Old Times and No Man's Land - A Theater Review and a Festival Wrap Up

Harold Pinter

The Pinter Festival at ACT has been everything a theater festival should be:

• It was grand in scale : producing three full main stage productions almost simultaneously; hosting numerous auxiliary events including readings, classes and film screenings. 
• It was focused : if you didn't know what Pinter was about at the start of the festival, you certainly did by the end. 
• It was courageous : produced with all local talent; taking on a serious often misunderstood playwright and producing his plays for an indoor festival in Seattle's warmest time of the year.
• It was uneven : the  productions were extremely varied in their effectiveness. 
• It was addictive : even after the most disatisfying of the shows, you wanted to come back and see the rest; you even hoped that this will be only the first of possibly a few Pinter Festival's that may come over the next handful of years.

Overall, the festival felt like a gift to the city, and I was thrilled to be able to witness it unfold.

I saw The Dumb Waiter and Celebration at the beginning of the festival and wrote about them here. This past week I was able to catch performances of No Man's Land  and Old Times.

Jeffery Frace, Cheyenne Casebier and Anne Allgood in Old Times

Old Times might be my new favorite Pinter play. A married couple, Deeley and Kate, entertain an old friend of Kate's, Anna, in their country house. Soon, however, Deeley and Anna's efforts to each claim Kate as their own escalate the evening's visit into a desperate and brutal journey into all the characters' pasts that leaves no one unscathed. I had read it before but never had seen it performed. I always loved the wonderfully obscure tension that bounced back and forth between the characters like a diabolical three way tennis match. But never had I imagined the breadth of humor that could be mined from the power plays amongst the characters. Under Victor Pappas' ultra-focused and confident direction the three extremely talented performers  (Jeffery Frace (Deeley), Cheyenne Casebier (Kate) and Anne Allgood (Anna)) deliver a surprisingly laugh out loud funny take on the script that manages to hit so much unexpected comedy in the play while still slowly building the extreme discomfort that rests at the core of the piece.

Frace brings just the right combination of casual aloofness and barbed sarcasm to Deeley that allows him to embody both the simplistic empathy and haunting unreliability that makes him the perfect host to this most unusual of evenings. Casebier as Kate is almost Zen-like in her stillness and silence during Anna and Deeley's power struggle which keeps her an important and well heard character even in long stretches where she has no lines (many an actor fail miserably in such a role where they seemingly have nothing active to do). Allgood is both poised charm and striking venom as the evening's questionably intentioned guest from the past. There was a brief glimpse of Allgood's range and affinity for Pinter in Celebration, but here we really get to see an assured, multilayered and memorable performance. 

With these strong performances at its center, what works so well in this production is it ability to take Pinter off the page and deliver it in a lively, unexpected and unsettling way to its audience. Director Pappas, with his actors and design team (Robert Dahlstrom's set is flawless in its simplicity, utilitarianism and elegance, and Rick Paulsen's lighting assists in producing some unforgettable images on the stage), make many subtle but bold choices with the script that give it a broad, tangible and recognizable life that many Pinter productions are too reverential or too intimidated to ever reach. If the Pinter Festival was a great success, Old Times was its crowning achievement (The Dumb Waiter was excellent as well, but I believe Old Times to be a richer and more nuanced play to begin with).

Moore, Crook, Corrado and Harris in No Man's Land

While Old Times surprised in its life off the page, No Man's Land never seemed to get far from a table reading. In this play we have two men, Hirst and Spooner, visiting at the home of the wealthier of the two, Hirst, after having met earlier in the evening at a local pub.Supposed strangers, these men soon find some odd common ground. Their relationship is further strained by two young men, Briggs and Foster, who are sort of assistants to Hirst, whose motives to protect their benefactor and themselves begin to quickly turn all of our assumptions about who these people are and what we are watching upside down.

Frank Corrado as Hirst and Randy Moore as Spooner seem, along with director  Penelope Cherns, to be trying to be following Pinter's script as a piece of music, as if the language is so strong that all you need to do is hop on, deliver it well and let you take it for a ride. The result is a pretty uneven production that produces a handful of interesting moments but doesn't really hold together. By the time Benjamin Harris as Foster and Peter Crook as Briggs arrive, each bringing a bit more of a pointed and welcomed energy to the production, the tone has been set and the proceeding action feels disconnected from what has come before. The problem is most pronounced during the play's handful of extremely long monologues almost all of which are delivered almost as if there is no one else on stage and subsequently, the rest of the life on stage dies. Cherns says in her program notes that "Pinter demands a light touch." It feels here that she touched way too lightly and didn't make the bolder choices that would have given the audience the more visceral experience that this play is designed to deliver.

A testament to the power of this festival is that despite my feelings about No Man's Land I felt even more compelled to see Old Times afterwards. Having seen them both now, along with the initial two one acts of the festival, I wish I had been able to make it to some of the auxiliary events around these shows. I do hope ACT is happy with the results of this experiment and feel  moved to bring us another wave of Pinter works in the future.

The Pinter Festival  plays at ACT through August 26. Tickets here.

Afterthoughts

Accents : In a festival like this, where a number of Pinter plays are being tackled by the same ensemble at once, I would have loved to see one show done without British accents. Clearly many of Pinter's plays are set in specific locales in England and use language that is distinct to British culture. Yet a number of his plays are unrealistic and non-naturalistic enough that I believe they could weather a true relocation across the pond and have our American actors speak the words with their own domestic accents. We do Shakespeare without accents all the time. Beckett, it could be argued, actually brings a different nuance when done with an Irish accent, but he still holds up marvelously when done with unadorned American accents. In these plays, Celebration, seems to be the play where accents mattered the least. In No Man's Land, I would argue that the accents almost got in the way. It felt like Corrado and Moore sort of fell in love with their accents and played the delivery of their lines more than the action of the play.

Design : While I found the costumes, lights and sets for The Dumb Waiter and Old Times  to be wonderfully effective and visually striking, I felt that the design elements in both Celebration and No Man's Land to be severely judgmental of  the plays' characters. The color choices in both were unappetizing palates with what seemed to be purposefully ill-fitting costumes that pulled the audience even further away from any kind of empathy with the characters. Just as the set of Celebration  didn't read as a fancy restaurant, the set of No Man's Land simply didn't read as the rich house it was supposed to be. Instead of a wall of books and a separate bar, both were crammed into a single unit. The exit door which is supposed to lead to the rest of the house, read more like it lead to a small bathroom or the narrow hallway of a nursing home (I actually thought that Hirsh, when he crawls out of the room having fallen down drunk, was exiting into a bathroom to vomit, not to make his way slowly toward his bedroom elsewhere in the house). Maybe in an attempt to keep the four plays looking dramatically different visually, the design team went a bit too far with No Man's Land in finding a disjointed and claustrophobic counter balance to the cleanly orchestrated and Old Times.

The Dumb Waiter and Celebration - A Theater Review

It was with great enthusiasm and excitement that I greeted the news, earlier this year, that ACT would be producing a Pinter Festival this summer. Despite the best of intentions on my part, I had missed all of the installments of their Pinter Fortnightly series to date and was hoping to be able to, at some point, get a glimpse of the work they were doing with the plays of this seminal playwright. A festival seemed just the thing, and if my introduction to it with these two one act plays is any indication, it is going to be an event Seattle will be talking about for quite some time.

The Dumb Waiter, one of Harold Pinter's earliest plays,is the perfect choice to kick off this festival as it is almost a case study in what lies at the heart of all of Pinter's plays. It is a taut tension filled piece that deals even-handedly with both the banalities as well as the essence of life. Here making tea and deciding the best way to kill someone are discussed with equal import. It straddles the fence perfectly  between gritty realistic drama (that Pinter's self-appointed protege David Mamet took and ran with) and existential mindscapes (that Pinter's acknowledged influence and later friend and colleague Samuel Beckett so often employed). It is darkly funny, even menacing (a favorite word amongst Pinter critics), and challenges its audience to view the world a bit differently by its end.

Darragh Kennan and Chuck Leggett in The Dumb Waiter

Two hit men wait in a room for their next job to arrive. These two roles are played with the perfect combination of light handed physical comedy and pointed penetrating rage by the wonderful talents of Darragh Kennan as Gus and Charles Leggett as Ben. Both men show equal comfort and skill at lounging pensively in a long Pinter silence, as well as quickly exchanging banter back and forth. They and director John Langs make sure that the pace and timing of the play is spot on. I've read this play a number of times and seen it produced before, but ACT's seemingly flawless production, will be the one that lives in my memory from now on.

(For a full disclosure I should mention that I saw these plays in preview, so any critiques I have from here forward could certainly have been addressed by opening night.)

Celebration, one of Pinter's later plays, makes for a very interesting partner with The Dumb Waiter. From a claustrophobic single room with two characters in the first play, we move to a busy restaurant with eleven characters in the second. Where The Dumb Waiter seems to have a tight kinetic energy driving it forward, Celebration has a looser more collage-like feel. Like Pinter's other later works, this play is more confident in its tangents. It takes the characters and audience quickly from point A to point C sometimes never bothering to circle back to B.

Frank Carrado in Celebration

Yet the precision I found so remarkable in the first play, I found to be somewhat lacking in the second. Director Langs here has chosen for his cast of diners to play most of the one act boisterously drunk. This energy tends to muddy moments that call for focus and worse yet, tends to allow the audience to write off the characters' sometimes jarringly odd behavior as simply the drink talking. The audience I was with forgave the characters so much that they were laughing hysterically through most of the show (I know that in most cases this would be a good thing, but it was off here). This seemed to encourage even more broad comedy from the cast. While clearly Celebration is one of Pinter's lighter plays, light for Pinter is still pretty dark and, yes, menacing. This production missed those elements.

That said, the framing of the two pieces with controlled zen nature of Darragh Kennan at the beginning of The Dumb Waiter and then with the final monologue as the "waiter" in Celebration, bookended the evening perfectly and made me eager to come back to check out Old Times and No Man's Land when they join the festival in a few weeks. Congratulations to Kurt Beattie and Frank Corrado for having the courage and drive to bring this festival to Seattle audiences.

The Dumb Waiter and Celebration  play at ACT through August 26. Tickets here.

Afterthoughts

Set and Staging : I sat at the side of the thrust stage, as did about 1/4 of the audience. The staging on the first play was little tough at times, seeing only the back of one actor's head as he blocked my view of the other actor, but overall passable. The fact that I couldn't really see the dumb waiter or its contents when it opened, which clearly the audience at the front of the thrust could, was a bit distracting.

In Celebration, however, these issues became a bit worse. The biggest challenge of a play like this, from a staging point of view, is that you have 4 diners at a single table who don't get up much during the show. If you sit them traditionally around the table, the audience is going to miss one or two actors for almost the whole show depending on where you are sitting. A tough problem to fix for sure. But the choice here to have all four actors cheated to the upstage part of the table, leaving 1/3 of the table unadorned an unused, crowded the actors together in a way that didn't really make sense within the play. Plus, from my side view, they were often almost lined up in a row where I couldn't really get a good look at any but one of them at a time.

The set for The Dumbwaiter was perfect utilitarian excellence and the use of lighting to punctuate moments in the play, ingeniously effective. Yet the set and costumes for Celebration seemed to make an unnecessary negative judgement on the characters. Though it clearly is supposed to take place in a very nice upscale restaurant, the colors and decor here clearly suggested a restaurant past its heyday. The tackiness and unattractiveness of the diners' atire also made us feel that these people were not to be empathized with but more to be laughed at. It struck me that the play could have been much more affecting if the restaurant resembled one of the finer restaurants down the street from ACT, and if the diners looked liked the well dressed and well educated audience that was watching the show. If so, I believe the laughter that would have been created during the show would have been much more nervous laughter than the almost hooting and hollering I heard.