Threats and Threats
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Threats and Threats "You can do something with this room. You stand a chance," says Rose, a washed-out, middle-aged, lower-class English housewife, taking apologetic...
...It stands, I'd say, with Play and Krapp's Last Tape by Beckett and N. F. Simpson's A Resounding Tinkle as one of the few original one-acts in English produced since World War II...
...Confronted with this exactitude, critics are tempted to project Pinter's work larger, to interpret and explicate it in symbolic or metaphysical terms...
...The accompanying item on the bill, A Slight Ache, is less of a play, although longer and more ambitious...
...it keeps saying, in substance, that words are not enough...
...Mark's Playhouse), but they are so predictable that it is impossible to take them to heart...
...with brilliant agility...
...The Toilet has seven urinals, a water closet, two washbasins, three bulbs, a towel dispenser, a rack of dixie cups (all scrupulously designed by Larry Rivers), and a gang of Negro schoolboys who have collected between classes to beat up a Puerto Rican kid...
...It's snakes . . . that bite...
...At the same time, there is that ambiguity to contend with: "No statement I make should be interpreted as final and definitive...
...Perhaps that is why The Slave...
...Frances Sternhagen can hardly be praised too highly for her Rose in The Room and Flora in A Slight Ache, so I won't try, except to say that there is not a feminine performance on or off Broadway to compete with hers now that In White America, with Gloria Foster, has closed...
...Vessels replies, "Probably...
...Leroi Jones also uses threats in The Toilet and The Slave (St...
...the husband is overthrown...
...for all its frenzy, is scarcely a play at all...
...and further, "If rage some day is not enough to appease me, I'll kill you...
...Easley, a college professor, another of those academic, weak-kneed liberals we keep meeting on stages, and his wife play unwilling hosts to Walker Vessels, who is the leader of the revolution, Mrs...
...Nan Martin as the wife and Al Freeman Jr...
...I'd feel safer if somebody could...
...Back of that honesty is a cry, the same cry that emerged from Dutchman, a cry from the black man to the white that runs, in effect: "If I were not raging at you I'd be murdering you...
...In The Room you are supposed to wonder whether the visitor is Rose's father, and you will never be told...
...In The Slave Jones turns up the threats full blast...
...The pattern of all-against-one is anticipated about five times before the Puerto Rican boy is brought in...
...and Ed Wittstein, surely the most versatile designer in New York these days, has turned the stage into a furnished cell, a bitter comment on a living room, without trespassing on the acting space...
...the actors catch the peculiar intonations of Pinter's fragmented speeches but they don't try to force the London accents, a mistake made in last season's showing of The Dumb Waiter...
...Or what do you say to a straightforward Piesporter Goldtropfschen Feine Aus-lese (Reichsgraf von Kesselstaff...
...There is the play's central threat...
...The wife looks forward to sexual games...
...The husband and wife are eating breakfast when a wasp flies into the marmalade pot...
...Humor, not wit...
...You stand a chance," says Rose, a washed-out, middle-aged, lower-class English housewife, taking apologetic pride in the slovenly enclosure that Harold Pinter calls The Room...
...But in a play what else is there to use...
...Yet I think that the three most accomplished actors New York has to offer would not be able to transfer the threat of revolution successfully and urgently from Jones' heart to the theater...
...But what does it matter...
...He is disgusted by a former friend of Vessels, a poet who wrote "tired elliptical little descriptions of what he could see out the window...
...In it Pinter, like Ionesco in Bedlam Galore for Two or More, seems to be imitating himself, looking for the old formula, finding and overdressing it...
...They seem to be wasting their time...
...he crawls out of the wreckage...
...Behind the threat, in turn, is Vessels' tormented admission that, as an educated man, "I would rather argue politics, or literature, or boxing, or anything, with you, dear Easley, with you...
...He personifies a threat...
...They sting...
...This "fable in a prologue and two acts" occurs during a Negro revolution "some time in the future...
...Vessels has come to take his daughters away and possibly to kill Easley and his wife...
...After which, his head slumps and he weeps...
...This was Pinter's first play and, though it may be exceeded in depth as well as length by The Caretaker, it embodies Pinter's most recklessly experimental writing to date...
...Miraculously, the sinister events are lubricated throughout by Pinter's lavish applications of humor...
...Jones is an honest poet trying to talk straight in an artificial medium...
...From such uncertainties and the dark comedy they breed Pinter derives his singular strength and novelties as a dramatist...
...Happy New Year...
...Others in the two casts -Henderson Forsythe as Edward, Ralph Drischell as the Matchseller, and Robertearl Jones-react and non-react capably, but Miss Sternhagen is the cohesive, dominant presence of the evening...
...Later, Edward will offer the implacably silent Matchseller a glass of sherry, a double scotch, Tia Maria, a Wachenheimer Fuchsmantel Reisling Beeren Auslese, or "a little Asti Spumante...
...Word Baker's direction engages the rhythm, comedy and emptinesses and holds on to them from the opening moment...
...the two daughters are pronounced dead (though it is not made clear whether they are killed in the wreckage or whether Vessels had already shot them...
...But here again the performance is so well pieced into the text that the outcome is a totally engrossing hour...
...Will there be more love and beauty in the world...
...Better yet, the company now at the Writer's Stage Theater really "can do something" with The Room...
...Pinter has explained: "I've never started a play from any kind of abstract idea or theory or never envisaged my own characters as messengers of death, doom, heaven, or the milky way or, in other words, as allegorical representations of any particular force, whatever that means...
...His very silence causes the wealthy couple whose home he visits to capitulate to him...
...the situation exists all the same...
...He cannot say that a Negro revolution and the bloodshed it would lead to would improve society, only change it...
...But not in his play, where the conflict is overshadowed by so many and such corny devices...
...Explosions boom and machine-guns stammer outside, while inside Vessels clouts and punches the couple, repeatedly levels a pistol at their noses and rips off a string of fairyland epithets at Easley, from "Faggot" to "Professor No-Dick...
...This one is superior in every respect...
...as Vessels scream up a storm, but they lack the resources to cope with Jones' acrimony and sometimes make heavy going of a sentence with more than one clause in it...
...Jerome Raphel handles the role of the husband evenly and impressively, flickering with intelligence from time to time, but his is the smallest third of the play...
...Between the bursts of hubbub The Slave consists of get-tough crosstalk as fitful and nearly as fruitless as the few minutes of a David Susskind panel show that crop up between commercials...
...The point is that you had your chance . . . now these other folks have theirs...
...The point of the scene is that it doesn't make any difference whether he is or not...
...Yet he is the mainspring of the plot...
...Badly structured, it fails to put its ranting to dramatic ends...
...He finally shoots Easley and has done with it, whereupon the house collapses on him and the wife...
...she is crushed to death...
...The gabby Vessels, in contrast to Pinter's dumb Matchseller, dissipates his threats the more he brandishes his pistol, the more he shouts...
...There is a powerful drama of double loyalty in Jones' feelings...
...I use rage to disguise my insanity...
...In both plays Pinter poses a tremulous, ambiguous situation in which apparently-unnecessary information is constantly volunteered and apparently-necessary information withheld...
...Jones' language is as raw as he can make it...
...Jones sustains the atmosphere of threats by means of fists, feet, ripe insults, dirty promises, and even taunts of love from the Puerto Rican to one of the Negro youngsters...
...Random events are threaded together with not-quite-visible cords, direct questions are never directly answered, the deliberate omissions ring out like warnings, and the ordinariness of the setting is belied by the menace of a non-speaking apparition-in A Slight A che it is a decrepit match-seller, looking like an indecision between the Ghost of Hamlet's father and the Commendatore from Don Giovanni, who stands and sweats onstage for three-quarters of the time without giving out so much as a grunt...
...The comedy comes out of their misplaced precision...
...the director, Leo Garen, has made a ballet of violence of the entire sequence and can employ even a toilet roll to lyrical effect as the boys pass it back and forth like an unwinding basketball...
...The wife is afraid it will bite: EDWARD: Wasps don't bite...
...I happened to see the English staging at the Royal Court Theater in 1960...
...FLORA: What about horseflies?[Pause] EDWARD [to himself]: Horseflies suck...
...The characters never make statements that they consider funny...
...But Jones cannot leave it at that...
...and the ambiguities are primary data not to be resolved further...
...Easley's former husband and the father of her two daughters...
...The play is acted out, though...
...Pinter, then, means the plays to be accepted for what they are, what is given-no more, no less...
...Easley asks...
...Any preference...
...it has a desperate, panting sound...
Vol. 48 • January 1965 • No. 1
