Happy Days exposes the eternal and sometimes hopeless optimism that most of us learn to summon in the face of our most vexing burdens. Winnie, the protagonist, is literally stuck in the mud. She is buried waist down for the entire duration of the play in a mound of earth with her husband Willie, scuffling helplessly around.
One is entranced by Winnie’s unending prattle, her strident optimism, in the midst of this most absurd of all life’s situations, and we are forced to laugh and cry with her endearing wisdom and foolishness. Samuel Beckett is widely credited as having altered the course of theatre with his bleak and minimalist settings infused with hope and optimism with plays like Waiting for Godot, and The End Game. Happy Days was first performed in New York City in 1961.
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