theatre notes. Pinter, again. London edition.

A few nights ago, two friends and I headed to the Harold Pinter Theatre in London to see Pinter's Old Times. It was the long-awaited highlight of a much-anticipated trip, several months in the planning. Pinter is one of my favorite playwrights, and this is one of my favorite of his plays, and when I heard that its run coincided with our trip, naturally I had to see it. That two of my favorite actors, Rufus Sewell and Kristin Scott Thomas, were starring, was of course only a minor factor.

Old Times is one of Pinter's 'memory' plays, and I can't pretend to understand it any more upon the third viewing than I did the first time around. The one thing I see more clearly is how much depends on vision and interpretation. The choices made by this director and these actors are subtly different from those made by the previous directors and actors; this is how it should be. The playwright can only give so many clues to what he intends, and the rest is up to us. What *really* is happening in this story between Kate, Deely, and Anna is never clear to me. Perhaps it never will be, no matter how many times I see this play.

Memory, as Pinter shows us time and time again in his plays, is a trickster, a fickle, ephemeral creature. It is something created, imagined, imposed, reinvented according to our desires. No two people ever remember the same thing in the same way; we can't even be sure that our own memories are real or made up. This time around I began to wonder if one or two or all three characters were dead, and they were locked in the afterlife as in Sartre's No Exit. It could be true, couldn't it?

Maybe I need to see it again.

theatre notes. Pinter Fortnightly.

How many plays has it been, now? Fifteen? Sixteen? I've lost count. It dazzles me just to think about it, and I didn't even make it to all the Pinter Fortnightly evenings. I've seen enough, though, to have a sense of what makes a body of work. How a playwright can have a distinct voice that remains true as he continues to evolve, the way a composer or painter has a distinct sound or way of portraying light. I've loved these staged readings, rehearsed for only a single afternoon. I think this short rehearsal is what gives Pinter's words a sense of realness, an immediacy that might get lost after weeks of preparation. The actors don't have time to over-think the words, which can be fatal. I think Frank Corrado described some performances of Pinter seen in England last year as "suicidally reverential," or something like that.

This is the difficulty with Pinter. It's easy - and catastrophic - to think too much, to over-interpret every phrase, over-emphasize every pause. His words are so precise that all you have to do is say them as naturally as if you were speaking yourself. As the way Pinter himself speaks, if you've seen him in interviews. Which, of course, is also hard. You have to wear the words lightly. The lightness is key. I am reminded of Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millenium, his essays (lectures) titled Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity (Calvino died before writing the sixth, Consistency). These first three - lightness, quickness, and exactitude - are what makes Pinter work. You need all three to lay bare the true, unbearable weight of emotions that run beneath the words. (Here I echo Calvino writing about Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being and how "everything we choose and value in life for its lightness soon reveals its true, unbearable weight"*). I can't describe it any other way.

Old Friends is, like Moonlight, or Betrayal, or No Man's Land, about friendship and love and memory and the passing of time. Once again there are repeated motifs, recurring moments and phrases, emphasizing the play's resemblance less to a coherent story than to a piece of music. The same memory is described by different people, slightly differently, which is how it happens in real life. You aren't sure just what happened (at least I am not, which is my usual state of mind after a Pinter play), but as we see recurring moments unfold I hear a murmured catch of breath as the audience around me recognizes the repeated coda. This palpable energy flickers across the room in a wave.

What we have here in the Bullitt Cabaret of ACT Theatre is a precious intimacy, between the actors in Old Friends who are most likely old friends, for the Seattle theatre scene is small and tightly knit - and between the actors and the audience who have been coming to these Pinter Fortnightly readings for three years now. Marianne Owen I remember from my first season attending ACT, in 1992. A few nights later I saw her and her husband, Kurt Beattie (who happens to be Artistic Director at ACT), at Town Hall. I ran up to her to say how much I loved Old Times and how much I was looking forward to the festival coming up this summer. She, too, was struck by the intensity of the audience, and I am again reminded of what I said regarding How to Write a New Book for the Bible: the audience makes or breaks a play. We are here because we love Pinter, because we love ACT, because we love Frank Corrado for putting these Fortnightly readings together, because we love these actors who have been striding our stages for lo these twenty or thirty years, perhaps more. And because we want it, no need it, to go on.

*Calvino, Italo. Six Memos for the Next Millenium. Vintage, 1993. p. 7.

theatre notes. Pinter Fortnightly.

I've seen about sixteen or seventeen plays and sketches by Harold Pinter, now. Two of them I've seen twice - Betrayal (in 1995 and then last month) and Moonlight (in 2009 and then a few weeks ago), and I feel that I could see any of the plays again, each time discovering more. There are recurring motifs, clear from the beginning of Pinter's body of work - a distinct rhythm, a way of repeating words, the use of cricket terms I've never understood. Then there are those eloquent "pauses" that have probably driven many a director to madness. Pinter has his own language, a certain cadence, emphasized for me by seeing many of the same actors in the Fortnightly readings.

This reading of No Man's Land is a little different than all the others. It's more of a workshop, in preparation for the Pinter festival next summer. Theatre director Penny Cherns has come from London to put the actors through their paces, and they've had a week ("24 hours," they tell us) to rehearse instead of the usual single afternoon. There's an actual set, sort of. One of the four actors has come in from Denver to join the cast, and it brings a different energy to the stage. The other three are from Seattle, and I'm familiar with all of them, Frank Corrado most of all. As with many of Pinter's plays, No Man's Land starts out conventionally enough, then sharply veers into a game of wits that is more about language and power than it is about any clear plot. It is a tapestry, a crazy-quilt, patching together Noël-Coward-esque barbs and Laurel-and-Hardy verbal jousts with some deviations into Beckett, reflecting Pinter's own earlier plays and crystallizing into the work of someone at the height of his powers.

I was thinking about Betrayal, how it has been referred to as one of Pinter's most "accessible" plays. It's simpler, to be sure, at least on the surface, and though time is shattered and shifted out of sequence, it is one of his rare plays that has a clearly delineated story line. No Man's Land doesn't, even though time progresses in an orderly fashion. I think it was Penny Cherns who tells us in the post-play discussion that Pinter often started with an image, a memory, or a phrase, and wrote the play around it. There isn't so much a story as the emotions that run beneath the words, which stand out like trees emerging from fog. Here, in No Man's Land, there is the writer's fear of growing old, of being alone, of losing one's grip on fading powers (no chance of that with Pinter, who seemed to intensify with age). The struggle between the characters is almost like a raging against the inevitably fading light...

theatre notes. Pinter Fortnightly.

It's the second time I've seen Moonlight, now. The first time was at my first Pinter Fortnightly reading, a little over two years ago. A little over two years and perhaps a dozen plays later, and I have come full circle. The audience has tripled, and the series has moved down into the intimacy of the Bullitt Cabaret, with proper lighting and a better arrangement of seats. I see a lot of familiar faces, ardent fans who come to nearly every reading. Billie Wildrick, who was so lovely in Betrayal, is here, and Gian-Carlo Scandiuzzi, who was perfectly hilarious as the waiter that same play (his day job is being the managing director of ACT).

The cast is different this time, save for Frank Corrado, who plays Andy, and Michael Winters, who plays Ralph. Kathleen Chalfant is Andy's wife, Bel; she's flown out from New York to participate, and she gives Bel a kind of unnerving deep serenity, with her beautifully calm face and black-velvet voice. I'm glad to see Suzy Hunt, who has a wide, curling, amused mouth which gives Maria a sort of sensuous humor, and Darragh Kennan and Josh Carter as Bel and Andy's sons, slip easily into the swift rhythm of banter that only happens between siblings who have created a language all their own. The heart of the play is Jessica Martin, who plays Andy and Bel's daughter, Bridget, whose death seems to have split her family into two halves - her parents on one side, her brothers on the other, each locked into their own world.

It goes without saying that Moonlight has its moments of hilarity (lots of them). But still, it's a heartbreaking play, especially once you know that Pinter was completely estranged from his only son. (I said this already, last time). During the discussion afterwards, someone says something to the effect that Pinter never talked about this sadness, this void, but I think of this play as his way of addressing the loss. His former wife, his son's mother, had died from alcoholism; Pinter had remarried and gained six step-children which surrounded him with a new family. I wonder if at the time of writing (1993 or thereabouts) Pinter had already accepted that he would never see his son again; perhaps this was his way of achieving a kind of peace. Certainly Andy never makes peace with his sons, who can't or won't come to his deathbed, nor the nonexistent grandchildren which his dead daughter might have had, if she'd lived. Bel does, though, calling her sons and cutting short their verbal games. I think of it as a way of saying good-bye.

What I love here is the language of Bel and Andy's exchanges, the deep understanding between two people who have known each other for a long time. Who have been married for a long time. Who know all the places to hit where it hurts and who also know how to step aside and avoid the blows. A marriage and a family are two separate things; this is sometimes hard to see and even harder to understand, and Moonlight is about that dance between the two. I love it more this time, after two years and a dozen plays. I could see it again and again, and find something new.

After the play, I go up to tell Michael Winters that I've loved his work since Shadowlands. "But you must have been a wee child at the time!" he says. He is warm and funny, like all the other actors I have accosted over the past year, and I am reminded again of how important it is to go up to people you have loved for a long time and tell them, thank you, thank you, thank you.

ACT and Pinter Fortnightly.

theatre notes. Betrayal.

Betrayal was the first play I'd ever seen by Harold Pinter. It was 1995 at Intiman Theatre; it's the play I associate most with Frank Corrado, even though I've seen him in many other performances over the past nineteen years. It's the play most associated with Harold Pinter, too, his most widely-performed one, the one considered the most "accessible." (This is said with some disgust by Corrado during the post-play discussion tonight). Placed in the context of the other fourteen or so works I've seen in the three years since the Pinter Fortnightly readings began, it still holds strong. I love it as much as I did when I was fifteen years old, maybe more. It's funnier, this time around, but I don't know if that's the actors, the director, or the intimacy between the stage and the audience, that electric bit of chemistry which makes a great play extraordinary.

Betrayal plays with time, moving backwards. It starts after the end of an affair, and takes you back to the beginning. Robert and Jerry are best friends. Emma is married to Robert, and has a seven-year affair with Jerry, who is married to Judith, who is spoken of but not seen. Their affair is one betrayal; Robert's knowledge of the affair is another betrayal, because he doesn't tell Jerry that he knows until much later in time (but earlier in the play). Emma's pregnancy is, too, a betrayal of Jerry, even if the father of her child happens to be her husband. Other betrayals are hinted at, too, those of Robert and Jerry betraying their younger, idealistic selves as they pursue their careers, one as a publisher, and the other as a literary agent, Jerry's wife Judith perhaps betraying him as he is her. Each moment explored illuminates the previous one, stripping away the shells of disillusionment which forced apart these people who were once young and happy, who once loved each other. In the last scene, Jerry drunkenly declares his love for Emma at a party, interrupted by Robert, who leaves them together. Is that when their affair began? Was it something inevitable, something that would have happened anyway, sooner or later? We'll never know for sure.

Now, more than ever, three years and fourteen plays later, or rather, sixteen years later, I can see more clearly how unique Pinter's voice is. He has this way of creating characters who always know where to hit each other where it will hurt with just a few devastating words, with a kind of dialogue of one-upmanship which pops up here and there in so many of his works. It is both emotionally shattering and shatteringly hilarious, and I am reminded for the hundredth time of Simon Callow's comment that "being English is inherently funny."* It is not fair to Pinter's body of work to call Betrayal "more accessible," but at the same time it is not fair to deride it, either. There is something pure about it; there are undercurrents and mysteries and things left unsaid, but it is, on the whole, a more open work than, say, The Room, or The Birthday Party, or Ashes to Ashes, when you aren't quite sure what the hell just happened. I could see it again, and learn something new.

There's so much more left to explore. I can't bloody wait.

Pinter Fortnightly, at ACT.

*This is from the commentary soundtrack from A Room with a View, 1985.

theatre notes. Pinter Fortnightly.

I've been to a lot of these Pinter Fortnightly events, now. There have been one-acts and sketches and radio works and full-length plays, fitting themselves together into a Pinterian universe that can't be described, only experienced. It's shocking how prolific Harold Pinter was, with not a dull work amongst the dozens he created. The necessary ingredient, of course, is the passion and skill of the actors who gather together for these readings. They have an afternoon's rehearsal, that's all. What makes it work, every damn time, is the physical and emotional chemistry and sense of timing of a group of people who know each other, who have worked together, sometimes for decades, even if they've never done Pinter before. There is trust, between the actors and also between them and the audience. We're all excited to be here, and it shows.

Tonight's reading is of The Birthday Party, Pinter's first full-length play. Savaged by the critics upon opening, it was eventually considered a classic. The alternating humor and menace of this work is echoed in the later plays of this era, The Room, for example, and The Dumbwaiter. Apparently Pinter loved Abbott and Costello, and there is a lot of sharply funny verbal comedy. (Perhaps there is physical comedy, too, but that's hard to convey in a reading). The ambiguity and obfuscation of the language remains a hallmark of Pinter's work throughout his career. As so often happens, the play ends with me wondering what the fuck just happened, but I find it thrilling all the same.

Even more thrilling is seeing R. Hamilton Wright, whom I have loved since The Revenger's Comedies in 1992. Frequently seen playing someone on the verge of a nervous breakdown (or actually having one in The Prisoner of 2nd Avenue last month), it is a real charge to see him as one of Pinter's more suavely menacing characters, both in The Birthday Party and also in last year's The Dumbwaiter. Every one of the actors (and Frank Corrado, who directed and gives the stage directions) is familiar to me, Wright most of all. I have seen them in all kinds of plays, over and over, and when I leave the theatre I feel that fierce gladness which never goes away, that gratitude that they love what they do so much that they do this for the fun of it. To learn something. To steep themselves in Pinter's language, for just one afternoon, one night. At first they did this for free, but I think now they get paid a little something.

I'll miss the next two Pinter Fortnightly performances, unfortunately, but I hope to make it to the next round come fall.

www.pinterfortnightly.com

theatre notes. Pinter Fortnightly.

I may have squealed aloud when I saw Liz McCarthy on the cast list for last night's Pinter Fortnightly reading. Unlike many of the other actors I remember so clearly from the early-to-late-90's, I haven't seen her since my teenage years. She was the young ingenue in those days, not long out of drama school, blonde and fresh-faced. I loved her and missed her and was thrilled to see her again. She's older now, of course, but then so am I. More self-assured, more poised. (Her, not me).

This week's Pinter Fortnightly showcases two short sketches flanking a longer one-act work. They date from Pinter's "political" period, the first sketch ("New World Order") and one-act ("Party Time") from 1991 and the last sketch ("Press Conference") from 2001. A few more pieces of the breadth of this body of work fall into place; immediately apparent, as always, is Pinter's mastery of language. This time there is no tenderness, only words swiftly dealt like cards at a casino table or hurled like ninja throwing stars. Only a fierce awareness of how power can be wielded unjustly and how silence is tantamount to participation in any violation against another human being.

Later, we watch a BBC television interview with Harold Pinter from 2006 or thereabouts. He'd already had a couple of battles with the cancer which would kill him at the end of 2008, but while his throat was a bit scratchy he was wonderfully at the top of his game. "Life is beautiful," he says, "but the world is hell!" In such a way the extraordinary happiness of his personal life - as documented by his wife Antonia Fraser in Must You Go? - is balanced by the frequent bleakness of his plays. It is a sort of inversion of that adage of the clown being the saddest person of all, that this tremendously happy person is the one best suited to throw open the windows onto the darkness of humanity.

In his interview, Pinter struggles with trying to explain what makes something "Pinterian." I can't describe it, either, but there is something about the way that he uses language or the kinds of characters he creates. The way painters can be recognized by their brushstrokes and colors, or the view of a particular bridge. There is a kind of assurance that is clear from almost the beginning, echoing from the earliest plays all the way to the end. This is what marks Pinter as a great playwright, this ability to grow and develop new ideas along changing times and politics and yet retain a singular voice and identity. It's really something. And there's still more yet to be explored.

Reading: Pinter/Fraser.

I remember seeing Betrayal at Intiman Theatre when I was fifteen. Fifteen is young, young enough to think that love and sex is for young people. Young enough to not want to examine the lives of middle-aged people falling in love, or in lust, despite husbands and wives and children. They were parents, and parents didn't have s-e-x or go away for holidays in Venice. Still, it was painfully funny and sharply written, an intricate puzzle about three friends and their shared histories and betrayals, unwinding backwards in time. It has stayed with me for all the years since.

Much later, I learned more about Harold Pinter, that he was married to the writer/historian Lady Antonia Fraser, that their relationship had begun while each was married to someone else. They made headlines in the gossip papers, despite being middle-aged writers rather than hot young actors or pop stars (although Antonia was and is gorgeously, glamorously blonde). Time softens harsh facts, as tabloid news becomes a part of history. Respectability grows over scandal like ivy creeping across the rawness of newly laid brick. Meanwhile, the Pinter Fortnightly readings at ACT Theatre opened the vast expanse of Harold Pinter's oeuvre before me, and even now I am impatient for more.

A memoir of their life together was recently published by Lady Antonia Fraser. The title, Must You Go?, refers to a question asked by Harold Pinter the first night they were introduced at a party; she was leaving, and he didn't want her to go. That is the beginning of their story, the beginning of a relationship which ended their respective marriages and ultimately lasted for more than three decades, until Pinter died in 2008, on Christmas Eve. She weaves together journal entries and memories and poems written by Pinter, tracing their lives together from that first "must you go?" to his last breaths.

Through it all - between the agonized wondering about whether they were ever really going to be together - are bits and pieces referencing the plays Pinter wrote as the years went by, with insights that throw into sharp relief his political beliefs that drove much of his work throughout the 1980's and 1990's. Fraser's journals and comments illuminate some of the plays I've seen in the past year - Ashes to Ashes, A Kind of Alaska, The Hothouse, fleshing out a background that was merely glimpsed before. It shifts my understanding of Pinter ever-so-slightly to a firmer ground, and at the same time it confirms what I've felt all along - his words are really all you need to know him.

Pinter Fortnightly. Madagascar (JT Rogers).

And now for something different.

To shake things up a little bit after a dozen or so readings of Harold Pinter's expansive body of work, tonight's reading is of a work by a different playwright, JT Rogers. To keep things connected, Madagascar won the 2005 Pinter Prize for Drama, but I will leave aside any comparisons to Pinter. It isn't fair to Rogers, or his play, or my understanding of it, to hold up this single work against the vast landscape that makes up my experiences with Harold Pinter. There isn't a history, a memory; I walk in the door with no expectations, except from the actors, who are, as always, perfect.

Madagascar is about secrets and mysteries. It is about memory, and how memories and family histories are made. It plays with time, as three people at three different points of time unravel their interconnecting stories. A character's place in time shifts their memory of what happened in the past. A mother and daughter, Lilian and June, are locked in an emotional triangle with their son and twin brother (respectively), who is not a part of the play and yet is spoken of so vividly it seems that he appears before you, along with their also unseen husband and father. The third character onstage, the mother's lover, adds his own dimension to these unseen characters.

At the heart of the story is the son's disappearance. The mother's story takes place in that moment before he was supposed to arrive; his sister's retraces the five years after that. His twin spends two or three years searching the world for him, before finally accepting that he is gone forever. But is he? In her last days, a mysterious postcard arrives, with the words "I'm still here." But we never know what it means. There are too many questions unanswered. Lilian slips away and drowns in a lake; June takes the perfect combination of pills in that same Roman hotel room where they stayed in her childhood. There is a kind of terrible symmetry to their deaths: the mother, when she feels that her son is gone forever, and the daughter, when her brother comes back from the dead. (Or does he?).

In the end, it is the lover, Nathan, who is left behind in that Roman hotel room in the present day. June has died, as has her mother, years before. Like the rest of us in the audience, he is full of unanswered questions. Such is life, without clear-cut answers.

Pinter Fortnightly. The Hothouse.

By now the memories of all the Pinter readings and performances I've seen are piled high in a corner of my mind, tangled together like fallen leaves. Two full plays - Betrayal (at Intiman in 1995) and last night's The Hothouse - countless one-acts, a handful of revue sketches, all have gradually coalesced together into a single body of work. At first sight, The Hothouse seems apart from the others, a broadly-drawn comedy which reminds me of Simon Callow's comment that "being British is inherently funny." But the physical, almost slapstick humor evolves, slowly, and darker elements creep in, as with Pinter's early works, such as The Room and The Dumb-waiter. There are explosions of temper and electric shock experiments and drinks thrown in faces and a sudden, violent end (which, of course, occurs off-stage).

The Hothouse comes from that earlier time, the late 1950's, the era of Pinter's "comedies of menace." I believe it was left unfinished and shelved, although one scene where a hapless institution employee undergoes testing by two other employees appeared as a revue sketch around the same time. This brief sketch was performed at an earlier Pinter Fortnightly reading, and the familiar words made me give a little jump of recognition in my seat. The Hothouse in its earlier incarnation then disappeared for twenty years, before it was resurrected and expanded, picking up undercurrents of political commentary along the way. (By now Pinter had passed through his period of "memory" plays - Betrayal, A Kind of Alaska - and had moved onto more overtly political plays).

What becomes clear across these different thematic eras is that a visible thread holds together this body of work: a fiercely beautiful mastery of language, a sharp intelligence, a black sense of humor. It creates a sense of cohesion between these fortnightly readings, helped in (a very great) part by a somewhat rotating repertory of actors who come together on their days off, who do these (free) readings out of love. It couldn't be done without a group of people who have chops, and boy do they ever have chops. The kind of skill and experience that allows this ever-changing crew to pull together a smoothly polished reading from a single afternoon of rehearsal. There is a sort of perfect alchemy between the staggeringly precise language of Pinter and the tremendous emotional and intellectual chemistry of the actors. Comedy is timing. Drama is trust. Here we have both, apparent with every word, every moment and movement, every look.

ACT Theatre (which hosts these Pinter Fortnightly readings) and I, we go way back. 1992. I was still in sixth grade when the season began. (I was not allowed to see the first play of the season, Steven Dietz's Trust, because of "mature thematic elements"). I remember the old theater near Seattle Center, in lower Queen Anne. There would be a crush of people at the snack bar during intermission and leaving at the end of the evening felt like being a salmon swimming upstream. I remember the parking lot where subscribers got to fit their cars into some kind of Tetris-like puzzle. I remember the first play I saw there, Shadowlands. The new theater downtown felt like another world. It still does, a little, even though it is now second nature to park my car at the Convention Center and make my way down the escalators. But the familiar faces remind me, again and again, that this will always be the theater I remember.

www.acttheatre.org
www.pinterfortnightly.com

Pinter Fortnightly.

In an interview from 1964*, Louis Malle spoke about being a part of the French New Wave, saying that "The good fortune that the directors of the new wave had is this: they made their first films the way others write their first novels, injecting into it the sincerity and emotional power of youth...the problem is to create the second or third films, and then a body of work." Malle himself did create a beautiful body of work, shifting and evolving from film to film, some of the later ones building on an idea first touched on in an earlier work.

The idea of developing a body of work after an explosive starting point of the first work has stayed with me since I first watched this interview, and echoes in my mind with each Harold Pinter reading I attend. This is what I am most grateful to Frank Corrado and the Central Heating Lab at ACT Theatre for providing: the opportunity to see a body of work unfold before me, making connections in my mind even as I enjoy them as individual plays.

First we see John Aylward and R. Hamilton Wright in The Dumbwaiter, which is alternately hilarious and menacing as two assassins await their assignment in a basement room. It owes much to Waiting for Godot, and Laurel and Hardy, the comedic pull between two men, and in this case the chemistry between Aylward and Wright, conveyed by a mere sideways glance or fierce glare. Unlike the Pinter plays that twist and invert our sense of time, it moves in a logical progression: prologue, dialogue, anticipation, suspense, climax, ending. Wright loses his shit, as he always does (I can't put it any other way, and nobody does it better). It is a little like The Room, Pinter's first play, with the same shifting sense of laughter and fear.

The second play is actually a radio play from the early 1980's, Family Voices, and while equally hilarious, it is actually more emotionally devastating, when you consider that it was written at the end of a personally turbulent time in Pinter's life; he had divorced his first wife, who was falling apart (not long afterward, she died of alcoholism), and married his second wife. In the process he became estranged from his only child, a son, which was echoed in Moonlight, a decade later. A mother, a father, and a son read their letters to each other aloud. But are the letters real or imaginary? It is funny, as only Pinter can be funny, but beneath the humor is a bleak expanse of emptiness, of distance, the kind of distance that you only see between a parent and child, and it is heartbreaking.

I thought again, looking at the faces of these actors I have loved and admired for nearly twenty years, R. Hamilton Wright and John Aylward and Clayton Corzatte and, of course, Frank Corrado, how lucky Seattle is to have this kind of theater community. How lucky I was to grow up with it. How glad I am that it is still going. A new generation of actors is continuously emerging, but the previous one more than matches them, their polished experience standing ground against this new wave. This year I chose to support two theaters: ACT, with a monthly membership that allows me to watch pretty much everything, and Strawberry Workshop, whose next works I look forward to even before the lights fall at the end of the play. I hope to do more, in the future.

*This interview with Louis Malle is included on the Criterion Collection edition of Les Amants.

The Passion of Frank Corrado.

I am a few minutes early for this week's Pinter Fortnightly reading; the room is still half-empty. There seem to be more chairs, this time. The stage runs parallel to one long side of the room instead of sitting squarely at the end. There are more props; chairs and round café tables with bottles of wine and mineral water. The actors are milling about, disappearing and reappearing behind a partition at the end of the room, and I wonder (not for the first time) just what exactly is back there and how many people could possibly fit in what cannot be a very large space. I chat with an elderly lady who agrees with me: we are lucky to have a theater community as rich and intimate as this one. I tell her I grew up in this town, with these actors. The room fills with more theater-lovers, and we begin.

At the heart of it all is Frank Corrado (who reads the stage directions in a voice that can only be described as "mellifluous"), whose passion for Harold Pinter is what brought us all here tonight, has been bringing us all together over a series of readings that began last summer, and, I hope, will continue. Bit by bit, with each play, the separate pieces of Pinter's ouevre have been assembling themselves in my mind into one cohesive body of work, anchored by the now fifteen-year-old memory of Betrayal, which I saw at Intiman in 1995. Pinter's last play, The Celebration, is entirely different, and yet not. It is pure comedy, but with that occasional sharp jab that Pinter does so well, those verbal spears that people stick in all those places they know will hurt you the most.

In The Celebration (which Pinter wrote after a disastrous restaurant dinner), two tables of diners are having dinner in a posh London restaurant. Their raucous conversation grows progressively rowdier as the evening goes on, interrupted intermittently by a historically (and hysterically) name-dropping waiter, an imperturbable maître 'd, and an emotionally oversharing maîtresse 'd. As an audience, we grow progressively rowdier to match the verbal antics onstage, whooping and laughing along. The energy in the room is something else. We are a community of theater lovers, of Pinter-lovers. The actors are enjoying themselves as much as we are, and I am wiping away tears (of laughter).

A series of three short sketches follows, each funnier than the next, each depending on that complex mastery of inflection, expression, and timing that breathes life into comedy. We roar with laughter at the innuendo of Trouble in the Works, howl at the painful job interview in Applicant, and explode when Frank Corrado and Kurt Beattie end things with the hysterical Victoria Station. Again and again I am blown away by the chemistry between the actors, their ability to hit upon that comedic alchemy that is all the more extraordinary given that they are reading from a script, having had almost no time at all to rehearse.

The pure, electric excitement of being in the theater is like nothing else.

There is one more reading scheduled for the Pinter Fortnightly series. I won't be here, unfortunately, but I know it will be as wonderful as all the others have been.

Pinter Fortnightly. The Room and The Collection.

I remember clearly, as I've said before, seeing a performance of Harold Pinter's Betrayal at Intiman Theatre in 1995. That was fifteen years ago. That was all the experience I had with Pinter until last summer, when the actor Frank Corrado channeled a life-long passion for Pinter into a series of fortnightly readings at A Contemporary Theater. I caught the last one, Moonlight, and it left me eager for more. My eagerness was rewarded by a new company, Shadow and Light Theatre (founded by the aforementioned Frank Corrado and the sublime Suzanne Bouchard), and a production of two one-act plays, Ashes to Ashes and A Kind of Alaska a few months ago. Then the Pinter Fortnightly series started up again, and although I missed the first one, I made it to the second.

This time around I recognize some of the players: Anne Allgood, from Rock 'n' Roll last fall, and Elise Hunt, from last summer's Moonlight. There are six actors, besides Frank Corrado (who presents the plays and gives the stage directions), some of whom are in current productions and are here on their night off. We start off with The Room, Pinter's first play, and suddenly I realize that now I have seen more Pinter than I have any other playwright, save for Shakespeare. (Though Shaw, Stoppard, Chekhov, Ackbourn, and Steven Dietz are close behind). The Room is, like his other works, by turns sharp, funny, somewhat unnerving and suspenseful, rising unexpectedly in a shattering crescendo that causes me to jump about a foot in the air at its climax. (In this last part it is unlike the other plays I have seen).

The Collection is different. It is more like a Noel-Coward-like drawing-room farce, entertaining, but still with something unsettling about it, the way Pinter is always unsettling. The more details you know, the more truths you hear, the less you understand. As it draws to a close I finally realize that I can imagine all the plays I've seen so far as one cohesive body of work, that Pinter, as a playwright, hit the ground running with The Room and just kept going, creating a language, a sense of atmosphere that remains entirely his own. I can hardly wait for more.

Pinter, again. (more thoughts).

It struck me early on in Ashes to Ashes that one thing Pinter understands more than anyone is how people know each other so well, as siblings (in Moonlight and, in a way, in A Kind of Alaska) or friends, lovers and spouses (Betrayal and Ashes to Ashes, and Moonlight as well). You know the other person's weak points, what gets under their skin, how to hit them where it will hurt most. That is the uncomfortable part of watching his plays, catching people when their defenses are down, when their innermost feelings and thoughts are dragged out, laid bare. There's something real happening on stage, something you see in yourself or in others, things you have done to people you love or that they have done to you. That kind of savage honesty became clear to me with the first time I saw Pinter onstage, in a 1995 production of Betrayal, and has stayed with me ever since.

After yesterday's performance of A Kind of Alaska and Ashes to Ashes the director, Victor Pappas, made a comment about the evolution of regional theater, beginning as a repertory of actors and growing into something quite different. After 18 years of theater-going in Seattle I've come to think of the local theater scene as almost a repertory of local actors, some of whom have been fighting the good fight in the name of art for more than twenty or thirty years. What then develops between these wonderful actors is an intimacy, a rapport, an emotional chemistry that communicates itself in a level of trust onstage that could never happen in three weeks of rehearsals between perfect strangers. The kind of brutally emotional honesty that Pinter demands needs that kind of trust, that tenderness which keeps his lacerating truths from becoming unbearable. This is what I love most about Pinter, that clarity, that sharpness, just softened by a touch, a wry twist of the mouth that is almost a smile.

Pinter x 2.

I had been eagerly awaiting Shadow and Light Theatre's production of two one-act plays by Harold Pinter since I first heard about them a few months ago. Last summer there had been a series of readings of Pinter one-acts, and I was lucky to catch the last one, Moonlight. It brought together some of my favorite actors from the 18 years I have spent in Seattle theaters, and reminded me all over again of the starkly, emotionally devastating beauty of Pinter. It was the first time I had seen Pinter performed since Betrayal, at Intiman Theatre in 1995, which remains one of my most enduring theatrical experiences.

A Kind of Alaska and Ashes to Ashes brought together the director (Victor Pappas) and one of the actors (Frank Corrado) from that 1995 production of Betrayal, and added one of my most favorite actresses since the very first play I ever saw at ACT (Suzanne Bouchard), as well as Kimberly King, who played the title role in the play which was solely responsible for bringing me back to ACT after nearly a decade's absence (Becky's New Car, by Steven Dietz, 2008). Corrado, Pappas, and Bouchard are the three founders of Shadow and Light Theatre, a new company devoted to the works of Harold Pinter. The energy and passion of Mr. Corrado (the Pinter Fortnightly series was his creation) and Ms. Bouchard that was so apparent in the Moonlight reading last summer crystallized into two polished gems of plays, in the intimacy of ACT's smallest theater, the 92-seat Bullitt Cabaret.

Pinter is about memory; it is the common thread that twists through the four works I have seen so far. In Betrayal, it is about a friendship, a marriage, and an affair, unraveling backwards in time. Moonlight is about grief, jumping back and forth from past to present as its characters deal with a past loss and an impending one, the death of a daughter (past) and father/husband (future). In A Kind of Alaska, a woman awakes after 29 years asleep, and she, her sister, and her doctor each struggle with all they have lost with those years. And Ashes to Ashes turns a husband's questions about a wife's former lover into a game where the landscape of memory remains murky and shadowed, shifting like mountains of sand that give you no solid footing.

The thing about Pinter is that the beauty of the language is balanced by the brutality of the emotions they convey, that the sharpness of every word that the characters throw at each other, like knives, is leavened by an unexpected tenderness, that the bleakness that wraps around the stage like a dark cloud is lifted by jolts of black humor. I walk away feeling drained and confused and yet thrilled by what I have seen. I look forward to more with the greediness of a small child who tastes something wonderful for the very first time.

Pinter Fortnightly.

Some weeks ago I became aware that ACT hosted a twice-monthly reading of Harold Pinter plays. It seemed interesting, but I never actually made it downtown until the very last reading. Two of my most favorite actors - Michael Winters and Suzanne Bouchard - would be participating, and several others I was familiar with. And, it was the last one. I had to go. I ran into the theater, and guided by someone in the lobby headed towards the Buster's Special Events Room, a long, airy space with gilded chandeliers and rows of chairs. About thirty or forty people were there, students and theater-lovers and a few familiar faces that turned out to be other actors I have seen onstage here and there, during the sixteen-odd years I have been experiencing theater in Seattle.

Frank Corrado - who I am also long familiar with - takes the stage, and it immediately becomes clear that these Pinter readings are his passion, that it is his energy and drive that brings these fortnightly occasions together. Such is the community of actors in Seattle that he has pulled other longtime friends and colleagues in on their night off - Matthew Boston has two more nights of A Thousand Clowns to go - to join in. Can you imagine loving your work, your art, so much that you want to do it on your day off? The actors take their seats, all familiar faces to me, even if I can't quite place two of them, and the play begins. Tonight's work is Moonlight, one of Pinter's last plays, about a dying man, his wife, and his estranged sons, haunted by the memory of a long-dead daughter. Without staging and props I must confess I get confused at times, and have trouble following along.

But it is a fascinating play, biting and sarcastic, unexpectedly gentle, using commonplace cliché to mask deeper emotions. It is funny and sharp, exactly what I expect from Pinter, and heartbreaking, too, even if you didn't know that Pinter was estranged from his own son. And seeing the actors I have loved since childhood up close and in person is so exciting I bounce a little in my seat, find myself sitting up a little taller. What makes it all so exciting is the energy between the actors and the audience, many of whom seem to be old friends. As long as there are people like this, actors with enough passion and love for their work, and theater-goers who appreciate it, then the theater will survive. It will grow. It must.