Samuel Beckett's Happy Days is a two-hour near-monologue delevered by Winnie, a 50-year-old woman who stands buried first up to her waist, then up to her neck, in a desert mound. She lives in a world people only by herself, her husband Willie, and her "things" -- a shopping bag full of knicknacks, and a parasol. With only Willie and the things as a points of reference, Winnie fills up her days, "happy days," with endless chatter and conscientious dips into the bag.

This is the kind of "classic" that is certain to be performed scores of times during the next decade or so in cramped college dining halls, by actresses careful to wring every shared of Meaning from every syllable, before audiences of sweating undergraduates who are bored to tears by the show but oh-so-reluctant to admit it.

Mrs. Joanne Hamlin treats it differently and, I think, correctly, as a basically comic piece of writing I started off Laughing clever bits of hamming coming to my senses. Laughing at this Twentieth Philosophical Classic?

It seemed to embarrass Hamlin, too. She slowed her performance distrinctly the first ten minutes and the began to drag a bit and so more and more. Tim again, aided by Bruce bluth's exaggerated but Willie, she would strike a but time and again the play bog down and extinguish it

Happy Days is the kind you can read for hours at either to be impressed by ett's superbly concentrate or simply for the mental of correlating the repeated --trying to pin instance, the ambiguous the past ("the old style, classics," and her quotation holding Winnie's demi-

On stage, however, it take the greatest of by the greatest of make the monologue interesting. Mrs. Hamlin decidedly superior . Her face is quite mobile makes good use of it, chief weapon is a lilting, voice that is perfect for the idoclatress of the she could find a way of the patter-song pace to the first few minutes, the cost of cutting a few might be able to hold the interest of her audience would be an extraordinary complishment.