Irish Classical Theatre Company (ICTC): Buffalo New York (NY) theatre company

Irish Classical Theatre Company (ICTC) at the Andrew’s Theatre, Buffalo NY

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There’s more to Buffalo than chicken wings, impressive architecture, and the birthplace of alternating current. OK, so that last one was big. Buffalo, a well-kept- secret-of-a-town, is also a theater town and the Irish Classical Theatre Company (ICTC) is largely the reason why. Started by Vincent O’Neill and the late Chris O’Neill in 1985, the ICTC puts Buffalo on the national map.

Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party is a linguistic feast for the absurd leaning heart. The complacent life of seaside boarding house owners Pety and Meg and their one overgrown baby-of-a-guest Stanley is disturbed when two strangers, McCann and Goldberg, come to collect Stanley. Somewhere in the middle they decide to throw Stanley a birthday party to die for— quite literally so, in the case of femme fatale Lulu who ends up possibly deceased at the end of Act II. Just so you don’t get too sure of yourself, Pinter brings Lulu back unharmed in Act III. Shards of a narrative form enough of a story to undermine the fact that at no point do we ever know what’s really happening in Pinter’s fractured world. Don’t get to comfortable; there’s nothing to hang your truth-seeking hat on whatsoever, although much will feel like the world-in-collapse at our door step.

Pinter is in good hands at the Irish Classical. Under Greg Natale’s keen direction, Pinter’s glorious games of pun and cliché soccer goes full throttle amping up the hilarity big time. (Yes, existentialists can be funny too.) Natale gives ample space and rhythm to the poetic banter that diffuses the pervasive sense that something catastrophic may occur at any minute. Otherwise, Natale keeps the pace brisk, building a momentum that stays true to Pinter’s all-encompassing climate of fear, impending doom, and the brutal unknown.

The cast—all superb—handle Pinter’s prose with care and delicacy. ICTC veteran Josephine Hogan’s cornflakes-for-brains Meg is off the charts on the daff-o-meter. Hogan’s perky timing in the opening sections sets the tempo for everything that follows. Her loopy optimism frames the play. Gerry Maher’s crusty portrayal of Petey, the clueless inn and lounge chair keeper, works like a balm amidst the building chaos. But it’s O’Neill’s slick but slimy Goldberg that creates the matrix for the entire production. He’s one sexy thug, possibly dying of some unnamed affliction (I’m going to guess a pesky bout of pancreatitis), out for one last caper. Guy Wagner as the tightly-wound sidekick, McCann, captivates in his highly precise moves and impenetrable stare. O’Neill and Wagner pound out the interrogation scene like a couple of practiced pros. The two are a study in contrasts, with the uptight McCann soothing himself by tearing paper as if he’s performing surgery and Goldberg’s rogue cowboy-with-a-past act. The bit when Goldberg asks McCann to breathe into his mouth lends a surprising touch of eroticism and Natale gives the scene its full glory.

Todd Benzin’s ticking-bomb Stanley is spot on and Leah Russo’s Lulu plays off the surrounding lunacy with saucy style. Benzin gives Stanley the full bloom of a disaster waiting-to-happen. Scott Behrend’s homey set contains just enough oddness to keep the off-kilter feeling strong. Suspended fragments of window frames made for a potent symbol of incompleteness. With Pinter, the unseen gets equal time with the seen.

So what should we make of Pinter’s subversive Birthday Party? Well, we could take the heady approach and pick up a copy of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and a good bit of Ionesco, Genet, Beckett, and Ablee and place Pinter in the cannon of The Theater of Absurd. Or not. There’s no need to be a card carrying existentialist to enjoy Pinter. He’s the most accessible (or at least tied with Albee) of the lot. By crafting his plays from the familiar, Pinter welcomes us in at any door we choose to enter. He lulls us with language we know and have spoken before he pulls the rug of our complacency out from under us. It’s one wild ride and the ICTC makes it fun and more than a bit disturbing. But isn’t that why we go to the theater?

O’Neill generously led a “question and answer as best I can” session afterwards. “Huh” type questions evolved into more authoritative interpretations. Pinter’s all about having perception complete the experience. That said, what better match to a steely cold Buffalo Sunday afternoon than a strong dose of well-produced Pinter.

- Nancy Wozny

Cast is the treat at 'Birthday Party'
By TED HADLEY
News Contributing Reviewer
1/15/2007

***-1/2 Stars (out of four)

Years after Harold Pinter's first full-length play, "The Birthday Party," received mostly hostile reviews, the British playwright told anybody listening that "I find critics on the whole to be a pretty unnecessary bunch of people."

Well, thanks a lot, Harold. It's a good thing that I'm not thin-skinned because, over the years, I've sat through many "Pinteresque moments," a term the playwright dislikes. Pinter's plays nearly all fall into the category of "comedies of menace," and I've written about them with, ultimately, a mix of admiration, wonder, praise and puzzlement, all the while finding myself in league with a Pinter friend and contemporary, David Hare: "You never know what the hell is coming next." Amen to that.

"The Birthday Party" bowed in 1957 and with it began the Pinter formula used in the body of work that earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005: Seemingly innocent situations, with ordinary, everyday people going about their business, suddenly turn sinister with the addition of "outside forces," a visitor or a subtle change in mundane habits. Perfectly sunny days can go instantly awry.

A case in point: Meg and Petey's run-down English seaside boarding house, with one tenant, troubled and reclusive Stanley, welcomes two new boarders, a Mr. Goldberg and a Mr. McCann. Stanley is suspicious. Who are these guys? What do they want? The two newcomers, spouting humble births and family values, begin immediately, albeit imperceptibly at first, their carefully planned assignment to intimidate, humiliate and crush Stanley, whose birthday it is according to the ditzy Meg. Audiences never learn if Stanley has been tracked down because of a past bad deed or is merely a random victim.

So begins the Irish Classical Theatre Company's revival of "The Birthday Party," a struggle for power and dominance, a story that starts out sweet and homey and, in typical Pinter fashion, goes bizarre in a heartbeat. Niceties give way to cryptic small talk. Pauses take on meaning and in silence there is threat. Goldberg and McCann verbally torture Stanley as language is suddenly layered and used as a weapon in a quick and repetitive cadence that is peculiarly poetic. There are bouts of rage, accusations and psychological abuses. Violence lurks. So much for a day at the shore.

Greg Natale directs for the company, skillfully building tension, poisoning the vernacular, turning the trivial nightmarish. He has the players to do this, of course, some experienced with Pinter, others new to the game: Journeyman actor Gerry Maher, Josephine Hogan, Todd Benzin - faultless here - Leah Russo, Vincent O'Neill and Guy Wagner, as the psychopathic suits. It's a wonderful cast, superbly directed.

Pinter was once asked what his plays were all about. He replied that they were about "the weasel under the cocktail cabinet." Because audiences leave plays like "The Birthday Party" with more questions than when they came in, that explanation suddenly doesn't seem so foolish or flippant or far-fetched.

A final note. Scott Behrend's set pieces, scattered over several areas, serve the play well.

Theaterweek
Harold Pinter at the Irish
by Anthony Chase, ARTVOICE

Vincent O'Neill as Goldberg, Todd Benzin as Stanley and Josephine Hogan as Meg in "The Birthday Party."

(photo: Larry Roswell)

THE BIRTHDAY PARTY

Drama critics of my generation were weaned on the work of Harold Pinter. We read and discussed his plays before we had read Chekhov. Our teachers had come of age with Pinter and such contemporary British playwrights as John Osborne, Tom Stoppard and David Storey. The covers of the trade paperback versions of these plays were well familiar to us while we were still in our teens; as familiar as the cover of the original mass paperback edition of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf from the same era. We had yet to see a single production of any of these scripts, but we could recognize the face of Vivien Merchant a mile away. Scenes from these sparse works, the offspring of Eugene Ionesco and T. S. Eliot, were ubiquitous in acting classes. We were entirely comfortable with the prolonged pauses and the ambiguities in these plays, and aware that we were a experiencing a rebellion from a post-war drama in which realism reigned supreme.

In the years since, the pendulum of style has swung back in a more realistic direction and the work of Pinter, Storey and such are performed with surprising infrequency. A play like Pinter’s The Birthday Party, now being performed by the Irish Classical Theatre Company at the Andrews Theatre, may seem peculiar to many in today’s audience. It might be worthwhile, then, to offer a bit more background explanation than might typically be warranted. Pinter is actually quite accessible. His raw material comes from the everyday world that surrounds us all.

The Birthday Party takes place in a mundane world where, at any moment, something horrible may happen. Petey and Meg are a middle-aged couple running a seaside boarding house. The thrill of the day is the morning corn-flakes and suspense over the announcement of the fried bread. They have just one boarder, Stanley, a nearly silent and anti-social recluse who fascinates Meg, who tries to regulate his life with regular meals, hours and incessant chat. The perfectly unbearable order of this setting is disrupted when mysterious Mr. Goldberg and Mr. McCann arrive. They seem to know Stanley and to have dangerous intentions regarding him. Stanley is in a near panic when he learns that Meg has planned a birthday party for him, and that Goldberg and McCann are invited.

Because the form of the narrative is distinct but the content is incomplete, it’s all a bit less lucid than this description might suggest. Pinter plays on the clichés of daily living and on the predictability of dramatic narrative in ways that both propel the action and thwart its logic. The birthday party scene is built on the familiar pattern of a suspense thriller as Goldberg and McCann become increasingly and inexplicably menacing. The following morning, Meg is peculiarly unable to recall the dreadful details, remembering only her supreme position as belle of the ball. Lulu, the attractive party guest who is a pawn in both the suspense plot and an overly familiar seduction plot, appears to have been killed at the party, but makes an appearance the next morning, angered but unharmed. Revealing their vague intentions, Goldberg and McCann march the beaten-down Stanley off to see a man named “Monty,” who will, we presume, force him to conform to a new set of clichés. Petey protests, to no avail. Stanley seems unable to exert his own free will.

In addition to building suspense on well worn codes of dramatic action, Pinter builds comedy from the layering of cliché upon cliché. These add up to a linguistic tour de force. In addition, Pinter exhibits a disregard for logic worthy of Oscar Wilde, as for example, when Lulu protests that sexual secrets have been revealed to her of which a woman should be unaware until she has been married several times.

Under the direction of Greg Natale, the Irish Classical Theatre production is headed by Gerry Maher and Josephine Hogan as Petey and Meg, with Todd Benzin as Stanley. Leah Russo plays Lulu, with Vincent O’Neill as Goldberg and Guy Wagner as McCann. It is a highly capable cast and each actor clearly defines a nuanced character.

The production is highly successful at extracting humor from Pinter’s script, less successful at navigating any sense of danger or dread. The assurance that nothing seriously bad can happen is, usually, the hallmark of a comedy. Not so in Pinter. So much threat lies in the ambiguities. Is this truly a comedy after all? Might it not be that life in culture is farcical, but tragic? This question lies at the heart of the Pinteresque.

This Birthday Party favors moments of clarity and glosses over Pinter’s absurd but well-worn sequences of action and his famous gaps of silence, depriving the production of a certain poignancy. On the other hand, the production does move briskly and has the pace and drive of a tour de force. Moments are irresistible and the overall impact is very memorable, indeed. I apologize if that sounds ambiguous. The opportunity to see a high quality production of this play is a privilege.

THEATER: "The Birthday Party" leaves viewers puzzled, amused

By Kevin Purdy

— The drive home, or the post-show cup of coffee with a companion, can be a bit awkward after witnessing a performance of Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party.”
You and the person sitting next to you have, ostensibly, just seen the same set of actors say the same set of lines. Yet after a few moments of conversation, the truth sets in that you haven’t seen the same play.
One could try to explain, but just describing the outlines of the play, set entirely in a run-down English boarding house, or praising the vigorous performances put on by the Irish Classical Theatre Company’s actors won’t help anybody understand exactly what “The Birthday Party” offers its audiences.
The play starts off in the joint kitchen-living room-dining room of Meg (Josephine Hogan) and Petey (Gerry Maher), a couple that gets by on Petey’s steadfast if meaningless job and Meg’s doting over a boarding house she continually reminds herself is “on the list.”
Their sole tenant, Stanley (Todd Benzin), has fallen into a routine of sleeping late, complaining about Meg’s attempts to ingratiate herself to him, remembering what could have been a promising career as a pianist and hardly ever getting out. Lulu (Leah Russo) shows a passing interest in him, but he can’t be bothered to take something as simple as a walk with her.
Enter Goldberg (ICTC artistic director Vincent O’Neill) and McCann (Guy Wagner), two men who supposedly need lodgings but, as far as anyone can tell, came with the sole intent of disrupting Stanley’s stupor. Self-assured and suave but with a hint of something gnawing at him from the past, Goldberg convinces Meg that having a “party” is the only way to celebrate what she thinks is Stanley’s birthday.
Words, confrontations, small actions and whispered menace drive the characters farther from where they started, and the distance from the end of the first act to the end of the second feels like the distance between two entirely different plays.
There is no “trick ending,” only the ending Pinter gives his characters after everything they’ve been through. After all is said — and all the characters are given some mighty intriguing, and often hilarious, things to say — the audience is left to marvel at how nothing amazing or spectacular at all could be the undoing of one man, many ways of life and just how many questions remain.
Director Greg Natale has built a tightly wound narrative on the black box stage, leaving enough room for the actors to fill out with their presence.

Photos

The Irish Classical Theatre Company's production of "The Birthday Party" continues through Feb. 11 at Buffalo's Andrew Theatre. Contributed photo

- Nancy Wozny

Theaterweek

Harold Pinter at the Irish

by Anthony Chase, ARTVOICE

THEATER: "The Birthday Party" leaves viewers puzzled, amused