Happy Birthday

Alias Stage's terrific Party

by Bill Rodriguez

By Harold Pinter. Directed by Fred Sullivan, Jr. With Enedina Garcia, Robert Grady, Rebecca Poole, Nigel Gore, and Brien Lang. At Alias Stage through July 13.

There's good news and bad news about Harold Pinter's plays not being performed much around here. The good news is that we're spared the inept, oh-so-earnest strivings to be Pinteresque that could easily befall us. The good news is that when a brave, first-rate little theater ventures into his world, we're famished for him.

The Birthday Party, under the direction of Trinity Rep's Fred Sullivan Jr. and with a pitch-perfect cast, is getting a terrific -- a definitive -- production at Alias Stage.

Who is this Stanley person, the only boarder at a run-down English B&B? Suddenly, this non-entity becomes mysterious -- not to the oblivious hostess Meg or her long-suffering husband Petey, but to us. For Stanley is terrified at the sudden appearance of two more boarders. Goldberg and his apprentice McCann enter looking like the Blues Brothers, black-suited, attaché case and suitcases in hands. Later they even do a little synchronized shuffle that would do Belushi and Aykroyd proud.

Yes, there's humor aplenty. The early Pinter plays -- in 1958 this was his second -- established the "Comedy of Menace," but the comedy of Burns & Allen comes more readily to mind in the opening breakfast table scene. Enedina Garcia may not have mastered the natural surreality of the other actors, the skull beneath the grin, but she sure makes this feather-head Meg funny. Her favorite question is "Is it good?" -- whether about hubby's corn flakes or the news he is reading. The vapid table talk makes clear we are to hear her words as, "Is everything still the same and non-threatening?"

Husband Petey's job is to arrange deck chairs at a nearby resort hotel, and with the world-weary patience Babbitt gives him he might as well be doing it on a sinking Titanic. At the end, when Petey confronts the Men in Black, Babbitt gives a less-is-more lesson in acting: by simply breaking eye contact, he signals a resignation to fate that makes Neville Chamberlain's more understandable.

Robert Grady gives a pumped-up performance as the beleaguered Stanley. Like a terrified mouse trying to hide and trying to flee simultaneously, the tension is threatening to rend the be-spectacled nebbish apart. Stanley also can be droll or sarcastic, with a mean streak. But his lust for the visiting Lulu (Rebecca Poole, with subdued submission) is wisely kept serious and understated. Grady was dynamite last fall in Alias's Etta Jenks, similarly bottled-up as a sociopath. If he gets other strong roles that broaden his range -- like his Laertes in Hamlet -- he could become a major player in town. (Please, Alias, give him something to do besides be nervous.)

As things get flat-out Pinteresque, they remain intriguingly Kafkaesque. What has he done -- or not done -- to be so fearful of the two men who take rooms? We never learn. Goldberg can flip from friendly to feral at the turn of an answer he doesn't like. Nigel Gore makes him part gracious, self-impressed wind-bag and part Doberman. The actor handles Pinter's long laundry lists of absurd charges against Stanley ("Why do you pick your nose?," "Why did the chicken cross the road?") at a rat-a-tat pace like a veteran machine-gunner.

As the lackey McCann, the always skillful Brien Lang is at his considerable best, modulating from subservient to malevolent like some evil machine whose engine takes time to warm up. He's fascinating to watch reacting when others converse: at one point of McCann's uncomfortable bafflement he looked uncannily like a stunned Stan Laurel.

The set design, by Trinity's William Lane, is naturalistic but oh-so subtle. The aged beige wallpaper looks as desiccated and pale as death. Those chipped white wicker chairs with the tattered floral cushions, we know they're cast-offs from the hotel verandah where Petey is shuffling away his fading years.

You don't want to miss The Birthday Party that Alias Stage is throwing. Coming after Sullivan's remarkable production of Hamlet, it looks like Alias is upping the ante of quality for off-Trinity theaters. We too are bound to be grateful winners.

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A terrific Tempest

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