talking the tears away
Samuel
Beckett Happy Days / Boston Court Theatre, Pasadena, California, Sunday, September
21, 2014
After
the disturbing ring of a bell, Winnie—in this new production, directed by
Andrei Belgrader, at Pasadena’s Boston Court Theatre—once again awakens in
Samuel Beckett’s clearly resurgent drama, Happy
Days, to, after a short prayer, bless the blue skies of a new day before
dipping into her treasure-leaden black bag to pull out a toothbrush and
carefully brush her teeth. Buried up to her waist in a mound of earth, the
unfortunate but nonetheless nearly always buoyant Winnie, calls over to her
invisible husband Willie to possibly awaken him (he, unlike her is blessed with
the “marvelous gift” of being able to sleep even through the annoying buzzer’s
awakening cry) and proceeds to attempt to read the words on her toothbrush. For
a great part of the first few moments of this play, Winnie continues to try to
make out the words imprinted there: “Genuine”—pulling out glasses and a handkerchief
embedded in her bosom, to clean them, later pulling a magnifying glass to
better see the small words printed on the toothbrush’s handle—“pure…hog’s….setae,”
words of which she can make little sense.
In Willie’s very first personal words of
the play he explains, quite vaguely, that a hog is a “castrated male swine,” a
being, we soon discover, that perhaps might be used to define Willie himself.
But still Winnie can make little sense of the words. We know, or at least those
of us who do crossword puzzles know (admittedly, I am not a crossword puzzle
fan) that “setae” is the plural of seta,
derived from the Latin word for bristle. In other words, the brush is made from
hog bristles, probably by the Wisdom Toothbrush company of the United Kingdom,
whose cheaper versions used hog bristles, while the more expensive versions
used badger hair.
None of this, obviously, truly matters—or,
one might contrarily argue, it matters immensely—being part of Winnie’s
desperate attempts to make meaning in a world that has little or no obvious
significance. For Winnie is a “cock-eyed” optimist, determined to discover a
happy or, “a good day.” She is a doomed being who, as Beckett suggests, is a
marvel simply in her ability to adapt: as she puts it, “That is what I find so
wonderful. The way man adapts himself. To changing conditions.”
In a world in which, admittedly, there is “So
little to say, so little to do, and the fear so great,” Winnie, like any literary
artist, keeps talking, creating a reality that is seldom in sync with the
strange, utterly post-apocalyptic world around her. If Willie says hardly
anything, reading only from an old Irish newspaper about deaths and notices for
jobs, Winnie has something to say about nearly everything—which given her dire
circumstances, isn’t a rich vein for discussion. Indeed, Winnie, herself
covered and surrounded with “several very hard, usually basaltic rocks” (the
definition of “whin”), behatted with a ridiculous flower-topped head piece
(suggesting perhaps the yellow flowers associated with the spiny evergreen shrub
of the other meaning of “whin”), reminds me, in fact, of my 89-year-old mother,
a healthy, partially crippled woman sitting in her assisted-living room (surely
a kind of half-burial of this once active, house-cleaning wizard) who in our
telephone conversations joyfully relays in our conversations the highly limited
activities she weekly undergoes (her visions of the birds outside her windows,
the fact that she is served good food—while unable to recall the specifics of her last meal—sharing a bathroom [something is
clearly abhors], and the occasional visits of family and friends). Winnie,
alas, has even less to report; even the sunny sky makes the heat so intense that
it sets her parasol afire, and the ants (æmettes,
as she describes them, using the Middle English term) she now and then spots
seem to be devouring her. But no matter, Winnie, cleverly moving back and forth
in time, patters on in a kind of “whinny,” like the gentle neighing of a horse,
refusing to give in to the increasingly deteriorating quality of life she must
endure. For her, even knowing that her husband, deep within his hole, might ever be listening to her prattle
is enough; if he actually deigns to respond to something she says, it is surely
“another happy,” even a joyful day!
Winnie, nonetheless, is almost always on
the verge of tears; how could she not be in her absurd condition, where, she
senses, even the audience members (under the visage of a couple named “Shower”
or “Cooker”—both derived from German words, schauen
and gucken meaning “to look”) cook up
questions or shower their misunderstandings upon her in rude insinuations of
disbelief of her situation. Why doesn’t someone simply come and dig her out?
Does she have any feeling left in her legs, any sexual potential left? Just the
kind of questions of a jeering music hall audience—which critics have pointed
out, bares a close relationship to Beckett’s work, reminiscent, perhaps, of his trip to the beachside resort of
Folkestone.
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But still she goes on, just as almost all
of Beckett’s doomed figures do go on, even, if like Willie they hardly stand or
like Winnie they are trapped in the earth to which they will soon return.
Indeed, by Act II, Winnie is buried up to her neck, and is now unable even to
ritualistically dig through her beloved bag to remove and replace the sacred
amulets of her hermetic world. Throughout most of this act, she and we have no
way of knowing even if Willy is still alive. Winnie, herself, fears that he
might be dead, having gone down his hole head first. But the very fact that she
has not heard from him illogically allows her to presume he might still be
listening, permitting her, as Beckett suggests in several others of his works, “to
go on.”
Now, however, Winnie realizes, is very
different from “before.” “Then” and “now” are marked definers of a kind of
before and after that not only demarcate time, of which she clearly has little
left, but separate a once open world, a world even of sexual possibilities,
from her current incarceration. Her memories of her childhood adventure, where
she (as Mildred, the name for Winnie that Beckett had used in earlier drafts)
sneaks into a room in the middle of the night only to encounter a mouse. The
mouse, of course, which causes her to scream out in terror, is a Freudian
symbol of the penis. The memory hints, perhaps, of abuse from a male member of
the house. But it also reminds me, a bit, of Alice’s journey into the rabbit hole
where she encounters the many terrifying figures of childish fear, including a
French-speaking mouse, nearly drowned in pool her tears; in this case, however,
Winnie has somehow been unable to escape those childhood terrors, remaining
partially trapped in the Wonderland hole, a kind of frigid memory of Willie’s
obvious still-active sexual desires.
Willie may, as Winnie suggests, have
always needed “a hand” in his sexual obsessions, but she—as he evidences in the
kiss she implants upon the silver handgun, Brownie, which she refuses to return
to her bag—a bit like Hedda Gabbler, has kept hold of the “weapon,” making
Willie almost impotent, a man left only with pornographic postcards for sexual
relief. Is it any wonder that when Willie suddenly appears in Act II—dressed in
splendiferous, if tattered, formal attire as if he were an agèd, disgruntled bridegroom—he
is probably not as much interested in winning the hand of his “Win”—in his
bumbling, fumbling efforts to move toward her—as in attempting the lay hold of
gun at her side, either to put an end to his own miserable suffering or to
finally silence her, to “win” the domestic battle the two have been playing
throughout their lives. She, of course, perceives it as a last romantic gasp,
another reason to perceive her unbearable position as representing a “good day,
another happy day,” both she and Beckett intentionally defying, as my
theater-going companion Pablo reminded me, Russian playwright Anton
Chekov’s advice: “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is
thinking of firing it.”
Both actress Brooke Adams and her husband
Tony Shalhoub performed admirably as the doomed couple. For a short while in act
one, I must admit, that I felt (like Los
Angeles Times reviewer Charles McNulty) that the purposely slow pace of
Adams’ actions and observations created a kind of tedium that, while perhaps
conveying the emptiness of Winnie’s world, made the play itself a bit tedious.
But quite soon thereafter I began to see her performance as a subtle indication
of Winnie’s endless thought-processes, as revealing the mind behind her
never-ending but constantly shifting fantasies of possibility that she daily
invented in her delirium. By play’s end the fact that we could actually almost
see the gears of her mind clicking in mad determination to turn a forsaken,
blasted landscape into a romanticized vision of possibilities provided a great
depth to Winnie’s bi-polar thinking. In the end, as she “sings her song,”
vaguely humming the “The Merry Widow” waltz—a work many creators have seen as a
kind of delirious sweep into a world of fantasy (one need only recall Orson
Welles’ use of it in his film, The
Magnificent Ambersons and Alfred Hitchcock’s equally perverse employment of
the song throughout his small-town drama, Shadow
of a Doubt [see My Year 2005])—at
the very moment when we perceive that, whether she realizes it or not, Winnie,
having no one left to talk to, may have to purse her lips and stare eternally into
space, reveals not only her insatiable pluck but her utter dementia.
Los Angeles,
September 23, 2014
