Word: loeb
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Happy Days, Samuel Beckett's two act, two character play about desolation and an enduring human spirit, begins its first weekend of performances tonight at the Loeb. This is the Summer Repertory Theater's last production of the season, and its most difficult one. Sustaining an actionless duologue is no simple feat, but the play manages to carry it off. Joanne Hamlin, who delivers most of the lines in the show, gives a fine performance under difficult circumstances. Still, the play and the production are not too satisfying. Geoff Garin's review appears on page two of this issue. Tickets...
...DIFFICULTY with the Loeb's production of Happy Days is largely a problem of interpretation. Director George Hamlin, a leading figure in the drama center's rise to regional prominence, doesn't ever really do very much with the relationship between Winnie and Willie, part of a more general and more alarming failure to allow the questions raised by Beckett to come out in any clear light...
...lies the play's real philosophical substance. Winnie's happy and resigned demeanor is the thing that sustains her through her travail, and it must be taken seriously. The task facing the director and the actress playing Winnie is to explicate and elucidate her faith, and this is the Loeb's major failing in the current production...
Happy Days is a play with much comic potential, and for the most part Hamlin and Hamlin realize the play's essential comic value. Beckett, who was 54 when he wrote the script, also has some valuable things to say about the terror of aging, and the Loeb production makes these statements for Beckett with great eloquence...
...philosophical exposition on the human spirit in a hostile world if it is to work at all. For that to happen the acting must be especially sympathetic and the play's principals must have a thorough grasp on the deep conflicts that come to the fore. That the Loeb's production is not a total success is only to be expected given the difficulty of the material. Nonetheless, the end product remains disappointing...