New Plays: The Word as Weapon

• Share

Harold Pinter is the Pavlov of playwrights. He feeds questions and withholds answers, leaving playgoers in a state of salivary anxiety. Written by Pinter in 1958, but opening on Broadway last week, The Birthday Party is certain to evoke in audiences another tantalized swivet.

The play's deadfall guy, Stanley (James Patterson), a paranoid expianist, is a mildly sinister human cipher and the sole boarder of a dilapidated rooming house at an English seaside resort. His landlady, Meg (Ruth White) cuddles and cossets him; unfailingly, she treats Stanley and her whey-faced husband to the breakfast specialty of the house, corn flakes and fried bread. Stanley has even less stomach for breakfast when he learns that two men named Goldberg (Ed Flanders) and McCann (Edward Winter) have come to the house as roomers.

McCann is edgy and truculent; Goldberg is expansive and sentimental as he reminisces about his mother's gefilte fish. In Act II, they pistol-whip Stanley with words—mad, flailing non sequiturs—charging that he "betrayed the organization." A birthday party for Stanley turns into a Walpurgisnacht, as the lights go out and Stanley goes berserk trying to throttle Meg and rape a nubile bundle of fluff called Lulu (Alexandra Berlin). Act III finds Stanley looking like a waxed zombie, Goldberg and McCann promising that "Monty" will take care of Stanley, and escorting him to something that seems suspiciously like a hearse. At the end, Meg and her husband retire to their corn flakes.

What is Stanley's crime? Are Goldberg and McCann agents of a murder ring, symbols of organized society, or instruments of fate? What torture do the pair inflict on Stanley? Rarely has Pinter left more to the playgoer's imagination. The American cast keeps its English accents tidy but not its performances, and Director Alan Schneider lets the first act drowse. Basically, the play lacks the athletic snap and resonance of The Caretaker's dialogue and the musky animal magnetism of The Homecoming family. But whether or not he baffles playgoers, Harold Pinter exerts a modish appeal for an age of jitters that likes its comedy sauced with cruelty. He taps the adrenal flow of anxiety and guilt that contemporary audiences bring into the theater with them. Mirrored in his comedies of terror, playgoers can see the resurgence of their own childlike fears, sense their own sadomasochistic impulses, detect the image of themselves as pawns of chance in a chaotic and absurd cosmos.

Pinter's play patterns coalesce about three recurring elements and phases—the room, the torment, and the expiation. The room is the setting, the torment is often an extended abrasive comic put-on, and the expiation is usually an act of physical or psychic violence. The room is a square womb. Though lighted, it seems dark, partly because it is sometimes windowless or tightly curtained against any blade of outside light. Outside this haven of refuge lurks the nameless, faceless intruder who will violate the safety and innocence of the room.