The Birthday Party

If you did not see this play at the Undermain Theatre, it's too late. It closed last night. I saw it on Friday. The play was good, but I did not find it as enjoyable as God of Carnage the night before. Much like modern art, it is a modern play and demands some thought and experience. It would have been better had I had the opportunity to see it more than once; I regret not being able to get there earlier in its run.

The Birthday Party is one of Nobel winner Harold Pinter's early plays, and it typifies his "comedy of menace" works. The play is set in a seaside boarding house in England, run by an older couple (Meg and Petey Boles). Stanley is their only boarder. One day, two men come to the boarding house, apparently looking for Stanley. They tell the couple that it is Stanley's birthday (which he later denies), setting the stage for an oddly tense and off-kilter birthday party that night. Goldberg and McCann appear to be organized-crime figures of some sort, and Stanley fears them from the start, but the exact story behind their collective presence never becomes clear. Rather, the play focuses on the immediate relationships between the characters, and how they evolve under stress.

As has been my experience at the Undermain in the past, the actors all did an excellent job with their roles. Bruce DuBose, who I last saw in Beckett's Endgame, is quite good as Goldberg - suave, deceptive, callous, and menacing. Marcus Stimac was also good at the somewhat more thuggish McCann. His menace is of the somewhat more direct variety, combined with unpredictablility and obtuseness. I have seen him in a couple of different roles with Shakespeare Dallas. Gregory Lush does an excellent job as Stanley, by turns intimidated and rebelling against it. Driven by both cowardice and anger, he is the foil against which the other characters play (for the most part). As the Boles, Mary Lang and T. A. Taylor do a good job protraying a down to earth English couple. They do not always know what is going on, but they carry on. Lulu has proably the fewest lines of the six characters, but Katherine Bourne hits it perfectly. As a young woman in a shifting emotional landscape, she is protrayed very well. I look forward to seeing more of Ms. Bourne in the future.

I will be looking to see another version of The Birthday Party when I can. This one was enjoyable, but it definitely bears watching again.

Next up for the Undermain is a staged reading of a portion of Ulysses at the Dallas Museum of Art on Bloomsday, June 16th. I plan to be there.