Albee/Pinter
Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
Pacific Resident Theatre
Through Feb. 5
RECOMMENDED
In 1960, Edward Albee and Harold Pinter were young playwrights whose work challenged theatrical convention and the expectations of critics and audiences. Both Albee’s brief two-hander, Fam and Yam, and Pinter’s lengthier one-act, The Dumb Waiter, received English language premieres that year — Albee’s at the Music Box Theatre on Broadway and Pinter’s at the Hampstead Theatre Club in London.
Different in style and substance, each nonetheless harbors the influence of Samuel Beckett and an absurdist perspective which posits the human experience as, at best, uneasy, uncertain and unsettling.
Under the artistic direction of Marilyn Fox, Pacific Resident Theater’s current production is a packaging of these two plays, with the view to re-examining the early work of two now established literary icons, who have themselves become points of reference for younger writers.
Of the two, The Dumb Waiter, directed by Fox and Elina de Santos, is the more accomplished. The action takes place in a dim basement of an old rooming house with a malfunctioning loo (set design William Wilday, lighting Matt Richter) where the self-contained Ben (Anthony Foux) and the younger antsier Gus (Jason Downs) are hanging out as prelude to a job they’re assigned to do. Though we don’t see a gun (right away), we intuit that this task might be a criminal one. Humor abounds, bred into the characters and their reality-circumventing dialogue, but most intensely concentrated around a primitive dumb waiter contraption which descends from the floor above with a thonk! (sound, Christopher Moscatiello). Each time it arrives, it’s with a request for some culinary preparation (suggesting the room the men are inhabiting was once a kitchen for a café), ranging from something as simple as tea and toast to an elaborate gourmet meal. Instead of ignoring the messages, the men scramble madly to fulfill the orders, a metaphoric commentary on the engrained propensity of the British working class to conform to societal expectations.
Too often I’ve seen Pinter flubbed by American actors out of sync with the playwright’s singular rhythms and terse dialogue, but here both performers have the language well in hand; in tandem, they capture the disease of their characters’ predicament and Pinter’s dystopic vision.
The production’s curtain-raiser, Fam and Yam — acronyms for Famous American Man and Young American Man — is a relatively obscure work about an encounter between two playwrights: Fam (Brad Greenquist) who is affluent and renowned, and his visitor Yam (Downs) an up-and-comer with a play running off-Broadway, uninvitingly titled Dilemma, Dereliction and Death. Neither fellow is likable: Fam is vain, stuffy and condescending, while Yam is an unctuous flatterer worming his way into Fam’s good graces.
Sporting an undercurrent of acrimony, Fam and Yam struck me as more of a comedy sketch or blueprint for future development than a mature or polished dramatic work. But it has an interesting pedigree: Reportedly (by Mel Gussow) it was inspired by a 1950s interchange between Albee at the beginning of his career and William Inge, who is thought to have been dismissive of Albee’s work, much as Fam in the play is cavalier about Yam’s successful new production. (see Charles McNulty’s LA Times’ commentary https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2022-12-07/commentary-mysterious-edward-albee-play). Tellingly, this play was omitted from the three-volume edition of Albee’s collected plays published in 2007.
Director Fox seems to have deliberately opted for a broad style of performance; Greenquist’s Fam in particular teeters on caricature, unfortunately without the crispness that would make it effective. That Fox may have been striving for straight parody is reinforced by the musical interlude that accompanies the set change between plays, wherein the actors and movement choreographer Myrna Gawryn engage in a lively little dance while moving pieces of furniture. It reminded me a bit of the animated overture to a Pink Panther movie — in this case, an effort to add some tongue-in-cheek levity to these playwrights’ darker work.
Pacific Resident Theatre, 705 ½ Venice Blvd., Venice. Wed., 3 pm, Fri.-Sat., 8 pm, Sun., 3 pm; thru Feb. 5. https://pacificresidenttheatre.org/albee-pinter Running time: approximately 75 minutes with no intermission.
