Happy Days, Samuel Beckett’s 1961 play of fleeting hope and endless woe colliding with one another, is at the core a fascinating subject. However, the content undoubtedly worked a lot more to shake up an audience in 1961 than in 2014. Theatre Y in Logan Square attempts to bring this morose menagerie into the 21st Century with the use of broken down technology piled up to the waist of our heroine. I spent time admiring the craftsmanship of this mound of monitors before the play began, but of course a well-constructed set is not what makes the play. Truly, the set can only serve to enhance or hinder the experience.

If this play were only a satire of Agosto Boal-type socially conscious theatre contextualized within Chinese history, it would be inside baseball enough. But the second act takes us into outright absurdism, as the theatre technology seizes direct control of the human characters and forces them through seemingly spontaneous fourth-wall breaking story snippets, which are of course, really scripted.

Let me step back a moment. Follow me back in time. Pseudo-Chum is a play written and directed by Sean & Carolyn Benjamin. Presented by the Neo-Futurists, the play reveals to us three aspects of Chum, the play within the play Pseudo-Chum. Chum is about a family that makes a trip to the coast of Australia to cull sharks. Beginning with the secret death of the patriarch of the family, lies and betrayal set in early, as the family begins to metaphorically and literally attempt to ruin one another.

When you think of Hell, what do you see? Do you see fire and brimstone? Pitchforks and torture? Or, do you see something entirely different? These assumptions are the groundwork that George Bernard Shaw builds on in Don Juan in Hell. In Shaw’s Hell there is no torture. There is joy, art, and endless pleasure for an eternity, but without contemplation of the purpose of such pleasures, or something beyond this base pleasures, what’s the point? This is where we begin.