Word: pinter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...second act opens another front of Pinter's war on our intellectual complacency. The question is no longer simply "Why are they acting like that?", but has become even more basic: "Is this real or is this fantasy?" The absurdity of the situation grows stronger with each new turn of events; Lenny coolly makes his proposition, Ruth Coolly accepts it, and Teddy remains absolutely unconcerned. The family even asks Teddy if he wants to act as Ruth's "representative in the States", a kind of international pimp. Max laughs: "Why, Pan Am ought to give us a discount...
...more complex. Perhaps the play is a fantasy--the wish-fulfilling Oedipal dream of the sons to depose their father and have sex with their mother (Ruth is the mother-substitute). Or perhaps one should stop trying to categorize the play as reality or fantasy and listen to Pinter himself: "There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false...
...Marlboro Theater Company's production captures the ambivalence of the play, and its lack of motivational explanation. The first act, which can have a tendency to move slowly and become tedious, is handled extremely well, largely because the Company manages to maintain Pinter's mix of terror and humor, so necessary for the initial attack on the "interpreters" in the audience. John Devany, as Max, shifts easily between the ranting, boastful, tough old man and the kindhearted, proud father whom Pinter has created, a difficult task when the character you portray seems to shift his personality for no reason. Hillary...
...McDonald's Lenny, while lacking in the sleekness one expects from the suggestion that he is a big-time pimp, is still quite good. There is one particularly fine interplay between Lenny, Ruth, their dialogue, and a pair of inanimate objects (a glass and an ashtray) which illustrates Pinter's capacity to utilize all the elements of production at his disposal. Lenny suddenly, and inexplicably, becomes insistent upon removing a glass he had given Ruth. "I'll take it," he demands, and she replies: "If you take it...I'll take you." The effect of this first sensual suggestion...
Only Michael Field, as Teddy, disappoints. His Teddy appears more as the absent-minded professor than the unruffled, pipe-smoking, detached observer Pinter intends. Thus his climactic soliloquy loses some of the force it might have had: "To see, to be able to see. You're just objects, you just move about. I can observe. You're lost in it. I won't be lost in it!" In Field's hands, the soliloquy becomes a childish lament, rather than a strong image of the intellectual detachment that Pinter despises...