Like William Shakespeare, the name Samuel Beckett has the power to strike fear in the average theater-goer’s heart. All those actors stuck in trash cans and funerary urns! Those two guys waiting around for some dude who never shows! That disembodied woman’s mouth spewing crazy talk! What does it all mean? Well, fear not. When Phantom Theater brings Beckett’s “Happy Days” to Warren’s Edgcomb Barn on Saturday and Sunday, August 17 and 18, the audience will be treated to his most accessible play, a masterpiece laced with the playwright’s offbeat sensibility that is also laugh-out-loud funny.
Warren native Pamela Rickard, plays Winnie, the protagonist whose spirit permeates the show. “She just has this incredible good humor and way of seeing the world in a positive light in spite of things sort of crumbling and unraveling around her,” said Rickard.
The character’s cheerfulness is challenged by her circumstances. For the entire course of the play she is literally buried, at first up to her waist and eventually up to her neck. The set device, noted Rickard, is “an easy metaphor. We're all stuck. We're all caught in something that we can't get out of, and this is just a very physical manifestation of that.”
Director David Grove, a recent transplant from LA to New York, agreed the play’s appeal comes from the juxtaposition of the character’s “endearing, sweet, and saucy” personality and her untenable situation. “Beckett explores basic human emotions -- fear, dread, sexual attraction,” he said. “They’re emotions that we all deal with, but he does it in an absurd way,” allowing the audience to see its own contradictions and humanity with fresh eyes.
It is not Rickard’s first time with the Beckett rodeo. “I’ve spent a lot of my life obsessed with and consumed by Beckett. I did the show 30 years ago in graduate school, as part of my degree.” The richness of the text has only grown for her: “It's really wonderful to have the opportunity to do it again, and to see how my life has changed, and how that piece has changed as I age, and how I approach the materials 30 years later.”
Still, the part hasn’t gotten any easier. Winnie’s only interactions are with her husband Willie, played by Lol Levy. The San Francisco based actor last appeared on the Phantom stage in 2018 when Rickard directed him in Harold Pinter’s “The Lover” in a role that requires quick, taut repartee. In stark contrast, the character of Willie is notable for his infuriating and comic silence, making “Happy Days” essentially a 70-minute monologue.
“It's incredibly, incredibly hard,” said Rickard, who also works in San Francisco as a theater director and educator. “Every actress who has done this part has described it as like climbing Mount Everest.” She knew just memorizing the script would take her at least four hours a day for two months.
But the opportunity to work with Grove again coaxed her back onto the stage. “We met at UC Berkeley in our first directing class,” he recalled. “But we fell out of touch as life happened.” Decades passed. Then, inspired by a recent, revelatory New York City Shakespearian production, Grove decided to reach out to his old friend. “I got this deep feeling. There was just something about that show’s staging that reminded me of Pamela.” His hunch paid off. Both have enjoyed their “Happy Days” collaboration. “We are very similar in our approach to text. We don’t push an agenda. It’s about telling a story,” he said.
Beckett’s greatest vehicle for an actress is a story worth telling -- about marriage, memory, the ravages of time, and female resilience. As the great Dame Peggy Ashcroft once claimed, “Winnie is one of those parts that actresses will want to play in the way that actors aim at Hamlet — a 'summit' part.”
Phantom Theater presents Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days,” Saturday and Sunday, August 17 and 18 at 8 p.m. Tickets available at the door and online. For more information visit www.phantomtheater.org
