Happy Days

Playwright Samuel Beckett is regarded as one of America’s true theatrical innovators. His surrealist-absurdist plays call for specific and striking imagery and his text is praised as spare and poetic. In Happy Days his lead character, Winnie, is buried to her waist in a mound. By the end of the play, she has sunken into the mound almost entirely. Winnie, in this static situation, can perform only an elaborate ballet of the hands and head using limited props, punctuating the performance with vocal trills, arias, wistful commentary.