Happy Days: A Play in Two Acts

In Happy Days, Samuel Beckett pursues his relentless search for the meaning of existence, probing the tenuous relationships that bind one person to another, and each to the universe, top time past and time present. Once again, stripping theater to its barest essentials, Happy Days offers only two characters: Winnie, a woman of about fifty, and Willie, a man of about sixty.

In the first act Winnie is buried up to her waist in a mound of earth, but still has the use of her arms and few earthly...