Word: beckett
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...come up with the winning combinations, Weiland has set up three strong lines. The fastest-skating and hardest-hitting of the three at this time has Tim Taylor and Kinasewich on the wings with last year's leading Harvard scorer, Jim Dwinell, at center. Another line puts veterans Bill Beckett, Dave Morse, and Dave Grannis together; Tom Heintxman, Gerry Jorgenson, and Dean Alpine form the third unit...
Happy Days (by Samuel Beckett) pursues the playwright's favorite thesis that life is slow death. The setting is a scorched plain, blazing with light. Throughout Act I, Winnie, the so-year-old heroine, is buried up to her waist in a mound of earth; throughout Act II, she is buried up to her neck. So much for action and plot. For subplot, her husband Willie scuttles in and out of a hole behind the mound, and, keeping his back to the audience, leafs through a yellowed newspaper...
...bell signals the times when Winnie must wake and sleep; in between comes the terrible recess of endurance, the "happy day" to be survived. She utters a prayer, sings a song, chews the nostalgic cud of memory. Actress Ruth White, though she plays her role with more gallantry than Beckett's morgue-attendant austerities call for, stars vocally: she croons, keens, gurgles, fumes and screams at her all-but-silent partner. A bottomless black shopping bag provides the day's events. Finding a toothbrush, she brushes her teeth punctiliously. She swigs some pink pep medicine, kisses an evilly...
...Beckett's message must be picked up in fragments, like shards around a ruin. He is an elegiac host at civilization's wake, taking for his text Cyril Connolly's "It is closing time in the gardens of the West. From now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair." The quality of Beckett's despair assays high; it is the quantity that is suspect. There is so much of it, and most of it is unearned. His characters are not scarred by life...
...Beckett branch of the avantgarde, which includes such playwrights as Eugene lonesco (Rhinoceros) and Edward Albee (The Zoo Story), might be labeled the New Exquisites. The Old Exquisites (e.g., Oscar Wilde and the fin-de-siècle dandies) were anti-bourgeois snobs. They were too pure for the philistine middle class. The New Exquisites are anti-life snobs. Life is not pure enough for them. Several times in Happy Days, Winnie scrutinizes the handle of her toothbrush and reads the words "fully guaranteed . . . genuine pure." She and the New Exquisites are bitter because life is not fully guaranteed...