EDGE Philadelphia

After writing Krapp’s Last Tape, Samuel Beckett’s wife allegedly insisted that he write a "happy" play. With Happy Days, now in a surprisingly engaging production at the Lantern Theater, he paid her back in his own particular form of spades.

Happy Days opens on husband and wife Winnie (Mary Elizabeth Scallen) and Willie (Brian McCann) living the doldrums of their lives in a post-apocalyptic world with a population of two. She’s buried to mid-chest inside a giant rock that’s stunningly realized by Meghan Jones’ sand and pebble covered boulder of a set. Except for the back of his head, he remains unseen, as he works his way in and out of a tunnel (also unseen). As she pulls items from her bag, recounts stories of her youth, or pesters Willie with questions, he replies in monosyllables (at best), often ignoring her for long stretches as she goes about her daily routine.

While she continues to gab away (mostly at us), he reads the paper, slowly allowing the monotony of married life to reveal itself. As for Beckett’s wife’s request for a happy (or happily married) play, I can only laugh thinking of how Beckett’s Happy Days interprets Nietzsche’s view on the subject: "When entering into a marriage one ought to ask oneself; do you believe you are going to enjoy talking with this woman up into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but most of the time you are together will be devoted to conversation."

But in Happy Days, Beckett doesn’t merely offer his views on marriage, but revisits the existential themes and curious dramatic methods that permeate his entire oeuvre. What do we do with our time (that doesn’t waste it)? How can we find meaning if even the words in which to understand it fail us? How can a play represent the struggle with existence while showing almost no action, no passage of linear time, and no causality at all?

Like many of his other plays, Beckett spends the entire evening (here a gratefully short 90 minutes) beating these themes and ideas to death with his overly-analytic thoroughness. Nothing occurs that has not occurred before: as she pulls everyday items from her bag, Winnie puts on lipstick, primps her hair in a mirror, and brushes her teeth. Life’s routines substitute for life’s meaning, although she still longs for human connections no matter how mundane, meaningless, or insincere. In her ultimate confrontation with life’s futility, right before she bursts into tears, Winnie joyously exclaims "one can do nothing and that is what I find so wonderful!"

Between them, director David O’Connor and Scallen transform this script’s lethargy and inactivity into a flea circus of miniature actions loaded with significance. Her every movement calibrated, Scallen takes the most unpromising and unflattering role of the season-Beckett insultingly traps this wife in a rock and yet makes her passively accepting of her plight with cheery enthusiasm-and delivers a thoroughly comprehensive and engaging performance. She tears up on cue, laughs with a girlish cheer at a one-word response, and then suddenly stares vacantly ahead at the sound of a bell.

Throughout, O’Connor’s direction (with an assist by Jeff Lorenz’s sound design) keeps monotony from feeling, well, too monotonous, and even drudges up the humorous moments that we should rightly laugh at in Winnie’s (and everyone’s) existence.

Noticeable changes rendered by Millie Hiibel’s costumes and make-up enhances the significance of and lend perspective to Act One’s non-events. Now buried up to her neck, Winnie still attempts the rituals of life in a body that no longer allows movement. "What a difficulty for the mind, to be the same and so not what I was," she muses, moments before asking, "What’s the alternative?"

The alternative, of course, is a playwright other than Beckett, whose maudlin and peculiarly pessimistic version of existentialism was not shared by other dramatists who explored the same themes. Beckett wrote all his plays between the existentialist bookends of Sartre’s No Exit and Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, two plays stuffed with the same terror of facing an unyielding existence, yet which both playwrights packed with action and drama capable of transmitting the ideas in culmination over the course of a plot rather than beginning and ending with the same sense of paralyzing futility. Happy Days, by contrast, would score a huge, resonating hit with the terminal, wheelchair-bound patients at an old folk’s home. As on the Lantern’s stage, there, the death-bed cries for help also receive no answer. A "happy play" indeed.

The Lantern Theater, 10th and Ludlow St, presents Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days until Oct. 18. David O’Connor directs. Tickets and more information visit the theater’s website.