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| ACT photo by Kevin Berne |
You probably see where this is going.
ACT Artistic Director Carey Perloff is stepping down after 25 years on the job, and her final directorial endeavor with the company (at least under her artistic direction) is this Pinter piece she directed elsewhere before coming to ACT. I guess she's something of a Pinter specialist. I am not. Be forewarned.
The Play
Set in a small beachside boarding house in England, run by an aging couple (Meg and Petey), we initially find that they have one and only one boarder, Stanley. They have a rather odd relationship with him, but everything is exceedingly routine. Stanley is a bit of a shut-in, but apparently he pays his rent, so all is well, though we can tell from the moment he comes downstairs that he is upset, depressed, or...something.Then two men show up out of the blue for a brief seaside vacation. Goldberg is a sharp-dressed, smooth-talking charmer. McCann is a rather large, surly Irishman. They are something of an odd couple, to be sure, though Goldberg is clearly the one in charge. The only other character we meet is Lulu, a young woman in the town who drops by now and again.
Stanley is not pleased that two men are suddenly showing up, and he tries to avoid them, which is tough in a tiny boarding house. When they do meet up, it's clear that he either knows them or knows who they are, and feels threatened by them for unstated reasons. When Meg and Petey are away, Goldberg and McCann interrogate and threaten Stanley.
Meanwhile, Meg has decided that it's Stanley's birthday (though he insists it is not), and throws the eponymous birthday party, inviting the newly-arrived guests and Lulu. Goldberg supplies the liquor (roughly a bottle per person--yikes!).
The party is odd--uncomfortable, but then, so is pretty much every interaction in the show. By the end, all in attendance are well and truly drunk, and Stanley seems to have snapped.
Next thing we see, it's morning. We see the aftermath of the party. People go away. Nothing is actually resolved. Pinter play.
The Performance
The acting is really very good. Meg (Judith Ivey) is convincingly senile. Petey (Dan Hiatt) is rather bizarrely unconcerned with any of the odd behavior going on. He and Meg obviously have a well-established routine (tea, corn flakes, friend bread, newspaper) that works for them. Stanley (Firdous Bamji) seems nearly catatonic, though apparently when he arrived he was quite the piano player. It's unclear why he stopped playing and now just holes up in the boarding house. He is clearly not happy being there, and Meg's dotty ministrations obviously annoy him. It's all very mysterious.Goldberg (Scott Wentworth) is terrific, just a smooth, convincing con man, which offsets MaCann (Marco Barricelli), who is pretty much his mirror opposite: a looming presence, more likely to grunt than speak. The two of them are most effective. And Lulu (Julie Adamo) is sort of a harmless bystander, sucked into the vortex of whatever it is that's happening at the boarding house.
All the portrayals are quite effective, and the characterizations are pretty interesting, but since the script doesn't actually go anywhere, we are sort of stuck in this purgatory with all the characters: clearly uncomfortable, struggling to hold power over each other, with no way out. Pinter play.
Nina Ball's set is very effective: a tiny, claustrophobic house (of which we really only see one room) on the big Geary Theater stage, with sand dunes and beach chairs surrounding, providing a buffer zone from the rest of the world. It's almost like there is nowhere else to go.
The Bottom Line
I don't really know what else to say about the show. It's well done, but doesn't go anywhere. So it seems to be a high-quality rendition of the play, but the play is basically just Pinter's message that the characters are just stuck in some kind of Sisyphean power struggle with each other. Everybody is either ordering people around or adamantly refusing to submit. It's very tiring. I'm sure that's the point.So I'm afraid I don't have a great appreciation for this Pinter thing. Others obviously like it a lot, but it doesn't do much for me. So, good stagecraft, excellent acting, but for me, that was it. Your mileage may vary, obviously.
The show runs for a couple more weeks, through February 4th. If it's your kind of play, you should like it.
We were at the Wednesday matinee feeling truly sorry for ourselves. I agree, the actors did their jobs well, but to what end? Pinter’s play, at best, seems like a Beckett pastiche, reaching for the same kind of audience without delivering the kind of substance that Beckett delivers.
ReplyDeleteHaving seen “Waiting for Godot” and “Endgame”, I wondered why I loved those and not “The Birthday Party”. For example, I’d been exposed to Beckett when I was a teenage existentialist, I’d done the homework before I saw the plays and had a good idea what I was getting into, all that may have helped. “The Birthday Party” I took in cold and in my (arguably) mellower 50s. Does Pinter suffer simply because I’m no longer the audience? If I saw “Endgame” today without having done the homework would I have the same reaction?
I didn’t study up on Pinter’s play beforehand, but had plenty of time on the train ride home to try to make up for that, so I googled around a little and what I found was a lot of people babbling about the enforcement of conformity in society and some bits about unreliable narrators and it all just seemed like a lot of people looking for something that wasn’t really there. The unreliable narrator spin did help, once that’s pointed out, I could see there was some poetry to what he was doing there. But at the end of the day, I’m not sold and I suspect the author is more at fault than the audience, I don’t believe that angsty, gloomy teenage self would have warmed to it anymore than I do now.