Theater: Pas de Trois

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The Lover, by Harold Pinter, and Play, by Samuel Beckett, are an off-Broadway pair of startlingly brief but beguilingly adroit one-acters. Each is like a ballet, a neatly executed pas de trois between husband, wife, and mistress. The dance is in the words and patterns, leaps of light or pirouettes of sensuality.

In The Lover, an Englishman who seems to be as tightly furled, emotionally, as his umbrella, asks his wife matter-of-factly, "Is your lover coming today?" Demure of dress, slightly abstracted of manner, she answers, "Mmnn." The husband thoughtfully agrees not to return before 6 p.m. He in turn reveals that he whiles away part of the time with a whore, "someone who can express and engender lust with all lust's cunning." It all sounds like a fearfully civilized arrangement.

Indeed, civilization may be the villain of the play. When the lover appears, he proves to be the husband, though in all other respects a totally different man. With cigarette dangling from his lips apache-fashion, the husband-lover advances on his mistress-wife (now clad in a sexy black dress), and the pair perform some erotic charades that turn the occasion into the afternoon of two fauns. After shuffling the cards of identity once again, Pinter clinches his point, that overcivilized modern man can no longer rely on his instincts and needs the aphrodisiac of make-believe in order to make love after the early rapture of marriage has gone.

In Beckett's Play, husband, wife and mistress are encased in mammoth urns up to their necks, and may be presumed dead. In fragmented monologue and monotone, each discusses the pain, the humor and the frenzy of their past relationship. A beam of light darts from head to head, almost comically, to start and stop each speaker, sometimes in midsentence or midburp. It is doubtless the eye of God, and it seems to be making their deaths half hellish, as they made their lives. Despite the slightly more somber tone of Play, both pieces are as playful as Beckett and Pinter are ever likely to get.