Theater and Truth

Happy Days by Samuel Beckett. Teatret ved Sorte Hest, Copenhagen, September 2021.

Dana H. by Lucas Hnath. Lyceum Theatre, New York, October 2021.

THE FIRST live theater I saw, after things began opening up in the fall of 2021, was a performance of Beckett’s Happy Days in Copenhagen. This was pure luck. I was in Denmark for only six days in late September, and this production—in English, yet—was just ending its run at the tiny Black Horse Theater on Vesterbrogade. So I and about thirty other fortunate audience members were treated, over the course of an intermissionless hour and a half, to Sue Hansen-Styles’s brilliant embodiment of Winnie (supplemented, as needed, by a few essential grunts, groans, and interjections from Nathan Meister’s largely offstage Willie).

At that point I had not been to the theater for over two years. If I can’t remember the last live play I saw