Katonah Classic Stage this weekend sees the first half of its Pinter Play Festival draw to a close with an excellent staging of Pinter's 1978 work, "Betrayal." Next week begins a two-week run of a one-act twinbill: "The Dumb Waiter" and "Applicant," presented in partnership with Pacific Resident Theatre. All performances are at the North Castle Library's Whippoorwill Hall, on Kent Place in Armonk. Tickets at http://www.katonahclassicstage.com.
Of the more than 30 plays Harold Pinter wrote in his career, there's a reason "Betrayal" is the one most often produced on Broadway.
It's about a man and a wife and the man's best friend, who is the wife's lover. Audiences love love triangles.
It bristles with the kind of Pinter poetry that puts a premium on what is not said, the subtext that lives inside each of the playwright's scripted lines and "Pinter pauses."
It gives its three-person principal cast (there's a fourth character, a waiter) plenty to chew on, in dances of language that, on the page, can seem ordinary, even dull.
And it is told backwards, beginning with the aftermath of the love affair and spinning back the years to watch the story begin, a device that enlists the audience in an act of construction.
Under the direction of Daniel Gerroll for Katonah Classic Stage, "Betrayal" is in the steadiest of hands. It crackles with possibility.
Richard Hollis is Robert. Claire Karpen his wife, Emma. Trent Dawson is Jerry. Sam Rodd is the waiter.
A triangle within a circle
Pinter sets the love triangle of "Betrayal" within a tight, familiar circle. Down through the years, all the same memories are remembered, all the same unseen acquaintances are evoked, all the same conversations play over.
Casey the writer is a constant -- in various points of his career -- as is the time Jerry tossed Robert's and Emma's daughter into the air, and the fact that Jerry can never remember whose kitchen they were in when it happened.
Everything's very polite, quite British, and superficial. Pinter's genius, fully realized by Gerroll and his company, is to let the curtain of politeness fall away in moments of realization.
Dawson, KSC's artistic director, plays the needy Jerry pitch-perfect, with his heart on his sleeve. Yes, he has been having an affair with his best friend's wife for the better part of decade, but it's not until he learns that his friend has found out about it that Jerry becomes an emotional wreck.
For a man whose talent is seeing the value of unproven writers, Jerry is blissfully unaware of what's right under his nose. His wife is having drinks with a fellow doctor after work, he says, but there's no way she could be having an affair. He's the one who cheats.
"She isn't," he tells Emma. "She's busy. She's got lots to do. She's a very good doctor. She likes her life. She loves the kids. She loves me. All that means something."
Dawson's Jerry is as loose as Hollis' Robert is restrained, constrained by how things are done.
He's a boor who admits to hitting Emma -- "The old itch ... you understand" -- and who waxes poetic about how a squash date among chums is no place for a woman. He knows his marriage is falling apart, has fallen apart, but should that keep him from a good squash game, with a pint and a lunch to follow?
Hollis plays Robert with fire and nuance, stiff-upper-lip with an air of menace.
Karpen, as Emma, is making choices of her own, in what to tell Jerry, in how to deal with Robert learning about the affair, in how she'll move on from it all.
She is pragmatic, but she has a whiff of nostalgia. If she and Jerry are no longer using the flat they've rented for their afternoon assignations, they should get rid of it. A real estate transaction. But Emma still finds herself back in that neighborhood, parking her car where they had, climbing the steps to see another name next to the bell for their love nest.
Karpen mines the moments of stillness for all they're worth, never more so than when Robert confronts her about the affair, as she lies on their bed on a Venice holiday, reading a book. It's the production's most powerful scene, as husband and wife make discoveries.
He discovers the affair. She discovers he knows.
But just when Robert should feel triumphant for having figured things out, his knowing smile fades and the light goes out of his eyes, replaced with horror. In an instant, he has made a calculation that terrifies him. It's a chilling moment and Hollis renders it perfectly.
It's the kind of moment, indelible, that an expert professional production can deliver. More power to Katonah Classic Stage for bringing Pinter to life, for the daring it took to mount it. And for the promise of the one-acts that will return Pinter to Whippoorwill Hall the next two weekends.
Katonah Classic Stage's motto is "From Shakespeare and Shaw and Beyond." "Betrayal" take the "beyond" well beyond expectations.
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