Theater: God ls AWOL

HAPPY DAYS by Samuel Beckett

No one sings the metaphysical blues quite like Samuel Beckett. Both his novels and his plays are one long threnody. He grieves because God does not exist. But he is not perfectly certain that God does not exist, otherwise why a title like Waiting for Godot? Is God AWOL?

Beckett has touched a responsive chord in an age of self-indulgent pathos. Fate is stern; it demands a hero. Self-pity is soft; it only asks for a man to look in a mirror and recognize a victim. All the "pity poor little me" folk, all the partisans of the "life is a dirty trick" philosophy, which is pervasive in our society, have proclaimed Beckett a genius. He is not a genius, but his considerable gifts, which he has harvested with great integrity, happen to coincide with the scary, fretful temper of the times.

The sense of will-lessness afflicts modern man, the conviction that he cannot affect events or even control his own destiny. Beckett symbolizes this by immobilizing his characters, in ashcans in Endgame, in urns in Play. In Happy Days, the heroine Winnie (Irene Worth) is buried up to her waist in the first scene and up to her neck in the second. Whereas Winnie is one of life's nonstop talkers, an autobiographiliac, her husband Willie (George Voskovec) is laconic and scarcely visible until the very end of the play. Yet his absence constitutes a powerful presence. In her garrulous chronicle of the petty and the cosmic, Winnie is performing her own last rites, and she wants Willie to hear them. What is the point of dying without an audience?

Godot may or may not be waiting in the wings, but death is always imminent in Beckett. "Earth, the old extinguisher," Winnie says — the last resort for pain.

Happy Days is essentially a soliloquy, and thus it confronts us with Beckett's major drawback as a playwright. As the most brilliant disciple of James Joyce, Beckett is the master of the interior monologue. But drama breathes only in dialogue. Hamlet is not babbling to himself in the four great inebriant soliloquies; he is addressing questions to his tormented soul, his troubled mind, his impotent will, and the sultry air resonates. In his one-character play, Krapp's Last Tape, Beckett took some notice of this problem. Between his senile musings and avid munching on a banana, Krapp turns on a tape recorder that relates all the romantic ardor and wistful yearnings of an earlier self. Thus, a kind of dialogue, and a very poignant one, is established and successfully maintained.

Beckett is more than lucky in this revival at off-Broadway's Public Theater; he is blessed. Entrusting a play to Irene Worth is like investing in the Krugerrand. She is pure gold. Voskovec, in what amounts to a crawl-on part, is admirable. As for Andrei Serban, the ebullient Rumanian-born director-improvisationist, he has had the incredible tact not to tamper with the text. For which relief, much thanks.