Director's Note

If I were to simply state the role of the director, it is to relentlessly ask the actor, "What are you doing?" Not "what are you feeling," or "what are you thinking," but "what are you doing?" As a director, I am first interested in action. We watch plays to see people in action doing heroic things in impossible situations, and succeeding or failing. We learn from their mistakes, and are inspired by their victories. We marvel at the conflict they overcome, and we laugh at the absurdities of their struggles. Everything dramatic is full of action. To get at the action is to get a the heart of the play.

Directing Beckett is unique in this perspective, because most of the action is internal. The characters are rarely wrestling with each other, but instead are wrestling with themselves, struggling not with the pain they inflict on each other, but with the pain that comes with existing: struggling to find meaning, facing death, being aloe. When I ask an actor in a Beckett play, "what are you doing?," the answer we come to eventually is usually a variation on "creating meaning." It is an internal thing, but full of action

Our heroine Winnie, is having a rough time, as you will soon see. She is immobile, with a barely present husband, and no toher company beside the occasional ant. She is subject to seemingly arbitrary rules. She is struggling to make meaning in it all. Not just to survive, but to be Happy. Winnie is both a hero and a clown. Her attempt to create meaning where there is none - to find purpose and happiness in a hopeless situation - is noble and absurd and utterly human. The creation of meaning is in the action.

--David O'Connor
Director's Note to Happy Days by Samuel Beckett
Lantern Theater October 2009