Washington Stage Guild’s 40th Season Continues With HAPPY DAYS
Founding Company Member Lynn Steinmetz plays Winnie along with Artistic Director/Founding Company Member Bill Largess as her husband Willie.
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The Washington Stage Guild will continue its 2025-2026 season with a return to famed playwright Samuel Beckett and his 1961 classic Happy Days. Founding Company Member Lynn Steinmetz plays Winnie along with Artistic Director/Founding Company Member Bill Largess as her husband Willie, directed by Alan Wade.
Performances begin January 29 - 31 with four Pay-What-You-Can previews and run until February 22, 2026 at the Washington Stage Guild's home, The Undercroft Theatre in the Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church, 900 Massachusetts Avenue, NW. Opening/Press performance is Sunday, February 1 at 2:30pm.
Samuel Beckett's critically acclaimed final full-length play, essentially a one-woman tragicomic monologue, has been a tour-de-force for many an actress since its 1961 premiere. Winnie, a woman in her 50s, is inexplicably buried waist-deep in a mound of scorched earth in a bleak landscape, while nearby, her husband Willie dozes. She spends her day going through familiar routines, endlessly chattering and reminiscing about better days almost as a vaudeville routine for one. Then a bell rings, and she starts again. Is she trapped in this cycle or free to leave? Beckett’s absurd satire about the human condition lets you ponder what it all means.
From Director Alan Wade: "I've read that the genesis of Happy Days was a friend's suggestion to Beckett that after Endgame he write a happy play. Beckett's response (Happy Days) is, well, characteristically, Beckett. I find Winnie to be both an individual woman and representative of humanity at large. She is a heroine doing her best against insurmountable odds, one of which is her husband, Willie. I'm approaching the play this time as a play about a marriage but, yes, with all of Beckett's attendant interests."
From Artistic Director Bill Largess: "Stage Guild audiences have embraced Beckett's thorny dark humor in the past, whether he was the author (Endgame) or character (in the play Sam & Dede). Revisiting Happy Days after so long seems like a perfect nod to our history in our fortieth season."
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