Pinter drama ‘Birthday Party’ turns into an ACT reunion
There’s a not so subtle edge of dread pervading “The Birthday Party,” Harold Pinter’s first full-length play. A pair of mysterious strangers show up at a shabby and remote boardinghouse with some sinister interest in its lone lodger. For American Conservatory Theater artistic director Carey Perloff, however, “The Birthday Party” is something she’s been looking forward to tremendously.
It’s the last play Perloff is directing in her final season as artistic director (a successor has not yet been announced), and the cast brings together a number of ACT veterans and other favorites. Former core company member Marco Barricelli returns alongside Scott Wentworth (“Mary Stuart”) as the imposing duo while Firdous Bamji (“Indian Ink”) portrays boarder Stanley, with multiple Tony Award winner Judith Ivey and frequent player Dan Hiatt (“Hamlet,” “King Charles III”) as the old couple who live there. Julie Adamo (“The Hard Problem”) plays young woman Lulu.
“I find this play astonishing for so many reasons,” Perloff says. “It was one of the first things I ever did when I ran Classic Stage Company in New York, and I worked on it with Harold Pinter in the room. What I learned from him was incalculable. So as I was thinking about what are the things I love the most that I wanted to do before I left ACT, and also what’s a play that would bring back so many of the real ACT all-stars, it was this play.”
One of those all-stars, Barricelli was not just a member of ACT’s nowdefunct core acting company but inspired Perloff to form it in the first place when they first worked together on 1996’s “The Rose Tattoo.”
“Marco and I were always profoundly in sync,” Perloff says. “That just happens with some artists, where we just trust each other in the room and deeply enjoy working together. And he inherently has enormous stage power. He’s a big man with a powerful voice and a powerful intellect and a real stage presence. So you put him up there in this world, and there’s already
menace before you open your mouth.”
Since Barricelli left ACT in 2005, he served as the last artistic director of Shakespeare Santa Cruz under the UC Santa Cruz aegis and was one of the founders of the independent Santa Cruz Shakespeare that succeeded it. He currently runs the graduate acting program in UC San Diego’s theater and dance department. He’s occasionally been back to act in shows such as 2010’s “Vigil” and 2014’s “Napoli!” at ACT.
“I was very honored that she wanted me to be here for this play,” Barricelli says. “This is the 17th play I’ve done that she’s directed, and then there are all the shows Carey didn’t direct that I’ve done at ACT. It’s been a real artistic home for me, and a lot of the shaping of my aesthetic and myself as an artist has come through Carey’s lens and through this organization.”
Barricelli has done a lot of Pinter over the years, some of it with Perloff at ACT, but it’s his first time with “Birthday Party.”
“This play is very opaque,” he says. “You’re 100 percent compelled every minute of the story, but you’re not exactly sure what means what and what’s going on. You just have to play it through, and something slowly reveals itself to you. But what’s revealing itself to you as some sort of narrative or through line, three different people will have three completely different opinions about what that through line might be, all of which are valid.”
Ultimately, however, much of the play’s power rests on its powerhouse cast.
“There’s a kind of amazing thing when you have heavyweights all on stage together,” Perloff says. “It really raises their game. So for me to sit and watch it, it’s like a good athletic match. And sometimes we fall right on the ropes. That’s part of the fun.”