'The Birthday Party' celebrates a perfect moment
It is not at all difficult to see why director Aaron Snook and the Signal Ensemble Theatre decided to stage a revival of Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party” at this particular moment.
To begin with, this year marks the 50th anniversary of the play’s debut in London (though the initially negative critical response to this early drama nearly drove the actor-writer into a different line of work). Far more to the point, this play is an exploration of intimidation — whether by extreme forms of psychological torment (interrogation without the possibility of response, language as a piercing tool of menace and possible distortion), or the more predictable techniques of blunt brute force. And for those who admire Pinter’s world view — he has railed against human rights abuses for decades, and in recent years has aimed his most savage remarks at U.S. policies — “The Birthday Party” serves as an ideal allegory.
‘The Birthday Party’
RECOMMENDED
Through Aug. 30
Signal Ensemble at the Chopin Studio Theatre, 1543 W. Division
Tickets: $15-$20
Phone: (773) 347-1350
Whether or not you find Pinter’s current political stance problematic in many ways, this play continues to grab hold of the imagination. And Snook and his precision-tuned cast of six handles its very tricky landscape with exceptional finesse, illuminating several passages that even the most devoted Pinter fan might have missed in earlier productions. The actors skillfully conjure the banality (or willed blindness) of their characters, as well as their more manipulative and vicious aspects. And under Snook’s direction, the cast taps into the striking poetry and deftly expressive music of Pinter’s writing.
The backdrop for this episode of terror is a charmingly mundane little boarding house in an English seacoast town. The middle-aged but still flirty proprietor, Meg (Mary O’Dowd), oversees the meals, while her decent but impotent husband, Petey (Vincent L. Lonergan), works as a deck-chair attendant. Their sole, year-long boarder is a rather meek, bespectacled, depressive fellow, Stanley (Joseph Stearns), a former concert and club pianist who clearly is on the run from something.
As it turns out, Stanley can’t hide forever. And he has now been hunted down by a pair of thuggish types — Goldberg (Will Schutz), the bombastic charmer, and his younger henchman, McCann (Philip Winston) — who insist on throwing Stanley a party he will not forget. What begins as a forced little celebration — complete with whiskey, tough-guy threats, blind man’s bluff games, drunken confessions and the seduction of a young, if not entirely innocent neighbor, Lulu (Leah Nuetzel) — ends far more demonically. The tone of musical hall farce cedes literally overnight, to something far more shattering.
The design team — Melania Lacey (set), Julie E. Ballard (lights), Elsa Hiltner (costumes) and sound (Anthony Ingram) — has done impeccable work. And as Pinter reminds us, terrible things can happen inside a doll-house world.