Happy Days
by Samuel Beckett.
Teatret ved Sorte Hest,
Copenhagen, September 2021.
Dana H.
by Lucas Hnath.
Lyceum Theatre,
New York, October 2021.
The first live theater I saw, after things began opening up in the fall of 2021, was a performance of Beckett’s Happy Days in Copenhagen. This was pure luck. I was in Denmark for only six days in late September, and this production—in English, yet—was just ending its run at the tiny Black Horse Theater on Vesterbrogade. So I and about thirty other fortunate audience members were treated, over the course of an intermissionless hour and a half, to Sue Hansen-Styles’s brilliant embodiment of Winnie (supplemented, as needed, by a few essential grunts, groans, and interjections from Nathan Meister’s largely offstage Willie).
At that point I had not been to the theater for over two years. If I can’t remember the last live play I saw before everything shut down, that’s not just because the performance was unmemorable; it also reflects the fact that I don’t attend live theater nearly as often as I do, say, live music, which I consider a much less chancy operation. When I do venture out to a play, it’s generally with a one-out-of-three attitude: if I actively like a third of the productions I see, I feel I’m doing reasonably well.
This useful skepticism was borne out when I attended my second between-the-Covid-waves play, a month after going to my first. Dana H., which opened on Broadway shortly after I returned to New York, received rave reviews, most of them focusing on Deirdre O’Connell’s tour-de-force solo performance as the eponymous Dana Higginbotham. What was particularly amazing, the reviewers indicated, was that O’Connell did not actually speak her lines. Instead, she lip-synced the entire thing, appearing to speak words (while also making the appropriate gestures and facial expressions) that had actually been pre-recorded by the real Dana in conversation with a friend of the playwright. The dramatist, Lucas Hnath, had then woven these snippets of Higginbotham’s account into the ninety-minute theater piece we were attending. That her “true-life” story dealt with her five-month abduction at the hands of a crazed criminal was only part of the draw. The real stunner—and what probably got me to buy the ticket—was the fact that Dana Higginbotham was Lucas Hnath’s mother.
What we have here, then, is a couple of weirdly similar productions: two ninety-minute intermissionless plays featuring star turns by solo performers; two dramas about female characters who for the most part are just talking heads. This is literally so in the case of Winnie, who starts Happy Days buried up to her waist in a mound of earth and ends it buried up to her chin. Dana H.’s immobility is more self-willed. She addresses us mainly from her armchair, with her messy pile of memoir pages held firmly on her lap, but she does have free use of her arms and legs as needed. Still, neither play is exactly filled with action. Both consist almost entirely of words.
Of course, it’s completely unfair to compare a young American playwright—Hnath is just over forty—to one of the greatest if not the greatest theatrical eminences of the twentieth century. Beckett wins hands down, naturally, and Happy Days is without a doubt a far better play than Dana H. But that is not what interests me here. What I want to explore is why this particular Beckett work, patently a fiction (and a far-fetched, seemingly allegorical one at that), felt so much more real to me than the documentary-style rendering of Dana Higginbotham’s billed-as-true story.
Granted, I was impressed by Deirdre O’Connell’s manifest skill in suiting her mouthed speech and accompanying actions to the recorded words. And I couldn’t help being intrigued by the tale she told—I was never bored, not for one minute. But some part of me stood apart throughout, questioning the whole thing. What kind of nudnik was this Dana person, really? How much of the kidnapping had she brought upon herself, by inviting a recently released, obviously disturbed former inmate to stay with her in her home? (They had met when she was serving as the chaplain at the psychiatric hospital where he was confined.) How strenuously did she really try to get away from him during their five months rampaging around the countryside, and why, when she managed to escape at one point, did she return to her own home, where he was bound to find her again?
Finally, where was Hnath himself when all this was happening? The play informs us that in 1997, when these events took place, Dana’s only child, Lucas, was away at his first year of college. Okay, it’s remotely credible that a fledgling undergraduate could go five months without speaking to his mother. But then Higginbotham tells us that eventually, after some construction workers helped her flee from her captor, she stayed on as a member of the construction crew and traveled around with them for an additional two and a half years—during which time she contacted no one and let no one know where she was. I can well imagine how eagerly a bright young man might grasp the chance to be independent of an eccentric mother. But really, wouldn’t he have noticed if she were missing for three whole years?
So, on the one hand, I had my doubts about whether Dana H.’s account was completely true. And on the other hand—and separately, I think, from my factual doubts—I wasn’t terribly moved by her story. I was interested in it; you might even say I was gripped by it, in a mildly voyeuristic kind of way. But it never touched me. It never felt like something that could happen to me, or to anyone I know.
Winnie, though. That’s another matter entirely.
Beckett’s Winnie is not a sympathetic person. As she talks endlessly at us from her frozen position in the dirt-pile, her manner is insistently superficial. She chats about all sorts of quotidian things in a resolutely cheerful way, as if to banish any awareness that there might be something odd or indeed appalling about her and Willie’s situation. We can sense from Willie’s groans (and at one point from his ineffectual effort to do away with himself) that he, at any rate, is appalled. But Winnie ignores or overrides his evident despair, constantly urging him to buck up and stay in place. Her stiff-upper-lip manner is at once hilarious and off-putting, given the dire straits in which she finds herself.
But the fact is, we will all end up frozen in place eventually. And for eighteen months or so, most of us found ourselves metaphorically buried up to the chin in the rehearsal-for-death that was the pandemic lockdown. (For the rest of us, those five million and more casualties, it was not a rehearsal.) So Winnie’s frequent references to “the old style”—the way things were said or done when life was lived normally, rather than as it is in this strange limbo or purgatory where she now finds herself—carry an extra punch at the present moment. I may not like Winnie, but I recognized some of that false chipperness in myself, and her situation terrified me, as it was meant to.
For the entirety of his writing career, Beckett harped majestically on our shared fatal disease, mortality. This condition entails both a fear of dying and an equally intense fear of endlessly prolonged aging, and he knew how to render both of those feelings viscerally. Still, there is more going on in Happy Days than just my—our—terror about death. Yes, Beckett can scare us to our core even as he makes us laugh. (Chekhov could do that, too. So, at times, could Shakespeare.) But what he can also do, with his strange characters trapped in ridiculously unbelievable situations, is to bring theater fully to life in front of our very eyes.
If Winnie exists at all, she exists only in the actor’s incarnation of her. In that tiny little theater in Copenhagen, Sue Hansen-Styles was Winnie, and I believed in her completely. When the play was over, she disappeared into whatever hinterland theatrical characters occupy when their plays are not being performed; but that made her no less real to me, during the time I was in her presence and when I thought about her afterward.
In contrast, Deirdre O’Connell was not actually Dana Higginbotham —nor was she meant to be, for otherwise her acting could not have been praised as a tour de force. Her skill lay in putting on an excellent performance, becoming the veritable “shadow” (as the Elizabethans called actors) of the woman she was portraying.
The paradox, I hope, is clear. At some profound level, Hnath’s documentary play lacked that very element of truth I was responding to in the highly stylized Beckett. Things were not at all what they seemed, or what I expected. Perhaps what I mean to say is that, despite the promise of verisimilitude, the real Dana H. was never there before me. Whereas the real Winnie, astonishly, was.
Wendy Lesser is the founding and current editor of The Threepenny Review. Her latest book is Scandinavian Noir, out in paperback from Picador.
