Playwright: Harold Pinter. At: TUTA Theatre, 2010 W. Fulton. Tickets: 1-800-838-3006; www.tutato.com; $25 (suggested donation). Runs through: Aug. 18.
Earlier this season, Writers' Theatre presented Harold Pinter's The Caretaker with the audience seated inside the claustrophobic four walls of the play's one-room set. Now, TUTA offers an environmental take on another seminal Pinter work, his 1957 one-act, The Dumb Waiter. This time the one-room setting is a 9' x 9' x 9' cube, with the audience (limited to 25) standing above and looking into the room as if through the ceiling. As with The Caretaker, the tight quarters and intimate audience dynamics demand focused acting, and TUTA's production delivers just as Writers' Theatre did so brilliantly.
With The Dumb Waiter, Pinter was the first writer after Samuel Beckett (yet at the same time as Beckett) to promote an absurdist world view in which there are no answers to fundamental questions ("Why are we here?"), and in which the rules of the universe are both unknowable and arbitrary. We exist and—eventually—suffer through the forces or whims of things/beings we cannot comprehend. Placing the audience in a god-like position emphasizes this aspect, just as random noises from the floors above the TUTA studios (in an old loft building) add a mysterious and threatening element to the audience experience.
The Dumb Waiter concerns professional assassins Ben and Gus, longtime partners, waiting in a small room for details of an impending job. Gruff senior partner Ben (Andy Hager) has a short fuse and a know-it-all air until abnormal things happen, while Gus (Trey Maclin) seems softer and more curious about the who, what and why of their work which aren't wise inquiries. The Dumb Waiter occurs in an hour of real time, but you know that Ben and Gus have spent hours and hours waiting like this.
Under master director Zeljko Djukic (TUTA co-founder and artistic director), Hager and Maclin offer beautifully calibrated performances, with Hager especially effective in registering Ben's fear and panic when things become odd, while Maclin's Gus has a fitting puppy-ish quality. Both sport very good London East End accents, especially Maclin. Assisted by designers Joey Wade (scenic) and Christopher Kriz (sound), Djukic's dollhouse-like staging concept is most effective.
Djukic injects several things not found in Pinter, most notably the brash use of two pieces of music, the first an over-the-top Italian song (Neapolitan?) that accompanies the activation of the titular device, and the second the Bee Gees' "Staying Alive," which covers physical action and provides a metaphysical comment. The music is a surprising, effective and enjoyable flourish but not a necessity. More curious is the suggestion in the closing seconds that space aliens are the unseen controlling force, which seems too easy an answer for the existential despair central to The Dumb Waiter, even if funny.
