Fragments interweaving in Samuel Becket's " Happy Days "

Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui, 2017

The end of communism came so fast in 1989 that took all of us, the Romanians, by surprise. We were free but we couldn’t realize that. When, after two tree years, finally, we understood that we are really free, we were seized by a great torpor. Suddenly we discovered the freedom to do nothing. Working was communist, working hard, worse, Stalinist. Chatter was good. In this historical moment, against that mentality, I staged in 1995, at the National Theatre Târgu-Mureş, Happy Days, being unemphatic with Winnie and using a style I called the immobile Commedia dell’Arte. In the first part of the paper I shall present a record of Beckett’s plays staging before 1989, analyzing in particular a 1985 Happy Days production staged by Mihai Mănuţiu. Further, I will focus on the production I staged and, based on my creation log, I will describe the creators understanding of Beckett’s text, the staging process and the public receiving, which we found sometimes paradoxical. The performance in discussion can be watched at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OunW5shtrA8

In the 2008 case, Baze v. Rees, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Kentucky’s lethal injection protocol. Four of the seven opinions looked to the 1947 Supreme Court case of Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber for Eighth Amendment Cruel and Unusual Punishments precedent in the death penalty context. Resweber upheld Louisiana’s determination to send Willie Francis—a poor, African American teenager who had survived the State’s first electrocution attempt—to the electric chair a second time. This chapter provides an in-depth examination of the Resweber case telling Francis’s personal story, the efforts of his attorneys, Bertrand de Blanc and J. Skelly Wright, to prevent his execution, and the precedential effect of Resweber, particularly in Baze. At the time Resweber was decided the Supreme Court still considered de jure segregation constitutional and held that the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause did not apply to State actions such as a second execution attempt by Louisiana. Ultimately, this Chapter argues that, in light of the passage of six decades, which heralded massive changes in criminal law and procedure, the use of Resweber as modern Eighth Amendment guidance—especially in Baze—is troubling. In addition to the legal account, this Chapter details personal reactions to Francis’s story obtained through interviews with members of Francis’s family and residents of Francis’s hometown of St. Martinville, Louisiana, as well as numerous letters that people from all over the country wrote Francis while he was waiting in jail. These letter writers discussed many topics, including their reflections on racial injustice in America and the need for religious redemption, not only for Francis but also for his judgers and this country. Yet a number of letters were deeper, more private. Francis, it seems, was not only an imprint of the social and legal times, but also a projected muse of sorts to whom individuals could confide their heartfelt thoughts and wishes—about God, death, health, hopes, family, even romance. Key terms: Fifth Amendment, Fourteenth Amendment, Double Jeopardy, Due Process, Incorporation, Gilbert Ozenne, L.O. Pecot, James Dudley Simon, NAACP, A.P. Tureaud, Joseph A. Thornton, U.J. Esnault, Dennis D. Bazer, In re Kemmler, Malloy v. South Carolina, Wilkerson v. Utah, Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, Monte Lemann

Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui 31.1, 2019

https://brill.com/abstract/journals/sbt/31/1/sbt.31.issue-1.xml Abstract: This article gives a close-reading of Beckett's letters to Barbara Bray, focusing on the years between their first meeting in 1956 and Bray's move to Paris in May 1961. In this correspondence Beckett grappled with the difficulties of "human conversation", as the letters raised questions regarding the construction of the self in dialogue and the (in)ability of language to bridge distance between two individuals. I propose that Happy Days, written between October 1960 and June 1961, emerged from this fraught epistolary process, and that the play can be read as a dramatization of the letter writer's address to their absent interlocutor. The connection is supported by Beckett's use of draft fragments of the play-text within the letter exchange itself.

The Simpson Avenue site is a household site dating to the 19th and 20th centuries. It is located on Hamline University’s current campus in the ‘backyard’ of the White House. The site was discovered during the fall of 2013 by the Excavating Hamline History class. While the original intention was to find a shed structure pictured on an 1886 plat map, a post-hole and an intact cultural deposit were uncovered. A 2x1 meter test unit and six shovel tests were conducted on the property that determined site boundaries and the vertical and horizontal distribution of artifacts and features. The excavation units show clear soil changes that define the fluctuating use in landscape at the site. The home originally on this property, the 830 Simpson Avenue house, contained an assemblage of 19th and early 20th century artifacts. The collection from the site was relatively small, however, the artifact analysis showed the presence of women based on the kitchen refuse associated with women’s roles, clothing components, and personal items of women and girls. Similarly, archival documents provided evidence that places women at the site during the period of time consistent with the intact 19th and 20th century assemblage. This indicates they were active participants in creating the assemblage. By the 1940s, this site experienced a variety of changes in occupation and site use. Ownership of the 830 Simpson Avenue home was private until 1916 when it was purchased by Hamline University. Students then began residing in this home as well as those along Simpson Avenue (between Hewitt and Wesley Avenue), and eventually these homes were rented to individual families. In 1946, the 830 house moved to a new location across Hewitt Avenue and became 862 Simpson Avenue. In place of the 830 house, the White House was moved onto the property. The construction and demolition debris observed in the soil stratigraphy indicates this crucial change from a residential neighborhood to the landscape influenced by university expansion. From 1946 on, the White House has remained in the same location on Hamline campus with remnants of the original Midway neighborhood just below our feet.

2016

Anachronism Effects: Ventriloquism and Popular Media, argues that the seemingly outmoded cultural phenomenon of ventriloquism is a key site for understanding Western anxieties about media and mediation at the turn of the twenty-first century. Ventriloquism achieved mainstream popularity in the Vaudevillian era through its comedic dramatizations of the foibles of everyday communication. Subsequently translated into the audiovisual contexts of phonography, film, and television, the art boasts a growing plethora of media afterlives, while also serving as political shorthand for the mechanical reproduction of another’s speech. Anachronism Effects insists that ventriloquism’s circulation as a popular metaphor, and continued prevalence as a form of contemporary entertainment, offers a unique template for tracing the transmissions of power and knowledge through diverse media platforms, as well as through racialized, gendered, and queer bodies, in the information age—even as the practice continues to evoke the cultural detritus of a prior historical moment. Anachronism Effects thus attends to the myriad ways in which ventriloquism has evolved as a distinct cultural object, as the art of “saying what people want to say but can’t say” by displacing this unspeakable or unsavory speech onto a dummy. From the radically race-critical 1970s vinyl record albums of the African-American ventriloquist duo Richard and Willie; to the late 1980s-early 1990s lip-synch scandal wrought by the “ventriloquism” of the Afro-German pop group Milli Vanilli; to the contemporary televisual, cinematic, and multimedia performances of the self-deprecating British ventriloquist Nina Conti and her jingoistic American counterparts Terry Fator and Jeff Dunham, the project’s case studies illuminate what it means to “vent” in both senses of the term, particularly in the context of the perceived dynamics of silencing or “correctness” that often accompanies contemporary political discourse. The dissertation’s initial case studies notably coalesce around highly politicized celebrations of national history (the mid-1970s U.S. Bicentennial, the early 1990s “reunification” of Germany), while its later chapters take up post-9/11 U.S. fantasies of a return to a folkloric national past. In each instance, ventriloquism’s play with the alignments and disconnections between body and voice enacts a material working-through of the temporal contradictions elided by national historical discourses.

You will be the only ones to have the six reviews of the three plays both in their English versions and French versions, and they can be very different, especially Oh Les Jours Heureux / Happy Days. The reviews of the English versions are in English and the reviews of the French versions are in French. There is reason for that privilege you are going to be granted: Amazon considers a review of the English version is valid for the French version too. Too bad for their customers. Since I read the English versions first the French versions are short-circuited, even on Amazon.fr. Amazing. But you will have the six reviews. These are only reviews and the objective is to write an article for a journal in Avignon, France that has to be delivered in December, on Beckett and after the damnation of humanity. This first stage of the work is essential to create a perspective and then to differentiate the two versions of each play. It is the proof that the two languages do not work the same way, and what’s more the context in England and in France are different so that the plays have to be adapted to the audience and the legal frame of each country. That is particularly true with Happy Days in English that is explicit as for the sexual orientation of Willie, whereas the French version drowns the fish in hot air and makes the play grossly bawdy instead of specific. 1961 was a very bad year in France for gay people after the passing in Parliament of a bill that classified homosexuality as a social “plague” or “evil” to be eradicated at once. Enjoy the reading. The English reviews are first and the French reviews come in the second half, and a surprise at the end. PLUS A critical viex of the fifteen articles published by RADAC in their journal COUP DE THEATRE in 2010 in Nancy, France

The Tragic Comedy of Samuel Beckett