Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party is anything but fun and games. Presented by Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern, the 1958 absurdist play centers around the events that occur at an English seaside boardinghouse when two unexpected guests arrive to psychologically torture one of the house’s tenants on his birthday.
Meg (Lenore Field) and Petey Boles (Dan Sipp) are a middle-aged couple who run a boardinghouse with only one permanent occupant, an unstable man named Stanley Webber (Jeffrey Detwiler) who vacillates between nostalgic reminiscences and savage outbursts. The dynamic between Meg and Stanley is equally erratic, and Field successfully toes the line between a bored, flirtatious housewife who makes passes at Stanley and a childless, deluded woman who constantly infantilizes him.
Despite being called The Birthday Party, the titular event in the play is contested—Meg repeatedly reminds Stanley that it is his birthday, but he denies the fact on every occasion, the first implication that things aren’t as they seem.
The arrival of the two strangers, Goldberg (Derrick Ivey) and McCann (Jay O’Berski), fuels the play’s tense atmosphere, and the only reason given for their arrival is to finish a mysterious “job.” What ensues during their stay can only be described as psychological warfare as Stanley’s birthday party deteriorates from a harmless gathering to a sinister showdown. Ivey brilliantly shapeshifts between a smarmy sycophant and a ruthless tormenter, while O’Berski, the artistic director of Little Green Pig, inspires unease and fear in his portrayal of McCann.
Often labeled a ‘comedy of menace,’ The Birthday Party uncovers hidden realities and the troubled relationships between its characters through unsettling dialogue and bursts of intense gravity among more banal, comedic banter. Director and Duke Professor Jody McAuliffe carefully translates Pinter’s infamous “pauses” and “silences” to create the disquieting ambiguity that colors many of Pinter’s plays.
Since The Birthday Party relies little on concrete information and more on tautological dialogue and cryptic allusions, the play can be difficult to follow without the original text as a guiding tool. McAuliffe, however, successfully adapts an absurdist work—a feat in itself—to the stage, all the while retaining the core information necessary to subtly show the slow destruction of the human psyche.
Little Green Pig’s The Birthday Party will run Thursday-Saturday, Nov. 10-12, at 8pm at Common Ground Theatre.
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