Word: pinter
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...BIRTHDAY PARTY is nine years old and Harold Pinter's first full-length play. Brought to Broadway for the first time, it is as highly individualistic, if not as technically poised, as his later works. The playwright cuts through the conventions of accepted stage behavior and the rules of the well-made play to expose the cruel and the comic, the frighteningly familiar and the terrifyingly unknown in each man's existence...
...BIRTHDAY PARTY, by Harold Pinter, is a 1958 play written prior to The Caretaker and The Homecoming. Party lacks the dramatic sophistication of tone, tempo and themes of the two later plays; yet the telltale stigmata are all here-dread, panic, menace, mocking comic absurdity, the evasive unwillingness of people to level with each other. Except for Edward Flanders, the American cast is often blunt and plodding when it should be sardonic, cutting and athletic, but Pinter nevertheless provides prickly excitement and a tantalizing quota of questions without answers...
...BIRTHDAY PARTY, by Harold Pinter. In a season that began with unqualified disasters, this is the first qualified success. A 1958 play written prior to The Caretaker and The Homecoming, Party lacks the dramatic sophistication of tone, tempo and themes of the two later plays. Yet the telltale stigmata are all here-dread, panic, menace, mocking comic absurdity, the evasive unwillingness of people to level with each other. Except for Edward Flanders, the American cast is blunt and plodding when it should be sardonic, cutting and athletic, but Pinter provides prickly excitement and a tantalizing quota of questions without answers...
Stage humor is in transition. The old humor of the gag and the wise crack was confident, benign, a pick-me-up rather than a putdown. The new humor, which draws its tone from play wrights such as Albee and Pinter, is cruel, taut-nerved, and speaks the lingo of the obscene and the absurd, not funny-ha-ha but funny-peculiar. The new humor reigns in off-Broadway's Scuba Duba, a flagellatingly funny first play by Novelist Bruce Jay Friedman (Stern, A Mother's Kisses...
What endows Pinter with his immense theatricality also seems to stunt the scope of his mind and art. All the world's a stage, but the stage is not all of the world. The question remains whether Pinter, having amply proved bis ability to capture a particular mode and style of dramatic existence, can or will move on to describe more comprehensive states of being...