Tag Archives: Jane Kaplan

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Pinter Sketches (Part 2)

Frank Corrado in No Man’s Land (Photo (c) Chris Bennion)

A Discomfiting Presence

In Corner Conversations & Matters of State, ACT’s second set of Pinter shorts festival (which closed Friday), curators Jane Kaplan and Frank Corrado delivered a sophomore survey of Pinter’s body of work that provided a satisfying capstone to the celebrations. This survey included essays, bits of lecture, context, and commentary.

In his opening remarks Corrado contextualized the shorts in the world of the British comedy stage review, specifically “Beyond the Fringe“, and the influence of sketch writer and performer Peter Cook. With no more further ado than a harmonica solo by Charles Leggett the nimble cast launched into a series of bits featuring mostly older and somewhat mentally unstable Brits.

The Black and White, Umbrella, and Last to Go took advantage of Pinter’s skill in dialogue that discussed almost nothing in phrases that turned back on themselves with multiple variations. Suzy Hunt was a standout in the first of these with the clever detail of her business. She repeatedly sucked at dentures, cleaned a fresh restaurant spoon with her hem and eyed the world with active, suspicious glances. Meanwhile Julie Briskman wisely underplayed on her side of the milk bar table.

Interview shifted things from the absurd to the disturbingly silly as David Pichette’s porn shop proprietor slowly revealed his unhinged ulterior intentions. There was pleasure for audiences familiar with Pichette’s work to watch this hissing maniac uncoil from the actor’s usual dignity.

Hunt returned as a dotty and manipulative derelict in Bus Stop, the production’s weakest offering. This preceded the evening’s hidden track (kept off the program the audience was asked to say nothing about this piece, which was less funny than illustrative in its subtle contrast with the rest of the evening’s sketches.

Leggett’s harmonica interlude, which was such a delightful surprise at the end of the first set of sketches became a bit monotonous and wearying in its regular use as set change cover in this round. As director, Kaplan justified this choice in the second half the evening, which lost the harmonica as the pieces took a more serious bent.

The fulcrum sketch was Night. Contextualized by notes on Pinter’s marital struggles, we saw a very human snippet in which a couple (Briskman and Leggett) reminisce about their first meeting. This being Pinter the past is not a singular thing or a point of consensus here but a stage for playing out the couple’s current tensions, conflicts of personality, and abiding grievances through disagreement.

With an acknowledgement of Pinter’s political life and a quotation from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech the cast launched into a pair of shorts that cut to the bone on the inhumanity in government. Precisely, from 1983, slipped from ambiguity into discomfiting clarity as men in suits discussed figures. Ben Harris and Peter Crook carried a waft of casual malevolence from their appearance in No Man’s Land. Harris, who was all but inaccessible as Foster (and appropriately so), made a case to send him some meatier roles.

In Press Conference Corrado played a government minister answering questions on policy with horrifying answers that were nearly masked by his official language. Corrado took on the minister’s role sounding more like an actor than a politician (an admittedly slight distinction). One wonders whether greater verisimilitude would have masked the enormity completely or lent it more power.

Horrors of more typically Pinterian absurdity define Tess, a rambling almost-logical monologue that spirals away from sanity. Briskman’s ingenuous approach gave full power to the shock ending.

The ending of this second set of sketches was less shocking than jarring; it wasn’t even theatre. The final word was given to Pinter himself in a video clip of his live televised performance of Apart From That. The script, a Pinter-précis of the utmost simplicity, was a near-perfect coda to the evening and the festival itself. That the performance featured a cancer-ridden Pinter was key to its success, but it also fascinated as performance.

Pinter is in the company of Checkov and Beckett in the degree to which his plays depend on presence—the experience of people remaining in one another’s company. Presence creates an opportunity for violence but in his world the only thing worse than being together would be to be parted. Yet, here in this final piece the performance itself questioned the nature of presence and thus the nature of community, citizenship, and our relationship to every other living person.

Written as a phone conversation and staged with Rupert Graves playing the other role via a live feed from a distant studio, the video of this sketch could hardly be more separated in time and space from ACT’s audience. As you read this article, however far removed you may be from ACT’s Pinter Festival, these questions could not be more pertinent. What is it that separates you from me and everyone else? What is it that connects us—writer and reader, the callous government minister and the woman scrimping in the milk bar? How do we live together and how do we feel about the horror and the menace of everyday? As the festival wraps up this weekend these questions remain implicit.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Pinter As a Sketch Artist (Part 1)

Entire Pinter Festival cast (Left to Right, Back row first): Peter Crook, Benjamin Harris, Darragh Kennan, Charles Leggett, Cheyenne Casebier, (Front Row) Frank Corrado, Randy Moore, Mariel Neto, Jeffrey Fracé, Anne Allgood, and Julie Briskman (Photo: LaRae Lobdell)

Easy Laughs With Minimal Menace: Sketch Night returns to ACT August 23rd

For much of this evening of largely light fare the highlights of Sex, Trouble, and Taxi #274 give us Pinter as light comic in a style not far removed from Monty Python. The low points feel like tepid high-school fare played by actors who exceed the material. The acting is high-caliber all around. What’s more, both cast an audience have a good time with easy laughs in the casual setting of the Bullitt Cabaret theatre. Stick around for the final act of the night and you’ll witness Pinter in miniature: simultaneously horrifying and hilarious.

The opening act of this set of sketches efficiently directed by Jane Kaplan features David Pichette, who recently appeared as Jacques in Seattle Shakes’s As You Like It. Here he squares off with that production’s Touchstone, Darragh Kennan. The sketch milks comic mileage out of the ludicrous jargon of manufacturing with vaguely risqué-sounding concoctions of mechanism named and repeated. The context of the jargon could be the undoing of Pichette’s character but he plays this manufacturer with histrionics that suggest Grover of The Muppets, making for a pleasant almost thoughtless piece of comedy.

One of a series of admirably efficient set changes leads to a discussion of village shopping habits played by Suzy Hunt and Julie Briskman in That’s All. Pinter’s keen ear for the inanities of small talk is almost straightforward here as Hunt’s character obsesses over who shops where when and the near scandal of broken habits. Hunt makes some surprising but spot-on choices in this diatribe while Brinkman keeps the life in a litany of head-nodding responses.

In That’s Your Trouble Charles Leggett and Darragh Kennan reverse the power dynamic of their fine performances in The Dumb Waiter. Here Kennan has the upper hand and all the presumption of knowledge. The dialogue in this piece has more substance and less import than that of their longer and better-known two-hander. Leggett and Kennan play the scene in a self-conscious, almost mechanized physical style emphasizing the pugilistic rhythm of the encounter. That’s Your Trouble comes off as a verbal transposition of a back alley dust-up where the outcome was never in doubt.

In Special Offer Mariel Neto faces hard economic times and an advertisement that suggests an opportunity for her to view a man with the same objectivity that many of Pinter’s male characters view women. The suggestion is enough to make some in the audience cheer in their laughter and applause.

The weakest piece in the evening, The Applicant, lets Kennan mug while Brendan Patrick Hogan’s sound design dispenses with any notion of realism favoring more musical effects that provide the modicum of interest in this piece. One can’t help wondering if underplaying and emphasizing Brinkman’s character’s verbal onslaught would have made a more compelling piece, but the silliness is more in keeping with the evening as a whole.

The ironically titled Dialogue for Three features Neto delivering a scorchingly sensuous monologue in the midst of inconsequential natterings of Leggett and Kennan. Her character’s guilelessness is striking in contrast to her earlier appearance in the sketches while Leggett’s non-response seats this set of monologues in the heart of Pinterland.

The scene change between the last two acts of the evening is a great performance in itself and wins applause for Leggett and company. The piece that follows fades away over a series of possible false endings but provides the most sustained and fully realized example of Pinter’s work.

In Victoria Station Pichette returns with similar impotent exasperation to his first appearance but instead of facing Kennan’s cool confidence he is undone by stupidity so obstinate it verges on the sinister. Tiny fractures appear in the dialogue between Pichette’s dispatcher and Leggett’s cabbie in which Pichette’s comic rage falters in fear. There are moments in which Leggett’s stupidity seems knowing. Even violence can have no impact on the cabbie’s trap. For the dispatcher there is no escape; for the audience it is as challenging and engaging as this first round of sketches gets.

Sex, Trouble, and Taxi #274 has a final performance on Thursday, August 23. The rest of The Pinter Festival including The Dumb Waiter and Celebration, Old Times and No Man’s Land wraps up on Saturday, August 25.