Ask any theater professional in the know and they will tell you that acting Pinter is dream job. Not for nothing is British playwright Harold Pinter (1930-2008) known as an actors’ playwright. His plots are enigmas, his characters hem and haw while spouting the most mundane conversations, and over all, like a fog, lies a mist of menace. Something wicked this way comes. Like Chekhov’s gun, sooner or later something or someone is going to go off.
Nobel Prize, Tony Award, and Olivier Award-winner Pinter is considered one of the most influential and important voices in “modern” theater. Although his greatest works span decades, his plays, The Birthday Party, The Homecoming and Betrayal are modern theater classics, and his screenplay adaptations of The Servant, The Go-Between, The French Lieutenant’s Woman and even populist murder mystery Sleuth, are evocative of golden age Hollywood at its finest.
He loved to act, and his plays certainly show his flair for the footlights. They are resplendent with terse monologues, intriguing dialogue that always says much more than stated, and an air of danger., even though none is apparently present. And those pauses, the ellipses, are mother’s milk to actors. So much can be done with those. It’s all under the surface, the subtext, if you will, and that’s why actors love to sink their teeth into Pinter’s meaty, elliptical talk. You can make almost anything out of it. His style is so unique, it’s been patented under “Pinteresque.”
The three actors in Betrayal, somewhat hypnotizing at Rec Room Arts, chew into Pinter like dining with Escoffier. They eat him up. Well, to be true, two do: Jay Sullivan and Molly Wetzel. It’s a mystery to me why Brandon J. Morgan has gone silent. One of Houston’s finest, Morgan possesses such ease and class when acting, that you often forget his immense talent. He fills his characters with grace and simple truth, no matter who they are. You just know you’ve met them somewhere because his characters are so life-like. What happened here?
He speaks so low that you strain to hear him. Rec Room is perhaps the smallest theater in Houston, why is he speaking so we can’t hear him or the author’s provocative words? Why has director Sophia Watt toned him down to a whisper? His character Jerry, a literary agent, certainly has things to hide – as do all three of them; four of them, actually, if you count Jerry’s offstage wife – but who speaks sotto voce in the theater? In his scene where he first declares his love for Emma, his best friend Robert’s wife, which sets the play in motion, his back is to us. We lose all connection. We totally lose him.
Wetzel and Sullivan, as married couple Robert and Emma, fare better because we can hear them. The knowing insinuations, the oblique references, the cat-and-mouse games are front and center. We have to lean in for Morgan, and that trips us up. Not only does it make Pinter’s knotty drama a lot less interesting, we lose important information along the way as the intimate drama speeds backward.
For you see, Pinter, that sly cat, plays with us. His drama about adultery and the lies one tells during betrayal, is told in reverse order. In nine scenes, starting with the ex-lovers meeting in 1977, Betrayal moves back in time to Robert and Emma’s wedding in 1968, with each next scene adding a bit more exposition, a bit more introspection, a bit more jealousy, a lot more tension. A theater maven, Pinter must have known Kaufman and Hart’s sardonic comedy Merrily We Roll Along (1934), which also has nine scenes and proceeds backward in time to the now-damaged trio’s innocent youth.
Rec Room’s production is stripped to the essentials. Designer Stefän Azizi employs only a table and chairs to serve as bar, restaurant, a hotel room in Venice, the couple’s tryst apartment. The walls are curtains, and the passage of time is by turntable, although it seemed to have a life of its own and rotated during scenes before time went backward, indicated by titles projected on the walls. It’s all very minimal, which pushes Pinter right to the fore where he should be. But Jerry, his back to us, remains suspended in time, far away, snacking on Pinter but leaving us hungry for more.
Betrayal continues through July 6 at 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at Rec Room Arts, 100 Jackson. For more information, call 713-344-1291 or visit [email protected]. $21.50 – $46.50.
D. L. Groover
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