Word: pinter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Times, one of Harold Pinter's journey's into the spaces between words and the spaces between people, is at the Loeb Ex this weekend. Like most of Pinter, it doesn't offer what many theater-goers consider the chief rewards of drama--confrontation, character development, eloquence. Pinter's meanings are usually clear and worth discovering, but sometimes his plays sag. If the cast and director bring subtlety and understated power to the production, though, it can hardly lose. Tonight...
...play is saved from being overly grave and melodramatic by Horowitz's fine ear for both the poetic and comic rhythms of natural speech. His characters speak that elliptical language made familiar by Pinter--a series of monologues that only rarely intersect, made up of short-circuited sentences, non-sequiturs and repetitions. The special idiom of the absurdist play demands from its actors a particular sensitivity to the purely aural qualities of speech as well as split-second timing and O'Brien never lets his cast miss a beat...
...home of Margaret and Will. Lee captures the bleak and barren quality of their marriage in the dingy walls and sparse furnishing of his interior but somehow he fails to convey the sense that this is a distinctly American environment. Instead, the setting seems more suited to Pinter's Birthday Party than a play set in New England in 1974. Without being insistent or exclusive, Horowitz addresses himself to some peculiarly American obsessions and drives in Alfred the Great and it is important that the environment his characters inhabit reflects this...
Stoppard is particularly drawn to playwrights who shake up an audience's habitual patterns of thought. That is one reason he admires Harold Pinter: "Pinter invented something-not the poetry of ordinary conversation that he is usually credited with, but the notion that you do not necessarily believe what people tell you in a theater. Formerly you did so, unless there was reason for skepticism-as in an Agatha Christie play. In Pinter's plays there is no surface reason for not telling the truth, but he has persuaded an entire generation of theatergoers that people...
BUTLEY Directed by HAROLD PINTER Screenplay by SIMON GRAY Ben Butley, who teaches English literature at a London university, is generally befogged and intermittently besieged. An arch ex-wife seeks him out with the news that she plans to remarry. Students descend on him for tutorials, inundate him with papers like "Hate and Redemption in A Winter's Tale. "Edna Shaft (Jessica Tandy) is upset because Butley(Alan Bates) encouraged a student to quit one of her stifling seminars. Joey Keyston (Richard O'Callaghan), a junior member of the department, is planning to move in with his lover...