As time passes, Harold Pinter seems more memorable as a theorist than a dramatist. He won last year's Nobel Prize for Literature and is too widely revered for inventing subtext, musical dialogue, and dramatic ambiguity—he held a shovel at the groundbreaking ceremony for a new kind of theater, but his youngers and betters have actually done the building. His is an achievement more deserving of prizes than productions.
And yet they come. CHAC's production of The Birthday Party, directed by John Abramson, is a devoted and careful study of the play. It is a menacing comedy in a British boarding house, where Stanley (Erich Tisa), an inexplicably enraged lodger, receives two inexplicably terrifying visitors (Karl Keff and Chris Macdonald). The two men, in suits, threaten Stanley with commonplaces—asking him to sit down, offering to throw him a birthday party—then interrogate him about everything from why he "betrayed our breed" to why the chicken crossed the road. They could be from the church or the government or a paramilitary organization. All we know is that their every gesture is swollen with implied violence. The script's ambiguities make it an actor's playground and the cast is confident and specific—amazingly, they rehearsed an entire year, the poor bastards—even through their characters' most excruciatingly nonsensical behavior, shouting, and word play. Shellie Shulkin nails the batty old landlady with her singsong voice and graceless movements and Keff's Goldberg fills the stage with his intimidating authority.
Still, we don't know what everybody's going on about. There's no "there" there, which, I guess, is the point. In Pinter's words: "Meaning which is resolved, parceled, labeled and ready for export is dead, impertinent—and meaningless." Two and a half hours in a sweltering theater is a long time to endure a shouting match of unresolved meaning. But by the end we feel like the cast—and we—have achieved something, even if it's just to have gotten through it.
