Harold Pinter came to fame in 1958 with the production of his debut play, The Birthday Party. He went on to become one of the stalwarts of the modern theater, up there with Beckett, Ionesco, Osborne, and Albee. Now City Garage has revisited The Birthday Party in a splendid production that captures Pinter’s specialty as a playwright: grotesque naturalism wrapped around a core of menace and depravity.
The play is set in the crummy living room of a seaside boardinghouse, run by Meg (Peggy Flood) and Petey (Andy Kallock). The latter is a deck-chair attendant who is numb to life, perhaps as a result of listening to Meg’s endlessly banal chatter. Their only boarder is Stanley (Isaac Stackonis), a once fairly-successful musician now suffering from severe mental problems (including psychopathic violence).
The catalytic change in the play is triggered by the arrival of two new boarders, Goldberg (Troy Dunn) and McCann (Gifford Irvine). Goldberg, dapperly dressed with a wolfish smile, has a modicum of charm. McCann is thuggish-looking and seething with rage. We soon learn that they have come to abduct Stanley, pay him back for an earlier mistake or crime. As it’s a Pinter play, we never learn exactly what Stanley did wrong. Nor do we learn much about Goldberg and McCann...or anybody else on stage. What you see is what you get with Pinter; he abhors exposition, explanations, realism.
Much of his play is taken up with Stanley’s birthday party, which is held against his wishes and goes quickly from ordinariness to madness, with Peggy getting drunk, Goldberg seducing the neighbor Lulu (Savannah Schakett), and Stanley freaking out during a game of hide and seek.> More likely, then, the play’s theme has to do with the delusions each character lives with, delusions that are eventually stripped away, forcing that person to confront the past, face the truth of his or her blighted existence.
Intellectual questions aside, the experience of seeing this play again was a deeply satisfying one, thanks to the superb acting and directing (and Charles Duncombe’s evocative set).
