Beckett’s eccentric, paraplegic vision is vividly brought to life

It’s hard to entertain yourself for an eternity. It’s even harder to entertain an audience with just your upper body for an hour and a half.

But that’s exactly the challenge that faces the protagonist of Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days,” a bright-eyed and chatty optimist named Winnie who happens, for no apparent or important reason, to be half-buried in the ground. With the use of only her torso and up, and, in the second act, just her face, she lives out the joys and disappointments of everyday life, calling to her barely visible and dying husband, Willie, to assure herself that someone — besides us — is listening to her incessant talk.

Becca Foresman ’10 achieves the feat of not only holding her audience’s attention for the full length of the show, but also dominating it, despite her restricted movement. Her every action is mesmerizing, from the exaggerated (and hilarious) five-minute spectacle of her brushing her teeth to her shrill cries to Willie (Zack Wieder ’10) to stop crawling into his hole “head first.” From the moment the curtain rose and I first saw her slumbering in her giant pile of sand, I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

But while Foresman may act like a middle-aged woman in crisis, it is all too clear she isn’t one. Her arms, the one extremity she has control over, are too white, too soft-looking to seem as though they have suffered very much. Winnie is a character for an actress who is not in the prime of life, but in the middle of it, and for whom the end is both too close and too far. Though it’s obvious that Foresman can act, a college senior is simply not old enough to play this part. Like King Lear, Winnie is a role that should only be attempted by an actor of a certain age — an age Foresman should lucky she hasn’t yet reached.

Because yes, it is still possible to relate to Winnie, though of course her position seems much stranger than anything we’ve ever encountered. She’s neurotic, she’s nostalgic, she’s, at times, boring, her eyesight is going, and she can never remember any of the “unforgettable lines” she once read. In short, she’s not much different from anyone else. And it is that which makes “Happy Days” so very terrifying: Though we may like to think we have eternal, unbounded mobility, ultimately, we’re just as trapped as Winnie is. It’s only that while she has already been put into her mound of earth, we like to pretend we never will.