'Party' Provokes Emotion

Though it boasts perhaps the most innocuous title in the history of theatre, Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party” is certainly not an average five-year-old’s affair. Devoid of any balloons, streamers, or happy children, Pinter’s play is a dark, existentialist work exploring the madness of human nature lurking just below a superficially harmless exterior. “The Birthday Party” will be on show in the Loeb Expository Theatre from April 3-11.

“The Birthday Party” premiered in 1958 and is Pinter’s most critically acclaimed play. The story revolves around the terrorization of Stanley Webber, a failed pianist who lives in a rundown boarding house owned by Meg and Petey Boles, to all appearances a bland couple. The trio seem at first to get along splendidly, displaying a mix of familial and flirtatious affection. But these early moments are merely a foil to those that follow the arrival of the rest of the cast. The play shifts tone dramatically with the arrival of Lulu, Stanley’s younger interest, and an ominous duo, Goldberg and McCann, who plan a birthday party for Stanley. As the play progresses, dialogue disintegrates and the plot devolves into disorder.

Despite its grave nature, however, the play—which is billed somewhat paradoxically as a “comedy of menace”—also promises moments of hilarity. “In some ways it’s actually hilarious… I’m hoping that everyone else also finds it funny,” says Eve H. Bryggman ’10, who plays Meg.

This particular production of “The Birthday Party” seizes upon Pinter’s vision of portraying the fine line between ennui and nightmare. “In conceiving the production, my goal was essentially to make it as Pinteresque as possible,” writes Matthew C. Stone ’11, the play’s director, in an email. As a result, this production foregoes unnecessary embellishment in order to greater emphasize the raw power of the original screenplay’s dialogue.

“[‘The Birthday Party’] is not a play with a message, and it’s not about abstract ideas,” Stone writes. “If you stage it right, there’s no need to try to convey something—the ambiguities in the play lead the audience to infer their own meaning, which, to me, is a much more powerful and engaging experience. This is a play that speaks for itself, so I haven’t tried to embellish, impose, or overdo anything. That would just kill it.”

Lacking an entirely coherent plotline, “The Birthday Party” relies on evoking emotion, rather than enjoyment, from the audience. Even the set design is minimalist. The stage features only walls on wheels, which move increasingly closer to each other as the play progresses. As with most absurdist dramas, “The Birthday Party” eschews a set in order to maintain focus on the dialogue between actors, thus relying on the cast’s abilities. “We are so lucky to have an incredibly talented cast who is totally capable of handling the challenging material,” writes Morgan L. Mallory ’10, one of the play’s producers, in an email.

Around the time Pinter was writing the screenplay for “The Birthday Party,” other playwrights who were proponents of absurdist theatre—such as Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett—were also exploring theater’s possibilities by rejecting conventions such as sequential time patterns and logical dialogue. “The Birthday Party” is part of a movement in the history of theatre which embraces the absurd, and in turn, seeks to unsettle the audience by disorienting them with a menacing and horrifying atmosphere.

“We are expecting a sense of confusion from the audience… because even we have a sense of confusion [about the play],” says Bryce J. Gilfillian ’12, the Assistant Stage Manager. “No one can precisely say what Pinter is attempting to achieve with ‘The Birthday Party,’ but in a sense that only adds to the intellectual fun of the experience.”