After two Oscars and two Emmys, Dianne Wiest finds meaning in Beckett
NEW YORK - "I just want to do Beckett's 'Happy Days' over and over again," Dianne Wiest declared between nibbles of a poached egg. "I don't want to do anything else, because nothing else comes near it."
Samuel Beckett's 1961 absurdist classic, which began previews Wednesday at the Mark Taper Forum, was the reason for this late-morning breakfast with the two-time Oscar winner, whose high-strung vulnerability was an essential comic shade on Woody Allen's vintage filmmaking palette. Wiest is reprising her performance as Winnie, the determinedly cheerful chatterbox who tries to engage her uncommunicative husband as she sinks into a mound of earth.
The production, directed by Yale School of Drama dean James Bundy, began at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 2016 before moving the following year to Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn. The play, a portrait of a woman chirpily confronting the inexplicable riddle of the human condition, has become something of an obsession for Wiest. For a week last October, she performed excerpts of "Happy Days" while enclosed in a "sculptural costume" designed by artist Arlene Shechet in a free public offering in New York's Madison Square Park.
"A cop would stop and listen," she recalled. "Kids were running around. I can't remember what
