced by Edward Parone: Plays by Edward Albee, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones),Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, directed by Casey Perloff, who directed the off-Broadway production at the CSC Theater.
“...articulate words; gratitude, often; recite the enduring mercies like a rosary; like a diamond necklace; the little miracles that fill and force the time...Rae...is the defiance of the species.
Grace under pressure. Quiet resistance. Winnie against the dying world...Yes, there were isolated pockets of people.. who still thought that anything that came out of Rae's mouth had to be just plain hilarious, but fewer and fewer as the play progressed...
by the time this play is over, you know this Winnie is as frail and conquerable as the rest of us. But much, much braver. The hush that fell on the house in the second half, when all that is left of Winnie is her head, above the sand--her frightened eyes, her endless concatenation of words, her unfathomable dignity--was no accident.” - from Sylvie Drake’s LA Times review, March, 1990
“...In a sudden flash, Winnie's parasol is supposed to be consumed by flames, but when the moment came during a critics' preview, the fire fizzled. Spontaneous combustion resulted in a puff of smoke” - from NYT article about the off-Broadway performance
