The Birthday Party
Now 50 years old, The Birthday Party is Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter’s first full-length and best known play. What it’s all about, exactly, is one of those things that has been bugging audiences and critics since it opened in London in 1958 - and then closed after only eight performances. After which it was declared a 20th-century classic.
The new Chicago production, by the Signal Ensemble Theatre at the Chopin Theater, isn’t likely to make the meaning any clearer, but it does give new audiences a chance to savor Pinter’s menacing ambiguity in an intimate space with a talented cast.
A very thoughtful print adjunct to the production is set up in the Chopin’s waiting room. It’s a set of bits and pieces written by and about Pinter and his work. In the Financial Times review of May 2, 1958 Derek Granger offers this insight into The Birthday Party:
Apart from a seaside ticket taker and a bare-legged floozy, all the characters seemed to me to be in an advanced state of pottiness or vitamin deficiency and quite possibly both.
That description fits the new production well enough. Petey the ticket-taker (Vincent L. Lonergan) and Lulu the bare-legged one (Leah Nuetzel) are properly normal in an abnormal context. Mary O’Dowd as boarding house owner Meg is wonderfully loopy. Goldberg (Will Schutz) and McCann (Philip Winston) are menacing oddballs. And Stanley, well done by Joseph Sterns, is by turns a schlemiel, a tyrant, a paranoid, and a victim, sometimes sympathetic, often not.
What the Granger review quote doesn’t convey is the sweaty uncomfortableness of The Birthday Party. Something is wrong, and you don’t really know what it is. Stanley, who may or may not be a professional pianist and whose birthday it may or may not be, is staying in a working class boarding house on the British coast when two sinister men from somewhere unclear come looking for him for foggy reasons. They turn his party into a nightmare.
In fact, the whole audience experience of The Birthday Party is of a sweaty dream, a kind of politics of personal paranoia, all vague hints and threats, a universe closing in. It’s like having a nervous breakdown from inside.
Sound like fun? The Signal cast and crew certainly have worked hard to make it fun. Melania Lancey’s literal scenic design and Anthony Ingram’s seaside sound design work together as a naturalistic universe that puts on display the familiar unreality of the place. The cast clearly worked a lot on their working-class British accents.
At first the accents annoyed me because the call-attention-to-it emphasis seemed to be lowering some kind of scrim between the play and me. Later on I changed my mind and decided the accents added a nice and needed comedic touch. After all, The Birthday Partytext is a comedy...isn’t it?
"The Birthday Party" is presented by the Signal Ensemble Theatre at the Chopin Theater, 1543 W. Division Av., Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 3 p.m. Tickets: 773-347-1350 wwwsignalensemble.com
