Top Theatre Artists Banding Together to Present Harold Pinter

Last year, Seattle-based actor Frank Corrado started staging readings of the plays of Harold Pinter, the Nobel Prize-winning English playwright who died in late 2008. Responding to audience enthusiasm, Corrado decided to push the concept further: in collaboration with Victor Pappas, the former associate artistic director of the Intiman, and the wonderfully talented actress Suzanne Bouchard, Corrado founded Shadow and Light Theatre, a new local dedicated to presenting Pinter’s work. Their first production, a pairing of the one-acts A Kind of Alaska and Ashes to Ashes, opens tonight at ACT Theatre (tickets $20).

---

Shadow and Light have chosen an interesting pair of plays that seem intended to push audience’s understanding of Pinter’s theatre. For a lot of people, Pinter’s work falls into one of two categories: the early “comedy of menace” plays like The Birthday Party, or his later, sophisticated domestic dramas like Betrayal. A Kind of Alaska, in contrast, helps highlight Pinter’s fascination with time and experience, which also informed the structure of Betrayal. Inspired by Oliver Sack’s book Awakenings, the play is about a woman brought out of a comatose state that lasted three decades.

---

Ashes to Ashes, on the other hand, hearkens back to the early comedy of menace, by infusing a mundane domestic argument with multiple layers of meaning. But whereas the early work tended to be purposefully obscure, in Ashes to Ashes Pinter is being overtly political, connecting a seemingly twisted domestic situation into a meditation on the Holocaust.

Shadow and Light is the latest sign that Seattle theatre artists are working to create new opportunities for themselves, similar to companies like New Century Theatre Company, recession or no. Bouchard has been a favorite of mine for ages, delivering knock-out performances in both Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House and Clare Booth Luce’s The Women. Corrado was part of the phenomenal ensemble cast of The Seafarer last year. And joining them to fill out the cast is Kimberly King, who won over audiences in the otherwise prematurely dated Becky’s New Car.