Dianne Wiest is waist-deep in work.
The award-winning star of stage, screen and (soon) a sitcom, she’s tackling the taxing, intractable role of Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days.” The character spends the play buried up to the waist, then neck, in what the playwright specifies is “an expanse of scorched grass rising center to [a] low mound.”
Winnie prays, philosophizes, rhapsodizes over another “happy day” and berates the play’s only other character, her considerably more mobile husband Willie, who wanders about the mound as Winnie pontificates within it.
“Happy Days” closes the current Yale Repertory Theatre season, playing through May 21. The show is directed by the Rep’s artistic director James Bundy, and features Jarlath Conroy (the gravedigger from Bundy’s Rep production of “Hamlet” a few seasons ago) as Willie.
Before a rehearsal a couple of weeks ago, Wiest discussed “Happy Days” in one of her favorite New Haven haunts — the Book Trader Cafe across the street from the Rep.
What’s her process for tackling this famously difficult role?
“Terror,” she smiles. “I’ve wanted to do it for about 10 years. I mentioned it to James, but said I was too frightened. Then I called him last year and he said the ‘Happy Days’ offer was still open.”
Wiest says she’s been actively working on learning the script — essentially a 90-minute monologue — for a year. “You can’t do it lightly. This is something that won’t let go. Right now for me, the only thing more anxious than being in rehearsal is not being in rehearsal.”
“What I love about James as a director is that he will remind me of a comma. You ignore those details at your peril.” Wiest also praises scenic designer Izmir Iqbal for designing a mound that will seem spectacular for audiences but is also comfortable and practical for the performer who must inhabit it.
“There’s padding,” Wiest said. “There’s a part of the mound where I can pluck up grass, and a place where things won’t roll away when I set them there.”
Early in her career, Wiest worked with Alan Schneider, who’s generally considered to be the foremost director of Beckett plays (besides Beckett himself) in the 20th century. Wiest was in Schneider’s U.S. premiere of “Footfalls,” presented with two other Beckett plays, “Play” and “That Time” in 1976. “Play” involves actors to be inside urns, with only their heads showing — not a far cry from Winnie’s buried-in-earth situation in “Happy Days.” But there is a big difference, Wiest points out: “‘Play’ has two other people talking.”
Wiest, who also worked with Schneider on a Harold Pinter play, the American premiere of “A Kind of Alaska,” recalls that “I knew, but I didn’t really know, the full wonder of his relationship with Beckett. I adored him, though he had a terrible temper. He would throw his cap at us. He didn’t know about an actor’s process. Not like James, who reads my mind.”
Connecticut Roots
Dianne Wiest’s first professional acting gig was in Connecticut, at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theater in the 1960s, in a children’s theater troupe overseen by Arvin Brown (who went on to run the Long Wharf for 35 years).
There are still those who consider Beckett too esoteric or abstract for mainstream theaters. That’s defiantly not true in Connecticut. The very first show the Yale Rep produced when it was founded in 1966 was Beckett’s “Endgame.” The Long Wharf Theatre just announced it will be stage “Endgame” next season, co-starring Brian Dennehy and John Douglas Thompson.
“Happy Days” has been done at Hartford Stage (with Estelle Parsons in 1998) and Westport Country Playhouse (with Dana Ivey in 2010).
When asked if people “get” Beckett now in a different way than when the playwright first made a major stir in the ’50s and ’60s with absurdist, isolationist, anxiety-driven works as “Waiting for Godot” and “Act Without Words,” Wiest says. “I think we get them more now. The world is so much more awful. Beckett saw such enormous amounts of death and destruction. He was such a passionately courageous man. There’s nothing he’s writing about that he hasn’t lived through. His work is timeless. As the decades roll by, it has meaning that only grows.”
In her long and varied career, in which she’s won two Academy Awards (for Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters” and “Bullets Over Broadway”), Wiest has appeared in such contemporary classics as “Edward Scissorhands,” “The Birdcage,” “Parenthood” and “Footloose” and — onstage — appeared in every full-length play by Chekhov.
What other roles does Wiest want to play?
“After this, there’s nothing else,” she insists. “I love Chekhov, but I’ve done every Chekhov. I hope people will let me do ‘Happy Days’ again after this.”
“HAPPY DAYS” by Samuel Beckett, directed by James Bundy and starring Dianne Wiest, is at the Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel St., New Haven, through May 21. Performances are Tuesday through Friday at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., with an added matinee May 11 at 2 p.m. Tickets are $54-$90, $25 for students. Information: 203-432-1234, yalerep.org.
