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    Short North Stage and Wild Women Writing’s On the Edge Fills in the Shadow of Two Influential Playwrights

    You’d be hard-pressed to find two more influential playwrights of the 20th century than Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett. Katherine Burkman, a member of Wild Women Writing, is a professor emeritus at the Ohio State University and has focused much of her scholarship on Beckett and Pinter. Burkman is the guiding light – as director and actor – of this sampling of four shorter, lesser-known works by the playwrights presented in the Garden Theater’s Green Room in conjunction with Short North Stage.

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    The first half of the program is Pinter’s one-act, The Collection. Written in 1961, this play is a look at two couples, Stella (Colleen Dunne) and James (Stephen Woosley), and Bill (Nick Lingnofski) and Harry (Geoffrey Nelson), living in London. The question throughout is whether Bill and Stella slept together on a business trip in Leeds. The stage is divided between their two homes, allowing for parallel action to occur, echoing and amplifying the action and creating the impression of a wider world, still turning, with a minimum of flash or distraction. As in most Pinter, what happens is deeply important but not necessarily for the reasons you’d expect – the play’s not at all interested in whether or not Bill and Stella slept together or what the fallout of that question would be on the relationships.

    James is an archetypal “modern” man, almost an ur-Pinter character, wrapped up in and hungry to keep control but seething with insecurity, a churning ocean of rage and barbarism under the placid surface of civility and gentility. Woosley plays it with an interesting ambiguity; everything he’s trying not to say creases his face and runs through his shoulders. Bill, his foil and adversary, is the other side of the “rot” of contemporary society: conniving and hedonistic, blase about what happens next, and unconcerned with who his actions might hurt. Lingnofski takes a more cerebral approach here, but he sells it and he soars. When these two swaggering, symbolic creatures interact on the stage, everything is flinty and electric.

    Harry, often thought of as the best role in the play – he’s been played by Olivier and by Pinter himself – is society not quite ready to crumble yet. He still sets the rules and enforces order through a combination of tradition and charm and implied violence. Geoffrey Nelson is the perfect actor to play Harry; his take is a masterful look at the way empathy, in the wrong hands, can be a bludgeon and a stiletto. The sociopath’s erratic behavior isn’t nearly as dangerous as the man who understands why you do what you do and knows how to use it against you. His later speech, referring to Bill as a “slum slug” as he takes the narrative out of the hands of those directly involved, is pure virtuosity, a lesson in finding subtlety even in a hurricane, and every word hits like a hot nail.

    Colleen Dunne finds something interesting in Stella despite having almost nothing to do; it’s an indictment of the play that the woman is unimportant to what happens, but a tribute to her that she still creates an impression.

    The homo-eroticism of male dominance is suffused with peak-of-the-cold-war paranoia; every motion, every word, has the shadow of a mushroom cloud behind it. The use of colloquialism and misdirection hums and clicks with a rhythm that’s the most important character in the play. Not only is this an early flowering of Pinter’s interest in language as language and language as concealment – there’s a musicality, a swing, that everything would fall apart without. Burkman and the actors understand and project the music that’s the spine of The Collection.

    The second half of the evening begins with “Victoria Station,” a 10-minute play featuring a taxi driver (Nick Lingnofski), and his company’s controller (David Fawcett). The controller tries to get the driver to go to the eponymous station and the driver, through being deliberately obtuse, simply naïve, or on something, never goes there. It starts as a stoned, absurdist riff on a “Who’s On First” routine then spirals into something darker, including threats of horrific violence.

    The driver’s unwillingness to tether himself to the hamster wheel of ambition – the controller says about the fare, “He’s going to pay his last respects to an aunt about to give him all her plunder. If you play your cards right you might just come out ahead” – is infuriating to a man who’s always played by the rules, but also intoxicating. When the controller – and by extension, society – can’t get the driver to do what he says through the carrot or the stick, he becomes infatuated, suggesting they vacation together in Barbados, and even roars, “Nobody loves me.” It’s a fascinating tête-à-tête about the alienation of being stuck in a box of one thing or another all day, and how we escape that without ever really escaping. And it’s played beautifully – with so little physical action and such rapid-fire detached-from-reality dialogue, this relies heavily on the two actors, and Fawcett and Lingnofski are perfectly matched.

    Beckett’s Rockaby is the center of the second half and, for me, the highlight of the entire evening of theatre. Premiered in 1981 for a symposium celebrating Beckett’s 75th birthday, this play takes the central conceit of his masterpiece, Krapp’s Last Tape – an aging person taunted and confronted by their own voice on a recording. But Rockaby expands, in that the recording could very easily be the person’s mind, not a tape, and contracts, in that the voice is a disconnected, childish sing-song, not a literal recounting of events.

    Rockaby features a woman (Katherine Burkman), dressed impeccably in shades of black satin, crushed velvet, and glittering jewels. She sits in a rocking chair, harshly lit by a spotlight so sharp the flecks of dust in the beam are almost characters. Burkman’s recorded voice, echoing through the theater and enveloping her, recounts a life of monotony, a gray and joyless drone that circles around the line “Time she stopped,” but without giving a clear indicator if we’re to think that she stopped time, that it’s time she stopped hanging on, or that she keeps fixating on the times she stopped, the times she could not go on. As the voice winds down, three times in the play, Burkman mumbles along three or four words, including the “time she stopped” refrain, then shouts “More!” and the recording rises again as she resumes rocking. The inflection change as she progresses through shouting “More!” tells a parallel story of, alternately, resignation and raging against the dying light. These handfuls of spoken text melt against and are clouded by the sad finality of the narration, a burst of anger at life itself then back to the parallels between childlike understanding and the feeling of being treated like a child in the last years of life. Burkman’s performance, both in the chair and in the recorded text, is heartbreaking while avoiding cliché. This performance made the hair on my arms stand up – I was so intensely aware of the room and of life that I vibrated most of the way home.

    The one misstep in the night was the closing piece, the Pinter sketch “Night,” wherein a married couple recount a night soon after they met, sifting through their differing perceptions. It’s acted well by Susie Gerald and David Fawcett, but didn’t make an impression beyond not being as good as anything that went before. Maybe when this was originally produced it had a context that lifted it up, but for me, sentimentality isn’t a strong mode of Pinter’s and even the rhythms of his language don’t quite work here. It’s a leaden, unmusical version of the song “I Remember it Well” from Gigi and just hangs there after the invigorating, intoxicating work earlier. That said, if the only real complaint is those 5-10 minutes, I’m not mad about that.

    By eschewing the tent-poles of these writers’ respective oeuvres – no Homecoming, The Birthday Party, or Betrayal; no Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape, or Happy Days – the program looks at themes and techniques often deployed by both playwrights but on a smaller scale. The effect is not unlike seeing a show of Van Gogh’s or Picasso’s sketches. It creates an impression the audience has to work a little harder for, but one that’s unbound by what we think we know about works often invoked rather than discussed. On the Edge is a gem of modernist repertory work and, even with the quibbles mentioned above, should be seen by anyone in Columbus who loves theatre, late 20th century modernism, or both.

    On the Edge runs through March 15, with shows at 8pm Thursday-Saturday and 2pm on Sunday. For tickets and more information, visit Shortnorthstage.org.

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    Richard Sanford
    Richard Sanfordhttp://sanfordspeaks.blogspot.com/
    Richard Sanford is a freelance contributor to Columbus Underground covering the city's vibrant theatre scene. You can find him seeking inspiration at a variety of bars, concert halls, performance spaces, museums and galleries.
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