Another Happy Day

Dianne Wiest, the exceptional sixty-eight-year-old actress with the distinctive voice, who is set to star as Winnie in a revival of Samuel Beckett’s 1961 piece “Happy Days” at the Yale Repertory Theatre (April 29-May 21), worries for the late Nobel Prize-winning writer. While rereading, for instance, James Knowlson’s “Damned to Fame,” his lively 1996 biography of Beckett, Wiest still wished for Beckett’s success earlier than he achieved it—that was in 1953, when he was forty-six and “Waiting for Godot” premièred in Paris—because she wanted his mother, the powerful May, to learn how her “brilliant boy turns out.” (For years, Beckett borrowed money from his mother in order to survive. She died in 1950.)