Word: splendid
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Pause.... Silence.... Pause.... It's Pinter at his best. Now showing at Adams Pool Theater, a capable production of The Birthday Party features splendid acting and, of course, the perennial treat of Pinterian dialogue. The show succeeds in being entertaining and often engrossing--when it doesn't attempt to put a spin on the mystery of the characters' motivations. But when director Schevey fiddles too much with the sense of the unreal intrinsic to Pinter's works, things tend to go awry...
...hard to figure out, however, who the source of his troubles is. The minute Gene Hackman appears as world-class physician Lawrence Myrick, oozing menacing bonhomie, a quality this splendid actor has virtually patented, we have our suspicions. It's the extent and passion of the conspiracy he has mounted to protect his research that is surprising and scary. That air of earnest befuddlement Grant has deployed to such good comic effect in the past serves him--and us--very well in this very different context. He's willowy and vulnerable in a way we no longer expect to find...
...turns out that my wife already knew that. This was not the first time I've carefully explained to my wife something she already knew. I do it all the time, and it's never an absolutely splendid experience for either of us. In this case, my wife had actually met someone who was once a Maytag repairman, working alone in a rural area. He hated those commercials about bored repairmen. Apparently, people would call him to get their appliances repaired, and he'd tell them that, given his appointment schedule, he wouldn't be able to get out there...
...repairman would explain to the caller what I explained to my wife about the commercials. It wasn't an absolutely splendid experience for him, either. By the time my wife met him, he had gone to work for Sears. He was at our house to fix the washing machine...
...then, on the day of the occasion, conceives the idea that the Queen can somehow cure his malaise. At the party he hears and reports on royal conversations, including the Queen's comment on the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, whom she had recently met: "He had splendid hair. Fuzzy wuzzy hair!" As she is leaving, the Queen looks at Theroux and says, "You're in a frightful muddle, aren't you?" He says yes. She tells him to "Go back to books," start writing again. She briefly touches his hand, and, Theroux writes, "something like a bee sting...