Word: cottingham
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...whatever the directorial interpretation, Betrayal remains a riveting play. This is largely due to the regressive action; Pinter begins at the end and shifts backwards through time. The nine scenes in Betrayal trace the collapse, decline, and eventual establishment of an affair between Jerry (John Ducey) and Emma (Reid Cottingham), the wife of Jerry's best friend Robert (Glenn Kiser...
...discovered the affair before Jerry knows), but it also invests the final, earliest scene with a sense of pathos that would be absent in a more traditional arranging of the play's events. This affair is, quite literally, doomed from the start, and the convincing passion which Ducey and Cottingham demonstrate in the play's final scenes elicits our sympathy in one of the play's few genuinely touching moments...
...Emma, Cottingham advances a different theory on betrayal. She has no qualms about betraying Robert, because she doesn't love him. But she is shocked when she discovers his own infidelity. Cottingham gives a dignified performance, and the moments in which she basks in the short-lived happiness the flat provides her are a joy to watch...
...manage to evade death until near the end. As Sir Lawrence Wargrave, a notorious "hanging judge," Woody Hill paces through his scenes like a hawk, interrogating other characters in courtroom style and calmly remarking, "We've been invited here by a madman, probably homicidal." Miss Vera Claythorne (Reid Cottingham) uses physical objects perfectly, obsessively adjusting the rings on her finger and hovering in the background with a cigarette like an angel of death...
...Cottingham's first-act sarcasm is brutally funny, and the show moves along nicely under Brent Eller's direction. The plot is perfectly symmetrical. Will Susan choose reality with a family that doesn't love her, bland Marsala wine and a black lunch table? Or will she opt for the illusory world of dreams, champagne, a family that treats her like a goddess and a pristine white table with fine china? We feel for Cottingham, who has captured Susan's despairing loneliness and repression behind her cynical facade...