Seven years ago, director J. Barry Lewis introduced Palm Beach Dramaworks’ up-for-any-challenge audience to the enigmatic work of Harold Pinter with a production of Betrayal. While some theatergoers were taken aback by its reverse chronology, that play was relatively straightforward compared to the next Pinter shoe to drop.
Opening this Friday and continuing through March 2, the West Palm Beach company serves up Old Times, which Lewis calls “the most challenging work that we have ever produced.” Fasten your seat belts.
It is the kind of play that is hard to talk about, because almost everything that occurs in Old Times is open to interpretation, by the actors as well as the audience.
Lewis does concede that “a married couple are getting ready to have dinner with an old friend of the wife, whom she has not seen in 20 years.” Then it gets murky. “Then you begin to ask questions: Well, who is she? Why is this person coming now? Why is the wife reticent to see this individual?’” asks Dramaworks’ resident director.
“And then you try to answer the questions, contextually, and you begin to realize that with all of Pinter, there are several levels of reality.” As critics and scholars have suggested, the wife Kate and her friend Anna may actually be two halves of the same person. Or perhaps the returning friend is actually dead, having been murdered by the wife in a jealous rage.
Not only is Lewis unwilling to get specific with his interpretation of the play, he did not impose one answer on his three-member cast.
“Instead of saying definitively it’s this, we keep saying there are many possibilities,” offers Lewis. “That each is a potential way of looking at it, because the play is all about perception. How you hear, how you listen, how you remember and what you remember.
“So we are not all in agreement necessarily with the story that’s being told, what it is attempting to do and why that memory is being presented in the first place,’ he says. “So we don’t need to know what each actor has decided about his past. What we need to deal with is what is happening in this moment.”
Pinter, too, was characteristically silent on the crucial details of Old Times, writing that “language … is a highly ambiguous business. So often, below the word spoken, is the thing known and unspoken.”
It does seem that Pinter is playing with memory, its power and its ambiguity, a frequent theme in his work. “In the play, memory is variously a weapon, a tool, as a power struggle for some kind of control,” notes Lewis.
And when you talk about Pinter, you must consider his signature stylistic punctuation — the pause. “They’re very specific to his writing,” says Lewis. “Rhythm is important in all his work and there are three things that are specified in Pinter’s rhythms. One is the dot-dot-dot, the ellipses at the end of a sentence, which is a small hesitation. Then there’s the actual pause, which is a bit of a hurdle. Then the next stage is a silence, a full stop. And they are each there for a purpose and you must artistically honor them. Because when you listen to them in sequence, they make a difference.
“We have to decide the length of the dots, pause or stop, what is necessary to make the comment that you believe the author is trying to make.”
For Betrayal, Lewis cast all South Florida actors. Old Times, however, will be performed by Shannon Koob (Kate), Pilar Witherspoon (Anna) and Craig Wroe (Deeley), all imported from New York.
“We have some extraordinarily fine actors in the area,” Lewis is quick to point out. “But I wanted, because of the challenge, to bring in three individuals who have not worked together before and who were unknown to our audience. So there’s no familiarity and no expectation on what you’re about to see someone do. I thought it would be an interesting process by working with the unknown.”
Although none of the three performers has ever been in a Pinter play before, they are all veterans of Shakespeare and have a facility with language that Lewis sought.
So has it been a fairly easy rehearsal process? Lewis laughs ruefully. “Let’s put it this way. If they had hair when they started, they have less now. If they had black hair when they started, now it’s gray.”
Still, he is confident that the Dramaworks audience will be equal to the challenge of Pinter. “This is the quintessential ‘theater to think about,’” the company’s catchphrase. “Because it’s such a puzzle, it’s a good mystery. Not a mystery in the traditional sense, but there is a mystery at the heart of this that is fascinating to try to crack. It will cause a great deal of discussion following it.”
OLD TIMES, Palm Beach Dramaworks, 201 Clematis St., West Palm Beach. Friday, Jan. 31- Sun., March 2. Tickets: $60. Call: (561) 514-4042.