McCarter Theatre opens its season with Harold Pinter’s ‘The Birthday Party.’
By: Susan Van Dongen
It’s ironic that so much would be discussed, pondered and analyzed about Harold Pinter’s 1957 play The Birthday Party. Like many of the playwright’s early works, the study of peril and mystery in a shabby English boarding house abounds with ambiguity.
When asked to clarify the meaning of the plot, the subtext of the dialogue and the inner lives of the characters, Pinter refused. He declined to make any more judgments about his characters and wouldn’t write an explanatory note that would elucidate the menacing undertone of the play.
At the time of the play’s first rehearsals, all Pinter would say about the meaning of The Birthday Party was "…the hierarchy, the Establishment, the arbiters, the socio-religious monster arrive to effect alteration and censure upon a member of the club who has discarded responsibility… towards himself and others."
But that’s about it. The rest is up to the audience to figure out.
"It’s an emotional roller coaster Pinter never makes it easy, everything is very complex," says McCarter Theatre Artistic Director Emily Mann. "That’s what I love about the play. It’s one of my favorites."
A work of blindness and blackouts, but also dark humor and rhythmic dialogue that brings out the best in a virtuoso cast, The Birthday Party opens McCarter Theatre Center’s 2006-2007 theater season. Directed by Ms. Mann, the production runs Sept. 8 to Oct. 15 in the Berlind Theatre.
The cast features Barbara Bryne, Dennis Creaghan, Allan Corduner, Randall Newsome, Charlotte Parry and Henry Stram.
Veteran actor Ms. Bryne will be making her McCarter debut, a long overdue reunion with Ms. Mann, an old friend and collaborator. The friendship dates back nearly 30 years, when Ms. Mann was a directing apprentice at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis where Ms. Bryne is a long-time company member.
"I remember seeing Barbara in ‘Tartuffe’ and saying to myself, ‘She would be perfect as Annulla,’" Ms. Mann says. "I had this (manuscript in progress) under my arm and I came up to her after the show and said, ‘I have a play that you would be perfect for.’ She asked if it was finished and I said, ‘Well, not yet.’"
Ms. Bryne politely suggested Ms. Mann finish the work and then she would take a look.
"I ran home and literally worked day and night to complete it," Ms. Mann says.
That play was Annulla, an Autobiography, Ms. Mann’s first, produced on the Guthrie’s second stage with Ms. Bryne in the title role. The one-woman tour-de-force has the eccentric main character describing her life during the rise of Nazism speaking to the audience as she prepares a real batch of chicken stew. (Every night the cast and crew went home with a meal, Ms. Mann recollects.)
Ms. Mann wanted to tempt Ms. Bryne to come to McCarter by offering "the perfect role," and a light bulb came on in her head when she thought of Meg, the overbearing landlady in Pinter’s play.
"I hadn’t thought about ‘The Birthday Party’ in 20 years," Ms. Mann says. "I was looking for a perfect role for Barbara really wracking my brain and all of a sudden Meg popped into my head. I thought, ‘Oh my God, Barbara was born to play this role.’"
When asked how she will portray Meg’s cluelessness, and blissful unawareness, Ms. Bryne blithely says she will just work with the words on the page.
"I don’t go into (too much analysis), I just look at the text, what I have and who I think the character is," Ms. Bryne says. "I recently did Ionesco’s ‘The Chairs’ in the Guthrie’s lab theater, and that’s all you could do with that piece, because it’s theater of the absurd. Certainly one has to have an idea of what the play is, but that’s partly the director’s job, to interpret what they think it means. But this play, in comparison to ‘The Chairs,’ is pretty straightforward. The characters are recognizable."
In the present pop psychology era of Oprah and Dr. Phil, you might say, with understatement, that Meg is "in denial," and her husband, Petey, is somewhat "emotionally inaccessible." You might also say (and existentialists might agree) that Meg has created her own reality and identity within her mind.
For example, her boarding house is filthy but she says, "it’s on the list" a destination for tourists. Her breakfast is awful but she keeps getting Petey to affirm that it’s "nice." She’s definitely over-the-hill, but gets the mysterious Mr. Goldberg to praise her looks, coaxing him to say that "she’ll look like a tulip" in her party dress. This adds to the dark humor of Pinter’s play.
"Meg is simple minded, she doesn’t seem to grasp reality," Ms. Bryne says. "She’s also totally unconscious of being funny. That’s just her. I’ve known people like that."
An interesting twist one that really gave a boost to Ms. Bryne’s career is that the late playwright Joe Orton saw The Birthday Party, re-imagined Meg, Petey and the lodger Stanley, and wrote the acclaimed Entertaining Mr. Sloan. Ms. Bryne was cast as Kath, kind of a heightened, more sexualized version of Meg.
"Joe Orton made something quite different out of it, much more high comedy," Ms. Bryne says. "That show did wonderful things for me. I received a Drama Desk nomination, which was a total surprise, because it was the first thing I’d done in New York. And it seemed like everybody came to see it."
The role led to her work with James Lapine in Sunday in the Park with George, and later to Hay Fever and Into the Woods on Broadway, as well as Milos Forman’s film adaptation of Amadeus, where Ms. Bryne played Mozart’s mother-in-law.
Ms. Mann also worked with Ms. Bryne when she directed her in the 1980 production of The Glass Menagerie at the Guthrie. The late John Spencer Leo on The West Wing was in the cast, too.
"I’ve always wanted to bring Barbara to McCarter and I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to work with her on Pinter’s brilliant play," Ms. Mann says.
She admits that people are sometimes intimidated by Pinter. They think they’ll have to go back to their notes from undergraduate studies in existentialism to understand his work.
"But he’s so accessible and he’s also very funny," Ms. Mann says. "This play is not dated one second. As long as there is fear in the world, this will matter. And as long as people remember how to laugh, this play will matter. Those are the two things Pinter so brilliantly works with.
"At this moment in time when people are concerned with standing up and being heard, this play is about either being silent or being afraid to stand up," she continues. "Of course, it’s less about the actual dialogue than what is going on under the surface. Pinter is always talking about the fact that people will just be speaking to hide what’s really going on, what they’re really thinking."
"People are amazed about how much there is to discover in this play," Ms. Bryne says.
"And that," Ms. Mann says, "…is part of the fun of rehearsing."
The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter, directed by Emily Mann and starring Barbara Bryne, will play at McCarter Theatre Center’s Berlind Theatre, 91 University Place, Princeton, Sept. 8-Oct. 15. Performances: Tues.-Thurs. 7:30 p.m.; Fri. 8 p.m.; Sat. 3, 8 p.m.; Sun. 2 p.m.; Sept. 24, 7:30 p.m. Tickets cost $33-$48. For information, call (609) 258-2787. On the Web: www.mccarter.org