PERFORMANCE ANXIETY.

As most writers know, the best editors tend to curtail those characteristics of the artist which are the weakest and the most self-serving, in order to free him or her from the prison of egocentricity. Similarly, actors need firm-handed directors to curb their excesses and to divert any tendency toward cuteness. One of the major problems with performance-based artists and comedians is that they often fall in love with their own material and their rendition of it. All artists have a streak of the solipsist; their loneliness and self-interest are what propel them to make art in the first place. But that doesn't mean that anyone wants to watch those thrashings, onstage or off: it's like standing around at a cocktail party while a drunk rages on, demanding incoherently all the attention in the room.

Lea DeLaria, who has worked as a comedian, singer, and actress in a number of shows around town (she was a memorable Hildy in George C. Wolfe's Broadway production of "On the Town"), cuts quite a figure. Small and powerfully built, she has a strong singing voice and excellent comic timing. An openly gay artist, she has always reminded me of a sapphic Martha Raye--all quick double takes and hard slapstick turns. One could not call DeLaria the most nuanced of artists, and that is usually perfectly O.K.--as long as she is working within the context that a forceful director can provide. On her own, however, DeLaria brays when she should whisper, and her charming, exhaustive, and ultimately disaffecting approach to a role overwhelms us. Which is precisely what happens when she plays Winnie in Samuel Beckett's "Happy Days" (a Worth Street Theatre Company production, at the Classic Stage Company).

It must have seemed like a good idea at first: a chatty comedian playing the nearly indefatigable Winnie, a middle-aged woman whose incessant demand for attention is like a prayer of sorts, one that Winnie directs at herself. Winnie has the self-regard of an actress, an artist, without daring to become one. "Hail, holy light," she says, at the beginning of Act II. "Someone is looking at me still. (Pause.) Caring for me still. (Pause.) That is what I find so wonderful." With her body obscured by a mound of junk-strewn earth (the appropriate set is by David P. Gordon), she natters on and on about what fills her "happy days": her toothbrush, her husband, Willie (David Greenspan), who spends much of the play hidden from view. Winnie is a Christian, so she knows that she's not God. But the mountain of dirt (representing, perhaps, the detritus of her life) is her self-enclosed altar, and we are meant to worship at the foot of it. Like most egotists, however, Winnie lets her self-regard go a bit wobbly when she thinks no one is listening.

It's possible that DeLaria could have been a credible Winnie. She has an expressive face, and she takes great delight in performing. But she didn't have a chance of finding the role with the show's director, Jeff Cohen, pushing her to play up those aspects of the script that suit her own personality, rather than pursuing Beckett's idea of the character. Using more accents than I could keep track of, Cohen and DeLaria's Winnie amounts to a seminar on American comedy styles, ranging from the Chitlin Circuit to Minsky's. In the process, the Winnie I know--the one who is as much a representation of the little murders we commit on a daily basis as she is an examination of what performance, and especially female performance, can be--is lost.

Of all the characters that Beckett created at the start of the nineteen-sixties, Winnie is the most fully realized and emotionally accessible, perhaps an echo of his mother, who was known to be bossy and self-serving, and may have had a hand in her son's famous silences, on and off the page. Many of the characters in Beckett's work are shadow figures; Winnie is not. She is full-blooded enough--a sometimes amusing gargoyle--to require a substantial amount of technique. It's possible that, given more time, DeLaria could have developed that technique, but to do so she would have had to be willing ...