Moonlight

The Studio Theatre is assaying Harold Pinter's late (1993) and experimental play Moonlight (to 10/18) in a thoughtful production that combines high contrast with many shades of gray. Directed by Joy Zinoman with vocal and dramatic precision, Moonlight - performed in three separate spaces - has a nice flow, even if you're never certain of where it's heading. Deborah Booth's scenic design, combined with the lighting of Michael Philippi, sound of Gil Thompson, and Michael Gallant's original music - by degrees elegiac and new agey - give the show a post-apocalyptic look and feel. Starring Ted van Griethuysen, who you expect to be great (and he is), the rest of this well-cast production delivers surprisingly strong performances.

Ostensibly, this play is about the deathbed ruminations of Andy (Mr. Van Griethuysen) to his wife Bel (Sybil Lines); his inability to reconcile with his children Bridget (Libby Woodbridge), who may be dead, Jake (Anatol Yusef), and Fred (Tom Story); and their relationship with a married couple Maria (Catherine Flye) and Ralph (James Slaughter), with whom they may have had affairs (in Bel's case with both). All this works to some extent, but may leave you unfulfilled with no time to reflect, at the end of 70 minutes, without intermission.

Having now seen this play in two separate venues, I'm reminded of T.S. Eliot's line "We had the experience but missed the meaning." And after reading the script before and after the performance, I'm no closer to a conventional understanding of Pinter's work, so I'll go about it differently, for Eliot followed up his famous line with "And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different way."

One approach would be to view Moonlight as a collage. There are perhaps five separate pairs of realities being investigated: Andy & Bel's, the boys, Bridget's, and Maria and Ralph's, and the young children's, not to mention the individual worlds. And there are multiple time frames, points of view, and vocabularies that are being applied to the theatrical canvas. So you could view the play as a kind of an assemblage in which the parts lead to an emergent, unexpected property. Appreciation, if not creation, of collage requires a certain sensibility. Personally, I've never understood, much less truly appreciated a Robert Rauschenberg work, but many people do. There's perhaps a strange aesthetic response that can be garnered if you let your mind go; the unusual combinations and permutations do add up to a whole that's much greater than the sum of its parts.

Another view is that it's an existential mystery. Who can really know another person? Nothing should be taken at face value in a Pinter work and Moonlight is no different. It's presumed that Andy's dying, but is he really? He looked pretty good to me. Maybe he just decided to take to his bed; or he's set up a psychodrama; or Pinter is playing on the inevitable, for we are all dying to some degree, and those who are really on their way out, are already gone. Bel notes this, in fact, when she tells him "if you were dying you'd be dead." It's also assumed that Andy and Maria, Bel and Ralph, and Bel and Maria have all had affairs with one another. But where's the evidence? Someone says so, but can we believe him or her? The press announcement claims that Bridget is already dead, but since we begin and close the play with her voice, maybe she's the only one alive, everyone already has died, and the invitation she received at the end is to her own passing.

Moonlight was a popular success when it opened in London (it had been playing for about three months when I saw it) and a bust on Broadway and I think the initial reaction had a lot to do with the language. The play abounds in clichés, wordplay, officious posturing. The boys are involved in what can only be described as a folie à deux, while Bel and Andy are engaged in marital fisticuffs and reminiscences that are conventional to the point of caricature. The same could be said of Maria and Ralph. The Brits are fond of this type of humor; it's highly (and slyly) ironic, bitingly sarcastic, irreverent, and at times, plain silly, and it has a long history starting in vaudeville and continuing through with Monty Python and its pretenders. They revel in slapstick and farce and they've never met a pun they couldn't make or a pratfall (verbal or physical) they didn't take.

Half of the fun of comedy is in the anticipation; it's culturally conditioned to be sure, but it can also be acquired. Since more and more theater is moving east to west these days - just look at the Tony Awards if you have any doubt - and it seems that half of the plays mounted today have some sort of English accent - maybe it's time to join the party.

For clarity, if not entertainment, I would try staging the next production of Moonlight as more of a comedy, dropping the dark themes (except as they pertain to humor), and brightening the design. There should be no doubt about the comic element of the dialogue and the generative development of meaning; we - the playwright and audience, together with the cast - are making it up as we go. If that weren't feasible, I would pair Moonlight with another Pinter play, similar to what the Rep Stage did in 2007 with Two By Pinter: The Collection and The Lover.

The present show, however you interpret it (or not), is still a very good one. If you are a Pinter fan or have a sense of adventure, I can recommend it. Casting, direction, and design, including costumes of Helen Huang, who seems everywhere today, all pass muster; all the performances were very good to great; you may have to wait a number of years to see it again. And after 70 minutes, the night or day will still be young - no 3-hour, mind-numbing classic to contend with, leaving you emotionally and mentally spent. You may even have time to see another play!

Program notes; Very good, with dramaturg (Sarah Wallace) notes, playwright bio, and list of plays

Applause meter: Recommended, 3+ hands, Pinter fans won't want to miss

Photo credits: Scott Suchman