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Lies of the mind By Robert Avila THERE'S NO PLACE like home, especially as furnished by Harold Pinter. From his first play, The Room (1957), through a long and glorious career, the British dramatist has made the most familiar and familial of circumstances startling and strange. Pinter's home is an ultimately revelatory site where competing memories and desires are shrouded in the mystery of half-articulated contexts (surmised by audiences welcomed, inevitably, in medias res). It's a place of both conflict and refuge where truth and fiction, the real and the imagined, incestuously share the same roost. Having staged The Homecoming to wide acclaim in 2000, Aurora Theatre Company concludes its 12th season with 1978's Betrayal, another dip into the Pinter pool. And Tom Ross (the incoming artistic director replacing retiring cofounder Barbara Oliver) offers brilliant direction in a revival as meticulous in detail as it is refined in dramatic effect. The play might have seemed a relatively straightforward domestic drama, compared to the deliciously bizarre Homecoming, but for the fact that Betrayal moves straight backward in time, more or less, taking a love triangle from the point at which one marriage implodes to the first inspired moment of infidelity nine years previous. As the play begins, Jerry (Christopher Marshall) and Emma (Carrie Paff) meet as old friends, the seven-year affair they conducted behind the back of Robert (Charles Shaw Robinson) – Emma's husband and Jerry's best friend – now well behind them. Jerry's wife and children, whom we never see, were likewise deceived, but it's Jerry's friendship with Robert that creates the relevant triangle, because Emma, in the wake of her now disintegrating marriage, has disclosed the affair to her husband. As we travel back through those seven years, we come to see that the play has, much like The Homecoming, a hidden question mark in the title, challenging us to decide to whom the word properly applies. Meanwhile, for all its genuine eroticism and romance, the play's reversal of the way such stories normally unfold puts the emotional content of the affair starkly, analytically on display. The play is a taut package marked by dry humor, deliberate ambiguity, evasion, and threat, and the cast is up to the challenge it poses. The illusions and silences speak volumes about each hopelessly isolated character. It's a predicament that belies the close-quartered intimacy of the triangle, or rather maps it as if it were akin to the parts of an atom: bodies held together by irresistible forces across a vast vacuum of space. Robinson is excellent as the ever civil, tightly coiled Robert, whose incipient violence toward his wife and envy of his best friend suggest unseen currents of desire and desperation. When he confronts Emma – Paff is subtle and magnetic in the role – with evidence of her affair, Robinson gives this complexity full rein. The play's ingenious construction offers, finally, an intriguing angle on the theme of memory. Jerry, for instance, has one indelible memory of pure happiness, a moment he twice recounts in which he lifts Emma's two-year-old daughter and tosses her in the air while all the people most important to him – his wife, his lover, his best friend, his children – stand around him laughing and joyful. Even if we resist the notion that the little girl may be his own (something that Emma denies but that seems nevertheless possible under the circumstances), Jerry's memory acts as a kind of fantasy of reconciliation, in which all his loved ones meld into one indissoluble family. And yet the others no doubt remember the whole thing differently, if they remember it at all (Emma and Jerry can't even seem to agree in whose kitchen the scene took place). Memories function like dreams, in which longing and need is fulfilled. Emma, in her turn, chooses to remember the flat she and Jerry rented as a home (using the word purposely), where Jerry obviously prefers to see it as merely a convenient rendezvous for their trysts. Meanwhile, Robert describes to Jerry over lunch his own memory of perfect contentment: reading Yeats alone on the Italian island he had meant to visit with his wife. Following as this scene does the revelation of his wife and best friend's deceit, the audience has a fuller sense of the memory's significance. Jerry remains in the dark. But the memory itself, a recent one for Robert, already sounds largely (perhaps wholly) constructed, reflecting less some onetime reality than Robert's need for an image of bliss carved from the rock of his isolation and loneliness. Mikiko Uesugi's set and Jon Retsky's light design come together superbly to underscore the memory theme. A cluster of childhood toys, books, and baby clothes, hanging suspended above the stage throughout, provides a certain material context for the words and actions of the characters. Their pristine form represents a material reality now gone, now literally lighter than air, untouchable and unseen. Between scenes, while a moody jazz score plays in the background, lights shine on these objects to cast a series of exaggerated, muddled silhouettes against a swirling colorscape at the back of the stage. The result is an ever changing assortment of idiosyncratic shadows that – much like memory – can be shaped into whatever we need them to be. 'Betrayal' runs through July 25. Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 and 7 p.m., Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk. $34-$36. (510) 843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org. |
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