A dirty joke, a poignant insight, an absurdist yawp, an unexpected reversal, a shocking confession and a stream of ironic badinage erupt one after another—and sometimes all at once. Full of loaded banter, veering from nail-biting confrontation to wildly cathartic caricature, Pinter’s controversial play, The Birthday Party, remains a text of unique and overwhelming power. Its unique and overwhelming power lies in this rapid oscillation; this sudden shift of mood; the abrupt embrace of tranquility and nonsense, the pleasant familiarity of cliche and the horror of senseless brutality. “Dark comedy” does not even begin to describe it.
Stanley (Adam Simpson) and Meg (Celia Maurice)
Off Broadway West Theatre Company’s performance of The Birthday Party summons this grimly ridiculous and genuinely terrifying world, a world cleverly disguised as a routine morning at a rundown boarding house in the least fashionable quarter of an English seaside town in the 1950’s, where we find British-born Graham Cowley, as Petey, munching his cornflakes in a fog, aloof.
Petey’s wife, Meg, dotes on him with unwelcome playfulness. As Meg, Celia Maurice embodies dotty sentimentality and loneliness. Ms. Maurice trained at Stanford University, with the A.C.T. Young Conservatory. In New York, she worked at the Lincoln Center with the New York City Opera, and The Birthday Party marks her debut performance with OBWTC. In this, she is magnetic: One moment, Meg is soaring away on a fantasy of escape, and, in the next, she is a dowdy husk of a human being. Humdrum chit-chat suddenly becomes brisk and riveting. This ordinary breakfast conversation, like one of our own, is now electrified—an everyday relationship catastrophically, irrationally infused with epic power struggles, violent upheavals, and dizzying bouts of confusion and regret.
At the breakfast table, still wearing his dressing gown and pajamas, the insanely demanding lodger, Stanley (Adam Simpson), heaps contempt on Meg. Later, the next-door neighbor, Lulu (played with smoldering sultriness by Jessica Lea Risco), asks Stanley, “You want to go for a walk?”
“I can’t.”
“You’re a bit of a wash-out,” she says.
Words are weapons, and, in time, they rip Stanley apart. The main drama here is his complete disintegration, from the youthful piano-playing phenom to the older and bitterly obscure lodger to… Something else entirely, something that must be seen to be believed.
Into this world drop the dapper Goldberg, and his Irish henchman, McCann. With their double-breasted suits, their black broad-brimmed hats, and smooth urban cynicism, McCann and Goldberg might as well be Martians. Keith Burkland, an OBWTC veteran, plays Goldberg. His sidekick, McCann, is played by James Centofanti, who appeared alongside Mr. Burkland last year in OBWTC’s Betrayal—another Pinter play. In this performance, their powerful chemistry crackles mercilessly, and spits sparks.
With oily, machine-like relentlessness, they advance on Stanley—and drive him to madness. McCann rips up a newspaper meticulously. For no apparent purpose. With a dead-eyed gaze, McCann regards Stanley coolly. He takes in this bizarre, overgrown boy, and says, “You’re in a bad state man.” Lulu is nothing but a “big, bouncy girl” to Goldberg. Goldberg is, himself, a London Jew, and a preachy raconteur (“You’ve always been a true Christian to me,” says McCann). Their neatly choreographed interrogations make a picture of menace.
Meg has no idea she is being ridiculed by Goldberg. Stanley’s face contorts in vexation and fury. He paces erratically, and beats his birthday drum like a maniac. The audience wonders: Is it OK to laugh at this? At the climax, in a scene like the cartoon version of the nightmare of a paranoiac, a game of “blind man’s bluff” unleashes a sinister, grasping golem; a stupid bacchanal spirals into oblivion with all the desolation of a drunken black-out; and Goldberg and McCann, once dapper sharks, are reduced to mere lecherous buffoons. Stanley is reduced to twitchy catatonia. Meg and Lulu are each reduced to a “walk of shame”. And Petey suffers more than he ever knew that he could suffer.
Goldberg (Keith Burkland) at center, with his henchman, McCann (James Centofanti)
A richly evocative sea-worn set—scarves and jackets and curtains pegged up like damp rags—renders an off-beat and dilapidated “boutique hotel” from the Fawlty Towers era. Anglophile fans of television shows like Doc Martin and QI will love the wittily suggestive back-and-forth repartee.
OBWTC’s The Birthday Party plays at San Francisco’s “The Phoenix Theatre” at 414 Mason St. (6th floor) until June 27th, 2015, with performances Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 8pm, as well as a pair of Sunday matinees (at 3pm) on May 31st and June 14. The Birthday Party is an all-out assault — a true tour de force — and it is not to be missed!
