Perloff throws a dreadfully good ‘Party’
Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party,” one of his so-called comedies of menace, is often associated with a feeling particular to a time and place: the fear of postwar Europeans who, still reeling from bombings and the Gestapo, knew that terror can strike capriciously, raining down at random, leaving no one, ever, completely safe.
Yet nothing feels period about American Conservatory Theater’s production of the 1957 play, which opened Wednesday, Jan. 17, at the Geary Theater as the last production Carey Perloff will direct for the company while still its artistic director. A longtime Pinter interpreter, she makes
clear that Europe’s postwar dread has only become the dread we must all share. It is not the feeling of one moment, resulting from one war, but the inescapable consequence of living in a world where institutions’ power vastly outweighs individuals’. When we put our faith in a government, a religion or, in “The Birthday Party,” something as vague and thus as insidious as “the organization,” we pay by empowering it to find us, invade our homes, pluck us out of our beds and do what it will with us.
Lest that make “The Birthday Party” sound terrifying or somber, the magic of Pinter is that it’s often as rollicking as a vaudeville routine. That’s thanks in large part to the first-rate cast Perloff has assembled to populate the play’s seaside boarding house. When landlady Meg (Judith Ivey) and landlord Petey (Dan Hiatt) open the show talking about their breakfast, you could fool yourself, for a moment, into thinking that you’re watching Burns and Allen or Nichols and May. To Hiatt’s inscrutable straight man, Ivey brings a richly constructed clown — scaling a whole octave in a single diphthong, padding through her sitting room as if it’s made of sticky sand; maintaining a daft, glassy grin, no matter the deviant turn the conversation takes.
Yet there’s something so off-kilter, so otherworldly about their prattle even in these opening moments that every laugh is an unsettled one. Why does it take them so many lines of dialogue to establish that, yes, it is in fact one another they’re talking to? Why is it so important to declare, over and over again, that the cornflakes are “very nice”? If Pinter’s inviting us to laugh at the inanity, the banality, the conformity inherent in marriage and domesticity, he’s also hinting that their world and our world are so uncertain that basic premises and laws need to be confirmed and reconfirmed, over and over again. It’s a sentiment cannily echoed by Nina Ball’s set design, in which the dingy boardinghouse’s roof seems to have already been blown off by a storm.
The show gets still another
To see cast members discuss the show’s genre: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=NV5buwtH0fI
To see Perloff discuss the play: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=UcdecoHU0f0
To see Pinter’s Nobel lecture: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=PH96tuRA3L0 magnificent comic duo when kingpin Goldberg (Scott Wentworth) and goon McCann (Marco Barricelli) arrive to browbeat and interrogate Meg’s longtime boarder Stanley (Firdous Bamji), who’s alternately a peevish milquetoast and a spark plug capable of perverse explosions. As the outsiders barrage him with nonsense — “Why do you pick your nose?” or “Why did the chicken cross the road?” — their back-andforth gathers a kind of locomotive musical momentum. What they say is of no consequence; what matters is that they can say it, say anything, and have it wield power over him.
Stanley knows exactly why they’re there but never says. He doesn’t have to. When our time comes, when hit men knock down our own doors, won’t you know precisely why? Isn’t it enough that you took part in this rotten world of ours?