Happy Days
Written by Samuel Beckett
Assistant director: Anabel Gioacobbi
170 Tillary Street, Brooklyn, NYC
September 17-October 3, 2026
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| Claire Beckman. Photo by Mikiodo. |
When the character Winnie in Samuel Beckett's
Happy Days, first performed in 1961, observes that "something has seemed to occur, and nothing has occurred, nothing at all," she could as easily be describing the play itself (as well as other of Beckett's works) as reflecting on her and her husband Willie's existence (and, by extension, all of ours). Brooklyn-based Brave New World Repertory Theatre's current revival, starring company co-founders Claire Beckman and John Edmond Morgan as Winnie and Willie, respectively, brings Beckett's study in stasis to the borough's very intimate Loading Dock Theatre, giving audiences an entrancingly up close and personal experience of what Winnie insists are more in a series of happy days.
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| L to R: John Edmond Morgan and Claire Beckman. Photo by Mikiodo. |
For a play where "nothing" occurs, this production of
Happy Days, under Jade King Carroll's direction, always maintains a sense of forward momentum, never leaving the audience feeling mired like Winnie. Winnie, famously, spends the entire play fixed in a mound–rendered here by scenic designer
Brittany Vasta with an outer layer of thick dark fabric that evokes dirt or rock–buried to her waist in the first act and to her neck in the second. Willie retains his mobility, though he is not actually very mobile and lives around what for Winnie and the audience is the back of the mound, crawling sometimes into an unseen hole and appearing to spectators primarily as a behatted head and shirtless shoulders. Their environment is a kind of wasteland, baking under an unrelenting daytime sun and overwhelmingly lifeless, with Winnie's references to words like "days" and "die" as being "in the old style," echoing the apocalyptic suggestion found in Beckett's
Endgame as well; and the boundaries of each day are signaled by bells for waking and sleeping that ring out from some unknown source (shades here of the earlier
Act Without Words I and
II). Despite this rather unpleasant situation, Winnie commits herself to keeping up a shield of optimism, finding things "wonderful" as often as possible while she follows her daily routine, which mostly revolves around a large handbag containing items such as such as a toothbrush, a nearly empty lipstick tube, and a compact mirror–but also a gun (not one of Chekhov's, though thematically significant).
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| Claire Beckman. Photo by Mikiodo. |
At the risk of commenting on theme in regard to a play that mockingly recounts a man asking of Winnie's being stuck in the mound, "What's it meant to mean?," we might point to concerns with the absurdity of existence and its confining, endlessly repetitious nature (one doesn't have to be stuck in a mound for life to feel more or less like Winnie's), but also to concerns with aging and with (another Beckettian preoccupation) seeing and being seen, here including specifically in the context of a marriage. Winnie frequently recalls her vanished past and says she is grateful to have "hardly any" bodily pain these days, but Beckman's performance–a compelling one in a demanding role–also highlights Winnie's aging in physical details like how she peers myopically at what is written on the toothbrush handle through a pair of glasses or flexes her fingers while she says "Damp," as if in connection to arthritis. While Winnie continues to profess devotion to Willie, many of her thoughts about their marriage are also connected to how time has passed. Present-day Willie, for instance, is generally able only to croak out an occasional brief response, his creaky voice belying the shoulder-length brown hair visible when his head and shoulders are visible over the edge of the mound, but Winnie strongly implies at one point that he's been pretty similarly taciturn since the moment he won her hand. And of course, as an additional element–enhanced at points by
Yiyuan Li's lighting design, composed of subtle shifts in tone except for one key moment of shock–the idea of "the sun blazing so much fiercer down, and hourly fiercer," as Winnie puts it, so that she imagines she might eventually "little by little be charred to a black cinder," hits differently in a time of accelerating climate catastrophe.
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| L to R: Claire Beckman and John Edmond Morgan. Photo by Mikiodo. |
Jane Shaw's sound design contributes to the recurrent sense of unease: jazzy music as the first act begins is overlaid with if not overtaken by an intensifying rumble, which returns at the beginning of the second act sans the music; and sustained drones tend to fade in at times when Winnie becomes anxious or discomfited. Like the upbeat music disappears from the intro to the second act, Beckman gives us a tenser Winnie in Act 2, more exhausted and stretched more tautly. She recounts an anecdote of a child being frightened by a mouse in a nursery as if it were a horror story; but she also still evinces some amusement at her own story of a Mr. and Mrs. Shower, or perhaps it is Cooker. In the first act, she displays much more obvious enjoyment fighting through her supposedly scandalized reaction to a dirty postcard in Willie's possession. The slang meaning of Willie's name hints at his association with the earthier aspects of life, not only sex but also nose-blowing and copious sleep. When we do get a good look at Willie, Morgan invests him with a shaky, ultimately fruitless determination that is simultaneously sad and admirable, and the orientation of his body near the play's end makes it equally possible that he is reaching for his wife or for the aforementioned firearm. When Winnie finally sings, something she has said is part of her daily routine, it is a small, moving moment of beauty from Beckman, an act that one might view as the kind of refusal to be cowed by despair that many of us could stand to see right now.
-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards
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