Keeping faith with Pinter

Gretchen Egolf and Alan Cox in Betrayal.  Photos: T. Charles Erickson.

A year or two ago, after several failed Pinter productions at the ART and elsewhere, I wondered aloud, "Is Pinter still possible?"  It seemed to me then that pop culture's absorption of this playwright's menacing comic tone had fatally undermined his dramatic impact - or rather, had swallowed up his acid irony in the new, glib, millennial mode of "irony."

Since then, however, I've seen one or two productions (all by women) which have demonstrated that the famous Pinter pause can still conjure something of its old power - just in a new, more poignant key; and that the playwright's disturbing ellipses can still unsettle even a millennial audience that is quite sure it has all the answers.  In short, the chill may be gone, but the thrill can still be there.

Or at least that's what fascinates about the new Huntington production of Betrayal, as subtly directed by Maria Aitken.  It's probably the warmest piece of Pinter I've ever seen; and yet it delivers in spades on the playwright's questing, unstable subtext.  Indeed, for once, during it the Huntington audience was clearly at sea - in a good way: you could feel them trying to piece something together that wasn't at all what it appeared to be on the surface.  Thus the theatre grew more and more quiet as the drama progressed (or rather regressed; it mostly moves backward in time) - only this was the silence of mental absorption, not boredom.  It has been said that art is supposed to be about questions, not answers; it was nice to see the Huntington had realized this concern lies at the very heart of Pinter.

A word more about Aitken; we've seen a lot of her work at the Huntington - and I'm quite, quite glad.  After a false start with the clever but superficial 39 Steps, she revealed sudden interpretive depths with Educating Rita (of all things), and since then has only gone from strength to strength with two more British dramas (a wonderful Private Lives preceded Betrayal).  Three stylish, fully imagined productions in a row - there may be no other Boston director who can currently make that claim.

But I want to note something special about Aitken and her oeuvre - it has mostly been composed of works with lead roles she has already performed herself (in a distinguished acting career), or by authors with whom she has had a working relationship (like Pinter).  There's nothing at all wrong with this - indeed, it's a type of directorial career I very much admire (the great Brian Bedford, up in Canada, has had a similar artistic trajectory).  I call these folks legacy directors - they clearly mean to hand the torch on to the next generation, while the academy (which should be doing that job, of course) fusses with this or that -ism or trend. Would there were more like Ms. Aitken!

The betrayers of Betrayal - Pinter and Joan Bakewell.

Which isn't to say that her Betrayal doesn't have an intriguing and original spin.  As I mentioned, it's far warmer than most; it's clearly sourced from within the experience of its female protagonist, "Emma" (here played by the luminous Gretchen Egolf).  This is in and of itself actually remarkable, as Pinter-land has long been assumed to be a masculine province.  But Pinter's no Mamet: great female roles exist in his work, and now Aitken has demonstrated that Betrayal (along with, I'd argue, Old Times and The Homecoming) is open to a fresh, feminine perspective.

The tale the playwright tells, of course, is one he knows from experience: Betrayal delineates one of the adulteries (with Joan Bakewell, interviewing the author above left, during their long relationship) that he was notorious for during his marriage to the actress Vivien Merchant - who, we seem to have forgotten, did not actually survive her husband's infidelities: after her divorce from Pinter she sank into alcoholism, and was dead within two years, at age 53 (their son, Daniel, disavowed his father and even changed his name after his mother's death; you can still see the wonderful Merchant, btw, in the film version of The Homecoming, and Hitchcock's Frenzy).

But Betrayal was written during the emergence of another Pinter affair (with Lady Antonia Fraser, whom he eventually married), the one that "officially" broke up his marriage, and became "permanent."  Thus it's quite apropos that broken dreams of domesticity and commitment - the ghost of what Joan Bakewell might have been, if you will - should haunt the play; although the sturdy and very successful Ms. Bakewell is still very much with us, in case you're wondering, and seems to have been hardly crushed by the collapse of this particular romance -indeed, she has even consulted on productions of the script, as you can read here.

The betrayals mount in Betrayal - Gretchen Egolf and Mark H. Dold

So the ruefulness and emotional wreckage that Betrayal charts are probably Pinter's, and not his paramour's.  No matter; Ms. Egolf eloquently channels the devastation (whoever experienced it in real life) as the various betrayals - of love, of friendship, even of adultery itself - are revealed in Pinter's haunting, back-and-forth narrative. And she's almost matched by Mark H. Dold as her cuckolded (but himself unfaithful) husband, "Robert"; Dold has the right hawk-like demeanor for the part, and hints, particularly in the famous "Torcello" scene (above), at a ruthlessly suppressed tragic depth.  My one caveat about his performance - and perhaps about the production generally - is that the edge of cruelty I feel Pinter intends for Robert is never quite made forceful enough (he "jokes" in one scene about actually striking his wife, and we should feel somehow that's no joke).

Perhaps a small step further behind is Alan Cox's adulterous "Jerry"(who betrays not only his wife but his best friend), even though Cox is experienced at Pinter; but even his is a skillful, if perhaps too light, performance, and closes with a memorable outburst of true feeling and affection - which we realize, in a brilliant coup de théâtre conjured by Aitken and designer Allen Moyer - will prove the font of all the heartbreak to follow.  But then that may be what is most mature about this late Pinter opus (the last - and frankly perhaps the least - of his "great" plays): its adult awareness of the way in which the better and lesser angels of our nature often fly hand-in-hand.

One last note on the striking design of the production (this is a play which is quite a challenge in design terms, btw).  The Huntington's stellar sets have actually become, in some circles, almost a kind of aesthetic albatross flapping around its neck (as in "Oh, of course the set was wonderful, they always do incredible sets at the Huntington, but as for the production itself . . . ").  But Mr. Moyer's design is one example of a set that does not merely dazzle, but works as metaphor for both the themes and history of the play.  A lynchpin of Pinter's technique is the telling detail (even if it's merely a sudden silence), and its relation to an unstable, or unknowable, power struggle, or past life; thus at the Huntington, scenes end with scrims "closing down," like the iris of a lens, on a single facet of the set - and the settings themselves float in a kind of pale studio, a twilight zone whose true nature and location remains forever unknown (and which inevitably recalls the television studios where Bakewell and Pinter first met).  Frankly these brilliant strokes, like so much else in this remarkable production, seem absolutely perfect for Pinter.

The Play That Wasn't There, or: Are We Pinter Yet?

Rebecca Harris, Dennis Parlato, and Jay Ben Markson in Mrs. Whitney.  Photos: Meghan Moore.

With John Kolvenbach it always seems to be "one step forward, two steps back."  This prolific playwright keeps getting produced, and so I keep getting exposed to him.  And I keep being mystified by the fact that he keeps getting produced, and that I keep getting exposed to him.

Or at least I felt that way until I saw Love Song, which Orfeo Group did last summer, and which had at least one great idea, and some sharp writing, to recommend it.   Love Song also sang with something like a theme - call it "romantic autism," or "relationship autism," if you will - that I suddenly realized had been a component of everything I'd been seeing by Kolvenbach all along.  This playwright seems obsessed with relationships that are in the end impossible because of the perceptual or emotional deficits of his characters; what made Love Song so witty was that it turned this gap on its head; the play's romantics learned to conduct the most passionate of affairs with themselves, and their own fantasies - indeed, it turned out the script's central love object wasn't even there.

So I actually began to think - you know, maybe there is something to this guy after all.

But now I've sat through Mrs. Whitney (which closes this weekend up at Merrimack Rep), and I think I'm ready to throw in the towel again on Mr. Kolvenbach, even though in some ways Mrs. W. counts technically as a step forward for him.  He does juggle more characters here than he has previously, and attempts to connect to a longer timeline, while conjuring an unstable sense of the past; he's trying to expand his range.

And yet at the same time a kind of playwriting autism seems to be afflicting him; for his superficial new accomplishments in Mrs. Whitney are all undermined by deep dramatic lacunae - that's a fancy word, btw, for voids.  As in empty spaces.  Vacuums.  We leave this play, in fact, never quite comprehending what it has been about, or whether it was even intended to be about anything at all.

Which, yes it has occurred to me, may be the larger point.  Is Mrs. Whitney actually a huge conceptual-art gambit, one whose clever surface conceals the fact that it is actually another "show about nothing"?  I often pondered this during the course of the performance at Merrimack (which seemed obsessed with actory surface, btw), and I got the feeling it had also occurred to Campbell Baird, the production designer, as he'd built a cheery winter homestead out of plastic and drapes, with fake snow on the windowpanes and holes in the walls opening onto - well - black, empty voids.  This house isn't really here, the set all but screamed, because these people aren't really here, just like their relationships aren't really here - because this play isn't really here.

So if that was your intent, Mr. Kolvenbach - to write a play that wasn't really there - then congratulations!  You have succeeded!   You have expertly shrink-wrapped a good deal of clever dialogue around absolutely nothing at all (except possibly denial).  Oh, I know there are things that seem to be here, like - well, alcoholism; and infidelity; and lost love and loneliness and despair.  But none of those things are actually there, are they.  No, I'm quite sure they're not.

The only question for me is - do you think they're there?

Ah, perhaps there's the rub.  For I'm afraid there's at least one other explanation for Mrs. Whitney.  The first is that John Kolvenbach has brought off a brilliant aesthetic illusion.  The second, however, is that he just doesn't realize he has left out everything that counts about a play.  And I admit that when I learned Mrs. Whitney was actually the second part of dramatic diptych (the first play of the duo is called Goldfish), I did begin to lose faith in that first explanation!  For in interviews Kolvenbach has actually opined that Mrs. Whitney was written to further explore the background characters of Goldfish.  And in the Merrimack program, he muses that his script "is a comedy.  About heartbreak."  Okay, but he goes on: his  plays are "scored," he explains; the empty spots in the script "serve the same purpose as the lines in the play . . . they convey information . . . the audience will only receive the play if the music is in place.  The plays should sing."

Oh, no.  Oh, shut up John Kolvenbach.  Please shut up.  Because all that makes the conceptual gambit explanation a little hard to swallow.  I mean . . . you don't really think you're some sitcom Pinter, do you?  That your gaps and lacunae operate with some sort of resonant mystery?  Oh, no.

But - oh well!! I'll go through the set-up of the drama anyway, and let people decide for themselves.  We meet the eponymous Mrs. Whitney (Dierdre Madigan, at left) just after Christmas, when she's brooding on her empty nest (her daughter is now grown, and AWOL).  We sense that we're entering the scene after some sort of crisis (Gap #1), but we've no idea what it might be (my advice is: check the script of Goldfish).

At any rate, there's a neighbor on hand, Francis (Joel Colodner) who is eager to make her less lonely, but she sets her eye instead on the former Mr. Whitney, whom she divorced for very good reasons something like two decades ago.  We have reason to doubt Mrs. Whitney's judgment on this score, of course - just as  we have some reason to doubt her judgment on everything.  We get the impression, in fact, that we may have caught her in the middle of drinking herself to death (she actually orders Francis to take the food he has brought her out of the house and leave it in the snow).  But then again - maybe not; she certainly seems to be entirely in hand, indeed, she's a model of crisp, ironic control.  Hence - Gap #2:  What's up with Mrs. Whitney?

But onward.  Mrs. W. pursues the former Mr. W. to the aforementioned cheery homestead, where the current Mrs. Whitney (Rebecca Harris) is waiting to brain her absent husband - or whoever walks through the front door - with a shot glass.  It seems that Mr. Whitney has gone missing, as he often does - indeed, it seems one key reason why all the various Mrs. Whitneys (there have been four or five, I can't quite remember exactly how many) have left this serial divorcer is that he's simply often missing. (Hmmmmm.)  Why he goes missing is unclear - although he seems to be on the wagon now, so maybe his absences have been alcoholic benders; or maybe they were meant to prevent him from going on alcoholic benders (that was Gap #3, btw, and probably Gap #4; are we Pinter yet?).

Now taken together, these various vacuoles do suggest some sort of thematic profile that (normally) a playwright might be interested in exploring.  But not Kolvenbach.  He keeps his 'action' - essentially a zillion variations on denial - humming, that's for sure - Mr. Whitney shows up, the current Mrs. Whitney walks out, the previous Mrs. Whitney moves in, etc., while Fin, a forlorn son of Whitney by some previous Whitney, tramps in and out, cracking mighty wise.  There's a short diversion with Francis, which of course comes to nothing.  There's a hint that Mrs. Whitney actually has completed her emotional mission, perhaps unawares, by connecting briefly with Fin - but if you blink, you miss this.  By now you can almost hear the clock ticking . . . will the playwright make it past 90 minutes without actually revealing anything?  Hurrah!  He does, and the script can end - with a restatement of its opening line; the whole pointless exercise has been circular - get it?

Yes, we get it.  But to answer my rhetorical question - no, we're still not Pinter.  You see, in Pinter (and Beckett, and any number of other absurdists)  the mysterious gaps around which the action revolves seem to expand as we watch; the lacunae grow in significance, because the playwright is steadily delineating their form and pressure; statements about faith, and power, and knowability are ultimately made - just indirectly.  But no such luck in Kolvenbach.  He seems to think that simple denial is theatrical subject enough.

And it ain't.

Still, you do get to enjoy some finely wrought superficiality at Merrimack; this theatre pulls in the best actors from all over, and they've wasted some fine ones on Mrs. Whitney.  I'll say this much; Kolvenbach can write banter; everybody in the play speaks with the same self-aware, sitcommy voice, but these actors make at least their jokes sing. As the heroine, Deirdre Madigan was all tart/bitter wisdom masking - well, something, but who knows what; despair?  Self-hatred?  Your guess is as good as mine, but at least she's dry as a good martini.  There was an arguably even sharper turn from Rebecca Harris as the fourth or fifth Mrs. W. - we last saw Ms. Harris being equally good in Kolvenbach's godawful Fabuloso; please, please can we see this fine actress in something other than John Kolvenbach?  Rounding out the cast, Jay Ben Markson gave a precise spin to Fin's one-liners, Joel Colodner did what he could with Francis, and Dennis Parlato remained likably, knowingly poised while revealing absolutely nothing of himself (of course) as Whitney.  I'm not sure what to make of Kyle Fabel's emotionally under-realized direction; I guess that's what the play called for, but still - that's kind of the problem, isn't it.  Sigh.  And I notice that yes, the Merrimack has programmed another John Kolvenbach for next season.  Which I think is evidence of a certain lacuna in the decision-making of this normally reliable theatre!  But who knows - perhaps the next Kolvenbach will be another Love Song.  At any rate, the mystery continues . . .

Deirdre Madigan and Jay Ben Markson actually connect, briefly, in Mrs. Whitney.

Joe Lanza, John Kuntz and Michael Balcanoff in The Caretaker.

The Nora Theatre's current production of The Caretaker (through November 1 at the Central Square Theater) is in many ways a worthy piece of work. Director Daniel Gidron has (wisely) decided not to attempt to "update" the play that first brought Harold Pinter international attention; indeed, within the production's budget, Gidron and his designers seem to have attempted to replicate as faithfully as possible the circumstances of Great Britain in 1959, the year of the drama's debut. The accent work in the production may be only adequate, but it's still good enough to not distract; and the acting (particularly by John Kuntz) is thoughtful and detailed, and at times quite absorbing.

Yet despite all the care taken with The Caretaker, the mysterious sense of unknown danger that once defined Pinter - and which I am old enough to remember from productions I saw in the 70's - has gone missing from this version. And the Nora is hardly alone in its inability to conjure that once-famous atmosphere of threat. The A.R.T.'s No Man's Land from two seasons ago felt similarly flat, and its Birthday Party from a few years before that had been faintly ridiculous. Other, smaller local productions that I've seen in recent years - of One for the Road, or The Lover, for instance - have been similarly threat-free. Indeed, as I watched The Caretaker I realized that I hadn't felt a classic Pinterian chill from a new production in perhaps two decades; you might have to go all the way back to the late 80's, and the Huntington's production of The Birthday Party, to sense the playwright's old black magic. And this issue couldn't be laid at the feet of directorial interference; true, at the A.R.T. director JoAnne Akalaitis had essentially parodied The Birthday Party, but other recent productions had been quite seriously conceived, and Daniel Gidron clearly intended this Caretaker to be as close an approximation to the original production as possible. (Indeed, a clip from the original film, below, reveals that even it is none too disturbing today.)


A sequence from the 1963 film of The Caretaker, with Donald Pleasance and Alan Bates.

So is Pinter "dated"? And if so, why? And how might his seemingly lost immediacy be recaptured?

Of course what's clear at once about Pinter is that if he is dated, it's due to his incredible success and influence. Listening to The Caretaker, in fact, I was struck again and again by how his voice has become the lingua franca of so much pop culture. Saturday Night Live appeared just as his output began winding down, and its skits were often rife with light, dumbed-down riffs on his central tropes. Then came Quentin Tarantino, whose dialogue is essentially a drive-in-movie version of Pinter's comedy of menace, re-fitted with fresher pop references (and goosed along by literal threats of torture and rape). But a funny thing happened to the Theatre of the Absurd once Quentin Tarantino and Lorne Michaels got their hands on it: it went meta, and lost its powers of critique.

But then today we don't have "irony" anymore; we have meta-irony instead. The ironic stance is no longer a challenge for an audience - rather it's an escape hatch. Culturally we're all channel-surfers, no longer embedded in the consensus that Pinter was savaging in 1959; belief in God, normative heterosexuality, the oppressions of bourgeois capitalism, the threatening police state - to today's audiences, all these things are essentially avoidable via the all-too-aptly-named "remote." And "irony" is the knowing lubricant by which we slide past each other in what remains of our cultural meeting-places.

The problem for Pinter's legacy is that while his manner has become ubiquitous, nothing coherent has replaced his initial target. Thus his stance has become comforting rather than disturbing - indeed, the audience I saw The Caretaker with responded warmly to the bizarre non-sequiturs of the leather-jacket-clad Mick, who rattles on about interior decorating while hinting at violence. The character's dislocations of meaning were funny and familiar; we took him as one of us, our theatrical avatar.

And we do so because we no longer identify with Pinter's benighted victims, but instead feel secure in our superiority to them as they grope around (sometimes literally) in the cultural dark. Unlike them, we're sure of our powers of control over our separate lifestyle-niches; if worse comes to worst, we don't have to grapple with existential questions, we can simply go shopping for a new identity.

Against this deeply cynical, but utterly self-amused alienation, Pinter has little or no power. Indeed, what's striking about his current cultural position is that the playwrights he was thought to replace, like Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan, have seen a renaissance in interest, as their durable virtues match well to a certain nostalgic demographic. In a word, the well-made play is hot, the Theatre of the Absurd is not.

But how to restore Pinter's former potency? Ah, there's the rub; the decline of "monoculture" may have dealt a greater blow to the absurdists and existentialists than it has to the bourgeoisie (which, in case you haven't noticed, is flourishing). And so far, at least, no one has managed to crack the carapace of self-satisfaction one senses in our Gen-Y "glibertarians" - they're not shivering in some Beckettian wasteland, struggling with the bleak truths of the absurdists; they are, instead, snug as bugs in their respective digital rugs. And the idea of using absurdity to attack their own assumptions strikes most of them as, well, simply absurd; indeed, their strategy of simultaneous disconnection from, yet accommodation to, the social and political world may make them all-but-impervious to theatre as a mode of communal critique. Thus any clear-eyed observer must inevitably face the underside of all those calls to draw more young people into the theatre: if we do so, we may inevitably compromise what theatre still, just barely, is.

Of course all's not quite lost, and even this production of The Caretaker offered some insights into how Pinter's legacy might be kept alive. The production's central problem lay in the performance of Michael Balcanoff, as the tramp who tries to destabilize, but then is victimized by, the power relationship between two mysterious brothers (Joe Lanza and John Kuntz). Balcanoff was a convincingly scruffy, homeless gentleman, but was unable to insinuate much in the way of either seedy subservience or indeterminate identity. He was a bit better once his own sense of power began to inflate, but as a particularly destabilizing form of Pinterian threat, he still fell short. Likewise, Joe Lanza brought little sense of sadism to the preening, malicious Mick, although he did, as expected, make the character's long flights of fancy quite funny. It was John Kuntz who made the production memorable, even if at first his take on the brain-damaged Aston was almost too recessed to be truly theatrical. But in his long solo in the second act, in which Aston recalls how he came to be so mentally impaired (unlike Beckett's Lucky, Aston's mind was violated, a key difference between Pinter and his great mentor), Kuntz was superb - quietly, but meticulously, intense. And briefly, the cold fires within the play flickered to life.

Acid dreams

Mrs. Barker (Kelly Rauch ) gets comfy in The American Dream.

It seems in Boston these days you have to go off the grid to find a theatre willing to tackle plays of real intellectual challenge. Our larger houses are currently diddling with the likes of Rock 'n' Roll or The Santaland Diaries, so it's comforting to see that companies on the fringe are still risking their rent checks on truly edgy (if older) material like Albee's The American Dream and Pinter's One for the Road, presented through this weekend by Theatre on Fire at the Charlestown Working Theater.

And if this double bill isn't quite a dream come true, Theatre on Fire's effort is still a provocative and engrossing take on two plays that haven't lost their power to trouble (and even shock) the conscience. Indeed, what's interesting about this twofer is how even though you couldn't call them cutting-edge (there's nothing formally new in the Pinter, and the Albee has already inspired a thousand skits on Saturday Night Live), they nevertheless still cut deep. Not much has really changed, it would seem, in our alienated national psyche since the 1961 premiere of Dream. And of course torture, the topic of One for the Road, never really took root in American soil until the Bush administration (and if you're confident the incoming president is going to change all that, you may want to think twice).

It is, of course, this rise in American sadism that provides a rough correspondence between Dream and Road - Albee reveals the essential emptiness of American life, and Pinter muses on what would eventually fill that vacuum. Still, the two operate in very different modes, and Theatre on Fire proves most at home with the bald satire of Dream. Albee described his play as ""an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, emasculation, and vacuity; it is a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen." And all that's pretty relevant today - American life still isn't peachy-keen, and more than ever consists of ritualized seduction, competitive consumption and violence, disguised by mores and "morals" that still ring hilariously hollow.

Thus "Mommy" and "Daddy" in The American Dream are first seen in an absurdist theatrical space borrowed from Ionesco, sunnily enjoying their own vapid contentment; a hot topic is the difference between the colors "beige" and "wheat" (although in the witty set design, most everything, including the characters, is white). They're soon joined by an even more aggressively self-satisfied neighbor, Mrs. Barker, the president of the local ladies' club, who's more than happy to strip off her clothes (above) if she's asked politely. There's only one fly in all this honeyed ointment - the cantankerous, truth-telling Grandma, whom Mommy and Daddy are hoping to bundle off with "the Van Man." But it isn't long before Albee is grafting these caricatures onto his own life story - Mommy and Daddy once had a secret adopted son (Albee was just such a child), whom they found unsatisfactory as a product, and so essentially tortured to death. But his replacement is just over the horizon - the hunk whom Grandma immediately recognizes as "the American Dream": handsome, hot, eager to please, and as empty as his admirers. The play ends on an upbeat note (of sorts), with Grandma's escape, and everything even dreamier at home than it ever was before.

Theatre on Fire's Artistic Director Darren Evans generally knew how to keep Albee's bitter laughs coming, although he may have pitched this dystopic vision at slightly too high and arch an angle (Mommy in particular, I think, given the tales surrounding Albee's adoptive mother, should be a crueller force to be reckoned with). Still, within those limits, there was smartly poised work here from Christine Power as Mommy and Kelly Rauch as Mrs. Barker, while Ann Carpenter got in her hearty licks as Grandma. I had more doubts, however, about Terrence P. Haddad's perversely blank American Dream; this blatant symbol (in a playpen of blatant symbols) should still operate as something of a character, sniffing out the opportunities in his new environment, and only slowly revealing that beneath his Marlboro Man exterior, there's no "there" there. But Mr. Haddad played the role as a void from the get-go, which I think subtly undercut Albee's climax.

Similar interpretive problems sometimes dogged the more problematic One for the Road. The piece, written as a cri de coeur against American-sponsored torture in the developing world, depends on a charismatic, densely-layered performance in the central role of "Nicolas," the cultured torturer toying between sessions with his abused victims (Pinter took the part himself on several occasions, to great acclaim). But in this admittedly challenging role, the talented Jeff Gill (at left, with Craig Houk) connects with the material only intermittently, perhaps due to the way director Evans has styled the piece.

Hard as it may to believe, One for the Road, like all Pinter, is a veiled power game, even if torture victims would seem at first blush to be utterly powerless. But Pinter's great insight is that within the consciousness of the torturer, who has, of course, unleashed the unspeakable within himself, they have accrued a moral power as great as his own cruelty, and thus pose a terrible psychological challenge. Evans (and Gill), however, concentrate on the superficial horrors of Pinter's exchanges - through which we glean hints of what, exactly, has been done to chief victim "Victor" and his family. This certainly sends shivers up and down the audience's collective spine, but the warped interior of "Nicolas," with its self-righteous core ("I'm making the world clean for God!" he insists) streaked with eroticism and sudden veins of panic, remains largely unlimned. Likewise, Craig Houk, while essaying Victor's terror and abused psyche expertly, never quite captures the victim's growing attempts to understand, and even battle, his captor. This gap is understandable, perhaps, but really too bad - it would have been nice to pair an American dream with an American mirror.