Theater: Winnie's Wake

Happy Days (by Samuel Beckett) pursues the playwright's favorite thesis that life is slow death. The setting is a scorched plain, blazing with light. Throughout Act I, Winnie, the so-year-old heroine, is buried up to her waist in a mound of earth; throughout Act II, she is buried up to her neck. So much for action and plot. For subplot, her husband Willie scuttles in and out of a hole behind the mound, and, keeping his back to the audience, leafs through a yellowed newspaper.

Under these static circumstances, the play is not the thing,...

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