Los Angeles Times

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

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles Times2 min read
Editorial: Biden Expanded Two National Monuments In California. Three More To Go
President Joe Biden’s move Thursday to expand two national monuments in California is unquestionably good news for our climate and environment. One proclamation will increase the size of San Gabriel Mountains National Monument by nearly one third, ad
Los Angeles Times4 min read
Commentary: My Mother Set Herself On Fire. Why Do People Choose To Self-immolate?
Ten years before I was born, at 4:40 on the morning of Nov. 10, 1971, my mother and another woman sat “yogi-style” on the floor of an Ann Arbor, Michigan, kitchen and lit themselves on fire. They were just blocks from the University of Michigan campu
Los Angeles Times3 min readCrime & Violence
UCLA Detectives Use Jan. 6 Tactics To Find Masked Mob Who Attacked Pro-Palestinian Camp
LOS ANGELES — It is shaping up to be perhaps the biggest case in the history of the UCLA Police Department: how to identify dozens of people who attacked a pro-Palestinian camp at the center of campus last week. The mob violence was captured on live

Related Books & Audiobooks