HAPPY DAYS in rehearsal!
LYNN STEINMETZ (Winnie) is a founding member of the Washington Stage Guild, where audiences most recently saw her as Catherine Petkoff in Arms and the Man in 2023 and various characters in The Good Doctor, as well as Kitty Warren in Mrs. Warren’s Profession in 2022 (and years ago, her daughter Vivie). Over the years, Stage Guild audiences have known Lynn as various English ladies, Irish lasses, Southern belles, saucy maids, a queen or two, doting mothers, dotty mothers, a drunk chain-smoking sister, and a mischievous ghost. Over the past 40-something years she has performed at several venues in the Washington–Baltimore area, including Arena Stage, Woolly Mammoth, Olney Theatre Center, Round House Theatre, Everyman Theatre, Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian, and others. Lynn studied at the Catholic University of America and The Juilliard School.
Our team…
Scenic Designer Megan Holden
Costume Designer Cody Von Ruden
Lighting Designer Marianne Meadows
Stage Manager Elaine Randolph
Assistant Stage Manager Luca Maggs
Directed by Alan Wade
TODAY’S FEB. 1 MATINEE OF HAPPY DAYS HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO ILLNESS IN THE CAST.
PERFORMANCES WILL RESUME ON THURSDAY, FEB. 5
by Samuel Beckett
Directed by Alan Wade
Beckett lovers note!
Beckett is BACK at the Stage Guild…
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. Featuring WSG Founding Company Members Lynn Steinmetz and Bill Largess.
“A MARVELOUSLY CONSTRUCTED TRAGICOMEDY. It helps to remind us of Beckett’s skills as a portraitist—a draper of vigorous flesh on what might have resulted in bloodless conceits—and why this master of absurdism has remained.” — Washington Post
“Happy Days remains ONE OF THE MOST UNSETTLING AND UNFORGETTABLE PLAYS in the modern canon.” – The New York Times
“a STRANGELY BEAUTIFUL attempt to grapple with the fragility of time and the fleeting poetry of optimism” – ArtsHub.comOur cast…
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.”
BILL LARGESS (Willie, Artistic Director) is a founding member of the Washington Stage Guild and has been the company’s dramaturg since it began in 1986. Artistic director since 2008, he’s acted in, directed, adapted, or designed plays by Wilde, Shaw, Molnár, Beaumarchais, Jonson, Eliot, Schnitzler, and many others. Directing projects include Murder in the Cathedral by T.S. Eliot, Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw, and the world premiere of Amelia by Alex Webb, which also played New York. Among his performances at the Guild are Hamm in Beckett’s Endgame in our 2022-23 season, the title roles in The Alchemist and The Guardsman, Lombard in the U.S. premiere of Brian Friel’s Making History, and the solo characters in Conor McPherson’s St. Nicholas and his own adaptation of Dante’s Inferno. He’s also appeared at nearly every D.C.-area theatre company, as well as the Manhattan Theatre Club, La Jolla Playhouse, and the Provincetown Playhouse. His work has been nominated five times for Helen Hayes Awards, including Man and Superman and An Ideal Husband at the Stage Guild, and received the Theatre Lobby’s Mary Goldwater Award twice. A lifelong Washingtonian and graduate of Catholic University’s Drama Department, he taught at George Washington University, and is on the board of the Washington Area Performing Arts Video Archive (WAPAVA). In 2000 he appeared at the International Beckett Festival in Berlin, Germany, and in 2010 he directed an evening of short Beckett plays at GWU.
Happy Days is directed by Alan Wade, who also directed several Stage Guild productions including the 1990 production of Beckett’s Happy Days featuring the late June Hansen and Endgame featuring Bill Largess. Mr. Wade’s one-man show I, from the prose of Samuel Beckett premiered at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theatre in 1977 and was then performed in Baltimore and Boston. He has also directed for The Olney Theatre Center, The National Players touring company, and the Bay Theatre, Annapolis. As a faculty member at The George Washington University he directed 30 productions over a 40-year career. His latest audiobook narration for Audible is Final Sequence by Saeed Habashi.
