Carey Perloff directs her final play at ACT.
Director celebrates her last season at ACT with Pinter play
When Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party” opened in London in 1958, the run lasted one week. All the critics save one dismissed the play and its minimal, often elliptical style. The one who did not, Harold Hobson of the Sunday Times, wrote: “Mr. Pinter, on the evidence of this work, possesses the most original, disturbing, and arresting talent in theatrical London.” Hobson’s review, which might have saved the production, came out the morning after the producer shuttered the show.
However, Hobson’s observations could not have been more prescient about the emerging playwright, who became one of the most significant writers of the post-World War II period, winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 2005.
ACT has not staged “The Birthday Party” until now. The forthcoming production will be the last time Carey Perloff directs as artistic director for the company. In March, Perloff announced the 2017-18 season would be her last at ACT.
“I know it’s kind of abstract and arbitrary, but 25 is a good
round number to say, ‘This is a good moment to be done!’ ” Perloff said with her customary verve in a bare ACT rehearsal room looking at the city from the eighth floor of its Montgomery Street offices.
Pinter’s next full-length play, “The Caretaker” (1960), ran a year. In his 1962 essay “Writing for the Theatre,” Pinter coolly explained, “Of course there are differences between the plays. In ‘The Birthday Party,’ I employed a certain amount of dashes in the text. In ‘The Caretaker,’ I cut the dashes and used dots instead.”
The dashes and dots were the now famous Pinter pauses and silences, garnering the eventual descriptor “Pinteresque.” “The Birthday Party” was dubbed a “comedy of menace” by the critic Irving Wardle, taking the phrase from the play “The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace,” written by Pinter contemporary David Campton. Some saw the branding as a sly slurring of its precedent, “comedy of manners.” Not surprisingly, both Pinter and Campton rejected the label, and Wardle soon backed away from it as well.
Pinter’s influence had immediate allies in work by Joe Orton and David Hare in Britain and Edward Albee in the U.S. The sensibility was more easily imitated than assimilated but can be felt in Sam Shepard, David Mamet, SuzanLori Parks, Martin McDonagh and Tracy Letts. What’s always true enough, though, has been the presence of both comedy and menace in “The Birthday Party.”
When Perloff realized this would be her last season, she decided “The Birthday Party” should be her last production.
“This is a great play — my favorite Pinter — with this great cast,” Perloff said. The small ensemble features Firdous Bamji as Stanley, the onetime concert pianist who stays at the nondescript seaside boardinghouse of Meg ( Judith Ivey) and Petey (Dan Hiatt). Scott Wentworth as Goldberg and Marco Barricelli as McCann are two threatening men who turn up looking for Stanley. Julie Adamo is Lulu, a young friend of Meg’s who drops into the boardinghouse.
The action takes place over a 24-hour period, from one morning to the next, and never moves from the boardinghouse.
Perloff noted that Pinter was just 28 when he wrote his first full-length play, and he survived a torrent of criticism after it was in the public eye. “He wrote like no one had ever written, the first time out,” Perloff said.
“When people said ‘This is terrible,’ ‘It’s absurd,’ ‘It’s not a play,’ he said, ‘No, this is the play I wanted to write.’ That takes a kind of courage.”
Pinter’s spare dialogue, the lack of backstory or character explanation, and shifting versions of events all contribute to the work’s mystique. The presentation has to be precise; rehearsals are exacting.
“We went over one page of dialogue for hours because it’s like a razor and you can’t get it wrong,” she said. “The language can never be reflective or private. It’s very active, and the stage is like a kind of boxing ring.”
Longtime Perloff collaborator playwright Tom Stoppard wrote in an email, “I tell people she is a writer’s director, meaning that everything comes from the text with Carey.
“I think Carey is proud to serve the text first, but that doesn’t preclude her from creating her own visions. Her production of ‘Indian Ink’ is a good example.”
Stoppard added, “Actors probably tell people she’s an actor’s director.”
Perloff directed “The Birthday Party” in 1989 for the Classic Stage Company in New York with Pinter in attendance for rehearsals. “Harold Pinter was a very powerful and often menacing man, but he was universally generous in the room — he loved actors,” Perloff said.
“Writers write to their own voices, and in their own way the plays are quite realistic — but it’s not like American realism; it’s a kind of distilled landscape in which everyone is fighting for their survival.”
Perloff particularly relates to Pinter through his Jewish British working-class background. Pinter lived in London as a child during the blitz of World War II. He was sent away to Cornwall in the country but brought back despite the danger because he was so miserable. Perloff feels the specter of fascism with the looming fears of bombing and invasion that left marks on Pinter.
“My mother’s a Viennese refugee, so I grew up in an atmosphere that was very focused on the Jewish European intellectual tradition of refugees,” Perloff said.
Pinter mines classic Jewish comedy routines in “The Birthday Party” but he also inserts historical imperatives of Jewish identity.
“The way Jews have had to change their names over time so as not to be detected, so as to pass, is something he calls out over and over again in ‘The Birthday Party,’ ” Perloff said.
Nearly 30 years after she first worked on it, the play has deepened for Perloff as she views the characters differently. She is now closer in age to Meg than Lulu.
“Meg’s desire not to lose Stanley defines everything that happens in the play, and that seems more resonant to me now,” Perloff said.
“All the strictures of organized civilized life that we expect people to belong to, Stanley has rebelled against. So he’s paying for it.
“I think because I knew Pinter, I find it very moving,” Perloff said. “At heart he did try to live his life as an individual that bucked the tide, and that was a very hard thing to do then. It’s still a very hard thing to do.”