‘The Birthday Party’

Emily Mann directs Harold Pinter’s enigmatic work at McCarter Theatre.

By: Stuart Duncan
   When Harold Pinter’s first full-length play, The Birthday Party, opened in London’s West End in 1958, the critics rushed to savage it. "Non-sequiturs," "half gibberish" and "lunatic ravings" were but a few of the epithets hurled at it. A single critic stood up for the playwright, calling him "the most original, disturbing, arresting talent in theatrical London." It was too little, too late. The play closed in just six days, playing to six in the audience at one performance.
   Unfazed, Pinter continued to write plays through the years, with obtuse or impossible plot lines, and critics became more amenable and audiences more discerning. The Birthday Party has been hailed as an important work. It still is a much-flawed play and, if you demand a clear understanding of the characters and motivations, you may well want to stay home. But the current production at McCarter Theatre in Princeton is a most exciting evening at the theater.
   It has extraordinary direction, a superb company of six actors and a set so elegant in its intent that it can truly be described as breathtaking.
   Like many Pinter plays, this one is based in reality. In his early career, Pinter was an itinerant actor and, at one point, he stayed in a boarding house in Eastbourne, England, which he described as "filthy, insane digs." It was run by "a great bulging scrag of a woman." Here, in his first play, he introduces a theme that will become common: "the failure of language to serve as an adequate tool of communication." In fact, he followed the lead of a pair of his contemporaries — Beckett (Waiting For Godot) and Ionesco (The Bald Soprano).
   As mentioned, the evening introduces us to six characters: Barbara Bryne plays Meg (the scrag of a woman) with a delicious sense of motherly concern, tinged with confusion. James Stephens is Petey, her husband, presumably hen-pecked but showing no visible scars. Henry Stram plays Stanley, the enigmatic boarder, by turns a weakling and a hero. Watch carefully as you first catch a glimpse of him and as he dons (in half shadow) a hairpiece, otherwise you miss much.
   Charlotte Parry plays Lulu, a beauty, presumably with a past, but looking more to her future. And Allan Corduner and Randall Newsome play a pair of gentlemen callers, Goldberg and McCann, a sort of pre-Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern duo that brings the knock on the door that was the era’s nightmare.
   A word about Eugene Lee’s set design: We have seen his work before at McCarter, and he won the Tony Award for set design for Wicked on Broadway. His work for this production, however, does far more than provide suitable space or set a mood; it creates an entire world. It is a two-level cutaway of the cheerless boarding house and testifies to its careless care.
   Emily Mann has woven these dissimilar pieces of fabric into an astonishing whole that will have you literally on the edge of your seat. You may very well not understand precisely what is going on, but chances are you won’t care. You may well overlook Pinter’s bursts of self-congratulatory cleverness, reveling in the brilliance of the acting. There is typically no catharsis or nobility to the playwright’s tragedy, instead, merely the absolute bleakness of commonplace life.
   And you will note that the single redeeming moment in the play is late in the evening as Stanley is being led out. Petey calls to him: "Don’t let them tell you what to do!" Typical Pinter: the only good in humanity that we are allowed is ineffectual.
The Birthday Party continues at McCarter’s Berlind Theatre, 91 University Place, Princeton, through Oct. 15. Performances: Tue.-Thurs. 7:30 p.m.; Fri. 8 p.m.; Sat. 3, 8 p.m.; Sun. 2 p.m. Tickets cost $33-$48. For information, call (609) 258-2787. On the Web: www.mccarter.org