NO IDEA WHAT DAY OF THE WEEK IT IS Jake Austin Robertson, left, and Tessa Albertson in the Wild Project’s filmed theatrical production of Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days.”
AS I LOOK BACK on the last year, Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days” makes sense in a whole new way.
I have spent the last 12 months (352 days, to be exact) with a lovable but barky 9-year-old terrier in a six-room apartment on West End Avenue, having everything from groceries and prescriptions to Christmas gifts delivered, seeing my friends and loved ones only by Zoom or FaceTime.
So suddenly a play about a woman trapped up to her waist (at first) in a mound of dirt, possibly forever, and trying to make the best of it seems – realistic. She can’t go anywhere. The only other person she ever sees is her husband. No one knows when (if) it will end.
We are very lucky that the Wild Project, whose shows I used to see in the East Village and review, is streaming a new, filmed version of “Happy Days” in March. As the publicity release points out, “Happy Days” is about “the wearisome humdrum of endless, interchangeable days” experienced by an adult human being while “helplessly buried up to her waist in the ground.”
Tessa Albertson stars as Winnie, with Jake Austin Robertson as her husband. The two actors — as well as the director — are Princeton alumni. A university fund is a sponsor of the event. The film is close-captioned.
ABOUT THE PLAY: Beckett (in photo), who died in 1989, began writing “Happy Days” in 1960. Its first production was in 1961, at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York.
In 2007, I saw an English-language production in Paris, starring Fiona Shaw. I’m pretty sure it’s the same production that arrived in New York (at BAM, the Brooklyn Academy of Music) a few months later, which Ben Brantley loved (New York Times review).
Two young British men were seated next to me in the Paris theater. At the end of Act I, they turned to each other and declared that the show was '“bollocks..” I’m going to guess that they had never heard of Beckett before. I wonder if they’d feel the same way, now that more than 120,000 Brits have died of Covid-19, along with half a million Americans.
By the time the Wild Project’s version begins streaming, it will be more than two weeks after my second Covid vaccination, so theoretically my quarantine can end. Will I feel reborn? Or will I sink even deeper? Sometimes the metaphors really hit home. The first image in Act II says it all. It now reminds me of this internal monologue: “Yay! Soon we can stop wearing masks. Wait. What? Really? Now we’re supposed to wear two masks?”
“Happy Days,” by Samuel Beckett, from the Wild Project in association with the Princeton University Fund for Irish Studies. Streaming March 5-13, 2021. Suggested donation: $25. thewildproject.org Reservations: http://happydays.nyc/