Review Roundup: Dianne Wiest in HAPPY DAYS at Theatre for a New Audience

Theatre for a New Audience presents the Yale Repertory Theatre production of Samuel Beckett's masterpiece Happy Days. Two-time Academy Award-winner Dianne Wiest (Hannah and Her Sisters, Bullets over Broadway) plays Winnie, widely considered modern drama's pinnacle female role, alongside Jarlath Conroy, who plays Willie, directed by Yale Repertory Theatre Artistic Director James Bundy.

Buried up to her waist and sinking into the earth, Winnie is an endlessly fascinating spirit of buoyant resourcefulness and unassuming grace in the face of inevitable oblivion. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, compassionate and ferocious, this extraordinary Happy Days comes to Polonsky Shakespeare Center (262 Ashland Place), TFANA's state-of-the-art home in the heart of the Brooklyn Cultural District, for 35 performances. The production runs through May 28.

Let's see what the critics had to say...

Jesse Green, New York Times: Whether Winnie is a symbol of a despoiled Mother Earth or just an Everywoman trapped in the wasteland of life, this production, directed by James Bundy, does not decide. What we do know is that she has suffered. The circumstances of her semiburial are not revealed, but we can see for ourselves the unhappy result. Several of her teeth are in jeopardy. It is often, she says sadly, the wrong time for singing. Worse may be the solitude. No one even passes the mound anymore, leaving Winnie with only her decrepit husband for companionship. Not that Willie (Jarlath Conroy) is much of a companion. Because he lives in a kind of gopher hole behind the mound, Winnie cannot see him except when he makes one of his infrequent incursions into her peripheral vision. Even then, he is usually a disappointment, with his bad manners and near-muteness. The closest they come to touching is when she clobbers him with her parasol.

Adam Feldman, Time Out NY: The affecting revival at TFANA, directed by Yale Repertory Theatre's James Bundy, welcomes such sadness: In Wiest's beautifully limpid performance, moments of bitter self-awareness pass like clouds over Winnie's determined sunniness, enriching the play's absurdism with plangent notes of deep feeling (including real hurt at Willie's inattention). This Happy Days fills you with a desire to comfort its heroine, but also with the knowledge that such comfort could only be cold. Hang in there, baby. It's almost Doomsday.

David Finkle, Huffington Post: Of all the Winnies I've seen-there have been many (but not Ruth White who premiered the play at Manhattan's Cherry Lane Theatre in 1961)-I don't recall any who, as Wiest has, so radically transformed Winnie from the generally jolly Winnie of act one to act two's outwardly depressed, while attempting to seem otherwise, Winnie. I'll go so far as to say that Wiest's act two is the best interpretation of the heartily harrowing role I've ever witnessed. Wiest conveys the ravages of time superbly as well as disturbingly-in a play about nothing if not Beckett's insistence that time gets us all in the lonely end.

Photo Credit: Gerry Goodstein

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