It’s encouraging that small theater companies around the city are doing some challenging, interesting productions.

When you’re buried up to your torso in a huge mound of dirt, unable to escape, you don’t have much more than your words. That’s where Winnie wakes up at the start of Samuel Beckett’s classic Happy Days, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year in this production from the former Washington Shakespeare Company, newly remonikered this season as WSC Avant Bard.

Harry Potter’s Aunt Petunia is half-buried in the Earth. But hey, who isn’t? That, I’d say, is a fair reduction of Samuel Beckett’s 1961 Happy Days, a not-quite-monologue for a middle aged woman who is stuck in a rut, though really it seems to be more of a pool of slow-acting quicksand. And the woman playing The Woman — actually, she has a name; it’s Winnie — in the National Theatre of Great Britain…