Playwright: Harold Pinter. At: Strawdog Theatre, 3829 N. Broadway St. Phone: 866-811-4111;$28. Runs through: Nov. 12
There are an infinite number of ways to interpret any one of Harold Pinter's enigmatic actors' exercises, especially those centering on sexual dynamics, but Kimberly Senior may be the first director in these parts to see in this popular who-done-what overtones of the kind of game played by the bored spouses in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The action is straightforward enough: long-married Deeley and Kate live quietly by the seaside. Deeley leaves home occasionally on some unnamed business, while Kate keeps pretty much to herself. Tonight, however, they are hosting Kate's chum from her single yearsAnna, whose glamorous life in Italy is the very opposite of Deeley and Kate's placid existence. As the evening progresses, and the brandy and reminiscences begin to flow, Deeley becomes increasingly jealous of the quasi-sapphic camaraderie that Anna claims to have shared with his wife in their bachelorette days. His insecurity finds expression in his own memories of having been involvedrather cavalierlywith both of the women during the period under scrutiny, to which Anna retaliates in kind, warning him, "There are things one remembers even though they may not have happened, but as I recall them, so they take place."
So what did happen 20 years ago? Who dumped whom? Who picked up whom on the rebound? Did somebody die and is one of the people in the room now a ghost? Are these three characters sincerewhether factually or subjectivelyin their accounts of events, or are they fabricating fantasies in an Albee-esque attempt to dominate each other, under the guise of hazy nostalgia? The escalating intensity between John Henry Roberts' scrappy Deeley and Michaela Petro's steely Anna (whose darkly seductive witchery contrasts with the sunny serenity of Abigail Boucher's Kate) inclines us to suspect the latter stratagem, but the factor that most distinguishes this production from its predecessors is Senior's decision, just as the warfare approaches its sizzling climax, to have the hitherto-passive Kate declare the final victor of the duel.
Pinter wrote his play in 1971, but with the proliferation in 2011 of devices for altering photographs, audiotapes and cyberdocuments, re-inventing the past has never been easier. Yes, being cast as the princess over whom knights fight in their imaginations might be flattering, up to a pointbut in the end, who is rightfully entitled to the last word on your life story? Yourself, or a pair of squabbling rivals arguing their own importance?