Going back

Relationships unravel in reverse Betrayal

by Bill Rodriguez

BETRAYAL. By Harold Pinter. Directed by the cast. With David Gardner, Nigel Gore, and Sandra Laub. At Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre through February 11.

When attentive actors inhabit a play that means a lot to them, a spare play fit for a spare setting, they can boil down the experience into a searing distillate. Harold Pinter's three-character Betrayal is being staged one more weekend at the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (through February 11). It was a workshop production last year, and the simple black-box staging, a bed the only constant prop, is quietly magnificent.

Harold Pinter, the Brit who taught David Mamet how people converse in pauses, is noted for his "comedy of menace" and absurdist forays into the chilly hinterland of the human psyche. In this 1978 play, however, he uses structure rather than ambiguous tension-thrumming situations to rattle us. In Betrayal, Pinter is declaring that when intimate human relationships are isolated under a magnifying glass, even his theatrical tricks could never make them any more ridiculous. Or profoundly sad.

The play is brilliant, both in its craft and the calm illuminations that it prompts actors to let dawn on us. We follow the doings of two male friends and their wife and mistress, respectively, who happens to be the same person. The happenstance is nearly as casual as that. Under the tidal surge of impulse, commitments to marriage and friendship are swept away in a finger-snap. Yet the story is assembled and unfolded for us in such a way that the soap opera triteness of the situation develops the fascination of a psychological thriller.

Emma (Sandra Laub) is married to successful London publisher Robert (Nigel Gore), whose best mate from way back has been literary agent Jerry (David Gardner), who has been bedding Emma for seven years. When the play opens, the affair has been over for two years, but its consequences are squinting in the sunlight for the first time: In a pub, Emma tells Jerry that her husband the night before admitted to numerous affairs of his own. She also, reluctantly, reveals that he has known about the on-going trysts with Jerry for four years, and she lies about this being news to her. At that point, the betrayals, heaped in a pile to be sorted out later, come to five by my count.

The structure makes it a sort of a collective memory play, from no single point of view. As the story staggers back and forth in time, it is usually one character who provides the tension as we watch them respond either oblivious to what we know or all-too mindful of what secret they recently started keeping.

Nine economical scenes, performed without intermission, accumulate like fragments in a cubist painting. Laub conveys Emma, an art gallery owner, as in-charge, hardly wafted about by the winds of change. Yet she is most affectingly when Emma is just listening. In one scene in particular, when Emma's husband toys with her, slowly revealing that he recognized Jerry's handwriting on a love letter, Laub silently modulates through an emotional sonata: Could he not know? Don't tip him off, in case he's not sure. Resign yourself; he knows.

Gore has the most delicate task, as her husband, although Richard is the most selfish and assertive of the three. The actor doesn't minimize the man being a brute, as he reveals in one blunt and unironic scene, opting instead for a subtler sensitivity. In the last scene, Gore makes clear that at the very beginning Robert gave tacit approval to the lovers, by pretending not to notice their mutual attraction, a philanderer choosing his relationship with his best friend over that of his wife. The moment is a gut punch.

That same closer has my favorite performance by Gardner. As we've seen him up till then, Jerry has been a rather passive player in the drama of his life. He's limp-spined enough to care more about being found out by his pal than about cuckolding him. In this ending/beginning scene at a party, we see a soused Jerry muster the courage of his cojones as he blurts and gushes and flatters the pants off of Emma. For the first time we see Jerry exhibit the strength of character, albeit twisted, that makes men heroic.

In my theater wrap-up in December, I cited the URI workshop production of this play, with the same self-directed actors, as the local theater high water mark for me personally last year. Whether it seeps into you slowly or sweeps you away, this Betrayal is one you will never forget.