13 November 1998

Reviewed by Brook Stowe

I have a confession to make. It's about Samuel Beckett. More to the point, it's about the plays Samuel Beckett wrote. People ask, "you like Beckett?" I say, "uh-huh." People ask, "you think Beckett is one of the major voices in 20th century playwriting?" I say, "no doubt about it." So what's my confession? Watching Beckett has always been a grueling experience for me. Do I fully appreciate his unique brilliance? Yep. Do I ponder the fierce veracity of his skewed universe? Without a doubt. But, with every Beckett I've seen over the years, I confess that sooner or later during the performance what I'm thinking more than anything is, "how close is the nearest Denny's and how soon can I get an Ultimate Omelette?"

There's a new group in town might make a change in my thinking. Rude Guerrilla Theater Company has christened their new storefront theatre in Santa Ana with quite possibly the most difficult of all Beckett plays, "Happy Days". What we have here is a woman buried in a mound of trash who prattles on about the minutiae of her life non-stop and nearly motionless for more than an hour. Sound deadly? It can be. It has been. It will be again. But for right now, Rude Guerrilla does something I haven't seen before with this play. They make it relevant.

Perhaps it was seeing all that confetti piled up on the stage so close to election time. Winnie (Susan Shearer-Stewart) is buried first up to her waist, then up to her neck in it. A huge mound of confetti. Her companion Willie (Dave Barton; yes, the same Dave Barton who contributes to this site) sports a straw bowler and a small American flag stabbed defiantly into his battered recliner. I look at them, I see us looking back. Us. You. Me. We, the people. After the polls have closed. After the speeches are finished. After the 11th-hour TV spots are done. Us. Mr. and Mrs. Joe America, abandoned again in the dimming twilight of the American Century, buried up to our necks in the detritus of a promise betrayed, crushed slowly in a high and suffocating heap along with the discarded hair dryers and tossed toasters of our wasteful existence. Us.

Barton's crisp and cogent staging (yes, he directed, too, along with just about everything else on this production except pouring the drinks in the lobby) and Shearer-Stewart's unrelentingly vapid effervescence anchor the dicey purpose of Beckett's language to a relevant vision as firmly as Winnie is anchored to her mound of refuse. Beckett taunts us with his language, teases us, infuriates us. Language to Beckett is not what we expect language in plays to be. Often, it is not even what we need it to be. Winnie's words do not reveal and explain her world, her predicament, even her relationship with Willie. They explain nothing. Rather, they conceal and obscure her situation even as they sedate and reassure her existence with the cold comfort of an infinitely repeated routine. Language for Winnie is an anesthetic against the gnawing reality of her complete and total inconsequence. Barton's direction guides Shearer-Stewart's elastic performance to just the right play of tautness and give while saddling his own Willie with a heavy slothlike crawl from first entrance to final, croaking flop into the trash heap. Barton's Willie is a relentlessly reptilian performance which effectively counterpoints Winnie's unsinkable bright chatter.

Rude Guerrilla has made a ballsy choice for an inaugural production and a bold entrance upon the local scene in pulling it off. I didn't think of Denny's once.

Continues Fri. and Sat. at 8pm; Sundays at 7pm at the Empire Theater, 200 N. Broadway, Santa Ana. 714.409.9853. Thru December 6. $10-$12.

THE CALIFORNIA TECH

Adam Villani: Media Guy

There’s some stunning theater work going on in Santa Ana right now, courtesy of my co-worker Dave Barton, Artistic Director of the Rude Guerrilla Theater Company and director of their current production of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days. Not to be confused with the long-running sitcom of the same name, Hppy Days is a sevemty minute near-monologue by a woman, Winnie (Susan Shearer-Stewart), half-buried in a giant mound of trash and in giddy denial of her pointless, monotonous life. Central to the tension in this piece are the rare grunts and outbursts from her near-comatose lump of a husband, Willie (Barton).

As can be expected, it is something of a daunting task to sit through such a long monologue by a near-immobile protagonist. But don’t be afraid to let your mind wander; the stream-of-consciousness nature of her speech alleviates any comprehension problems caused by inattentiveness.

Don’t take that the wrong way; Winnie’s absent-mindedness, repetition, and naivete create their impact more from the play as a whole rather than from any specific moment, save for the wrenching ending. This is challenging, but rewarding, stuff.

Reviewed by Kristina Mannion

Backstage West/Dramalogue

With stark and undisguised metaphors of desperation and doom, Samuel Beckett offers a glimpse of days that are anything but happy in his often disquieting, often puzzling 1961 work Happy Days—a darkly absurd drama which can prompt any number of interpretations but serves primarily as an extreme commentary on human despair and its direct relationship to the limitations of old age and the limitations of an increasingly materialistic, coldly modern world.

The blunt irony of the play’s incongruous title manifests its constant and mocking presence right from the opening cues, which feature a loud, grating alarm bell and a harsh red light that illuminates Beckett’s unfortunate protagonist, Winnie, buried to the waist in a mound of trash, unable to move and not quite sure how such a strange predicament came to pass. A 50ish woman with a falsely sunny outlook on her peculiar situation, Winnie—played by Susan Shearer/Stewart in this Rude Guerrilla Theater Company production—is a pitiable character whose days and nights are signaled by the piercing bell and are filled with nothing to do save prattle on and on about the old days and perform the mundane rituals of everyday living. Her only comforts are a black bag filled with a few common items and Willie (played by director Dave Barton), her taciturn companion (most likely her husband), who lurks on all fours behind Winnie’s mountain of trash and occasionally answers her chirpy questions and adamant requests.

Their curious and pathetic relationship is yet another facet of Beckett’s exploration of despair; at one time we believe they may have been happy together, in love. Now they have little or nothing to communicate, and their interaction is limited to Winnie’s trite phrases and Willie’s often inarticulate utterings. In many ways, these two forlorn characters represent the personification of helplessness—a universal feeling we’ve all experienced at one time or another. And that’s where Beckett strands us. Clearly, he does not intend to provide us with any profound answers or solutions; we are treated only to this oddly nebulous allegory of melancholy that ends with Winnie buried to the neck in rubbish while Willie looks on with impotent confusion.

Doing their best with Beckett’s unusual and complex script, the Rude Guerrilla Theater Company turns out a mildly thought-provoking, if somewhat uneven staging at their newly acquired venue, the Empire Theater. Ably handling her character’s sheer abundance of lines and Beckett’s often strange turns of phrase, Shearer/Stewart is an appropriately befuddled Winnie. At first a bit restrained—perhaps due to Barton’s often too relaxed direction—she does pick up steam as the play wears on. Her best moments arrive in the second act, in which her increasingly anxious expressions and words spell out Winnie’s fear, now heightened as she becomes literally and figuratively mired from head to toe in despair. As Willie, Barton lends a fitting air of desolation to the program with his shuffling movements and occasional bursts of speech. Barton’s set design also adds to the overall atmosphere of gloom.

And yet, ultimately, Beckett’s intention is to create more than just a picture of gloom; his script demands the creation of a truly palpable sense of frustration. Unfortunately, this production never quite reaches the degree of intensity Happy Days calls for, and, in the end, leaves a less than lasting impression.

HAPPY DAYS

OC Weekly

Joel Beers

…There’s a plethora of light bulbs going off in Samuel Beckett's 1961 landmark Happy Days, surely one of the most bizarre plays ever written. It features two characters: Winnie, a relentlessly optimistic woman who begins the play symbolically buried up to her waist and ends it buried up to her neck, and her husband, Willie, who spends most of the play either crawling around on all fours or reading the newspaper, occasionally interrupting Winnie's monologue. On the one hand, it's a simple play. Winnie is im-mobilized, and she has nothing left to do but talk and find ways to wile away the time. On the other hand, it's fiercely complex, a rather horrifying portrait of the futility of existence, as well as a curiously uplifting story about courage in the face of meaning-essness.

It's also a very challenging play to read, watch or produce. And since challenging is always good in our book, the Rude Guerrilla Theater Company's decision to mount Happy Days as the debut show in its new downtown Santa Ana space deserves nothing but praise.

I wish the same could be said for the production. Director Dave Barton (who is also a Weekly theater critic) accomplishes something I've never seen before: he focuses attention on the relationship between Winnie and Willie. Audiences are likely to leave the theater feeling sorry for the couple's fate-entirely missing Beckett's dreadful majesty, the intellectual paralysis and existential horror he means to convey. Although Barton gets the humor right, the more potent stuff is mostly absent from this production.
Perhaps the intent was to lighten the intellectual freight in order to help make Happy Days happier for contemporary audiences. But I'm not sure this play needs it. This is postmodern myth and metaphor; it doesn't need to feel relevant or updated or contemp-orary as much as it needs to feel real. To do that, one master must be served: the text. And that doesn't happen often enough to make this Happy Days work as effectively as it could.

OC WEEKLY - 2ND REVIEW

Extra-credit points to the Rude Guerrilla Theater Company for selecting Happy Days—one of the most challenging works in the Samuel Beckett oeuvre—as the debut production in its new performance space in downtown Santa Ana. Double extra-credit points to the company and director Dave Barton (who is also a theater reviewer for the OC Weekly) for producing a haunting, thought-provoking piece that respects Beckett’s lyrical prowess.

Beckett’s 1961 absurdist piece is brought into the ‘90s by Bartn’s choice of burying Winnie, the play’s ridiculously cheerful protagonist, in a mound of garbage, rather than the expanse of scorched grass intended by the creator. Sprinkled among the garbage are such discarded trappings of modern Western culture as a blow dryer, a broken TV remote control, and a box of panty liners.

Susan Shearer-Stewart shines as Winnie, a woman who finds and relishes even the tiniest morsel of hope as her world slowly smothers her. Shearer-Stewart’s Winnie seems anchored in the past, unable or unwilling to deal with the harsh realities of her present. On the rare occasion she does address the way her life has turned out, she does so only in the most superficial manner. It’s as though she views her garbage-covered life as the way things ought to be—which reinforces one of Beckett’s main thrusts in this play: that we spend our lives trapped in denial. Barton doubles as Winnie’s husband, Willie, who life is reduced to either sitting comatose in front of the TV or crawling on all fours behind the mound of garbage that imprisons his wife. (John McElligot Jr.)

By Mark Chalon Smith

LOS ANGELES TIMES Special To The Times

The First thing you notice in the Rude Guerrilla Theater Company’s “Happy Days” is all the trash. The small stage is heaped with it—papers and junk rising in a large mound. What you may not notice, at least at the start, is Winnie, an almost invisible knot atop the pile. But she shows herself soon enough in Samuel Beckett’s absurdist drama. After raising up a bit, Winnie talks and talks and talks, mostly about her life with husband Will[ie], which seems to be nearing an end.

Susan Shearer/Stewart’s Winnie, we can see, is buried to the chest, and there isn’t any way out. And in that image we can almost hear Beckett’s mantra—the one presented so thoroughly in “Waiting for Godot”—that there really is no exit from the predicament of living. Reflections and memories can give comforting (or troubling) pause, but it always comes back to the same futility. It’s easy to admire Rude Guerrilla for inaugurating its playhouse in Santa Ana’a busy Artists Village district with “Happy Days,” one of Beckett’s mainstays. The message is obvious: Artistic director Dave Barton and his troupe plan to tackle provocative, difficult fare. Always a good sign for theater in these parts. Beyond that, there are other elements to like here, starting with the scenery, which Barton (besides playing Will[ie], he’s also the director and set and lighting designer) has raised a vivid swirl of a dumping ground. It’s a filthy place, but poor Winnie and Willie call it home.

The visuals tickle, but they aren’t enough to keep tedium from setting in, even when Shearer/ Stewart becomes more animated trying to reveal Winnie’s struggle against the restraints of her life and environment. The production lasts about 70 minutes, but it feels like along time. Shearer/Stewart doesn’t illuminate Winnie as mucha s needed, despite her colorful turns. Beckett’s often oblique dialogue demands characterizations that fill in the blanks, adding to the portrait. This is especially true in “Happy Days,” with its abstract references to Winnie and Willie’s relationship. Shearer/Stewart’s best moments come in the charged scene when Winnie lifts a revolver from her bag and blithely dwells on it. There’s something ominous, and effective, in how she responds to the weapon. We wonder if she’ll be tempted to use it, either on herself or her man.

Later on, the staging has another affecting passage. By now buried to her chin, Winnie is completely vulnerable to her world, including Willie, who crawls up for one last communion with her. Barton’s Willie is a detached, anonymous prescence until then, moving quietly through the garbage and only reacting when Winnie calls him. In this last scene, we are pushed to consider what they mean to each other. Will he caress Winnie or end the boredom with violence? There’s a hint of resignation (or is it dread?) in Barton’s face as the lights start to fade, leaving the two alone facing an uncertain future.