Happy Days

In the first act of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, Winnie is buried up to her waist in a large mound of barren earth. In the second act, she is buried up to her neck. The mound of earth can be seen as life, or aging, or even just a mound of earth. No matter the interpretation, Winnie tries to make the best of it, carrying out her (limited) rituals, sharing her thoughts with a man we barely see whom she has clearly know for years (her husband? lover?), and being ever grateful when a day turns out to have a good moment or two. "Oh, this is a happy day," she says. She adds, "This will have been another happy day," as though to file it for the future when it will be a precious memory.

Brooke Adams
Photo: Joan Marcus

In the production currently at The Flea, directed by Andrei Belgrader and starring Brooke Adams and (her husband) Tony Shalhoub, Winnie chirps along, accentuating the positive and barely listening to her own words. Adams' performance is flat, with a largely monotonal presentation. She recites words rather than inhabiting them. (Full disclosure: the night I saw Happy Days, the audience gave Adams a standing ovation, so mine is clearly a minority opinion.)

[spoilers] 

The production as a whole doesn't listen to Beckett's words or else fails to examine the anguish behind them. It is a coarsened version of Happy Days, complete with masturbation and flying snot. Willie's reappearance at the end of act two is treated as slapstick rather than desperation. These decisions, while lessening the impact of the play, can be justified based on the text. Less justifiable is the moment when Winnie signals the audience to clap to try to entice Willie to sing. If Winnie is aware of the audience, than her isolation is considerably less isolated.

My Daughter Keeps Our Hammer

Katherine Folk-Sullivan (left) and Layla Khoshnoudi (right)
Photo credit: Hunter Canning

With a 65 minute run time, Brian Watkins' My Daughter Keeps Our Hammer is a short and provocative one act play.  It is well worth your time.

The premise is one that the typical New Yorker or urbanite will find foreign.  Two sisters, both college uneducated, living in the middle of a prairie out West.  The elder sister Sarah is burdened with maintaining the family home/land and caring for her ailing mother and a lone sheep named Vicky, while the younger sister Hannah works every day at a roadside diner wrestling with a mild wanderlust and an Isuzu that won't take her anywhere.  Yet its very foreignness is what makes the play all the more poignant when you start to relate to these characters.

The story is told through a series of monologues by the two sisters.  As they state at the beginning, they don't talk much to each other, even as they recall the same events.  Estranged by bitterness, jealousy, and the memories of happier times, Sarah and Hannah's relationship is simultaneously archetypal and personal.  The raw honesty and frequently irreverent humor of their stories highlight the deeper, darker things that often motivate actions.  The strength of this work lies in the characters' step-by-step decisions and tiny explosions of violence, which have the power to transform us from humans with delusions of moral decency to stumbling unrecognizable creatures.  (I once heard a variant of that phrase used with regards to Breaking Bad...it seemed applicable here.)

I'll leave my description at that because I don't want to give too much away.  Production-wise, the choreography of light was quite brilliant (Was that too punny?) - from flashlight to overhead lamp to flame.  The performance by Katherine Folk-Sullivan (Sarah) was top notch.  She especially shone in the moments when Hannah was speaking and you could see the play of emotions across her face.  Layla Khoshnoudi was delightfully funny and insightful as Hannah.

This was my first Off-Off-Broadway play.  I loved the intimacy of the theatre (only two rows of seats), but it was a very wide stage which made views slightly uncomfortable.  Granted, I was sitting at the end of a row.  I kind of wonder if this play might work in the round...but, random musings.   Final verdict: I highly recommend it.  This is a journey worth going on with Sarah and Hannah.

My Daughter Keeps Our Hammer is playing at The Flea Theater (41 White Street) through February 15.

(press ticket, second row, far left)