It’s been said that he’s equal parts Hemingway and Beckett but to me Pinter is Alfred Hitchcock. Re-reading The Birthday Party- discovering it for the first time, previous readings were like skimming – the suspense, tension, uncertainty – like a rug is about to be pulled out and someone is about to crumple down and fracture. It’s like a car accident, you’re horrified but mesmerized. It’s where every moment the stakes are incredibly high and one or two sentences in the whole play reveal, rather hint, only hint, at what the real action is, what the possible objective can be. I am scared for the people in the play – but who is the perpetrator, or is it a macabre accident, that these people are in the room. Chekhov, in a way, not in the language – but characters who are always at the boiling point or about to get there, and can be pushed over, a fractured structure that doesn’t follow climax/resolution formula. I used to think that Chekhov gave me permission to throw a bunch of characters in a room and let them run around complaining – that’s what it took to write comedic tragedy. This is not reality, it’s a heightened prismatic interpretation of a dream that you throw on a stage, yet an invisible, taut string holds it together and it vibrates through the play. Pinter is brilliant like Eugene O’Neill for me because I can read both as literature, I don’t need to see them to appreciate the drama here. The words, spare, repetitive, or blown out like wind sails in O’Neill’s case, carry a compelling narrative.

Pinter wrote The Birthday Party in 1957, his first (or second) play.

Does Harold Pinter’s private life shed light on his plays? – Jan 13, 2010, The Guardian

The following is from Harold Pinter, Writing for the Theatre (1962)

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections.

When true silence falls we are left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.

There can be no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.  ((Related: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”. – (Hamlet, Act II, Scene II))

We have heard many times that tired, grimy phrase: ‘Failure of communication…’ and this phrase has been fixed to my work quite consistently. I believe the contrary. I think that we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rear-guard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else’s life is too frightening. To disclose the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.

Each play was, for me, ‘a different kind of failure.’ And that fact, I suppose, sent me on to write the next one. 

From The New York Times today:

…. close relationships between playwrights and theaters are increasingly rare these days, and developing more of them is one of the chief recommendations of a new study of the state of the American play that the nonprofit Theater Development Fund published in book form in late December. Yet several obstacles stand in the way, according to the study, which also looked at playwrights’ struggle to make a living and which has set off a debate in some theater circles. See Playwrights’ Nurturing Is the Focus of a Study, NYT, 01/14/2010

Today I completed the first draft of a new full-length prnyc. How do you know when you complete the first draft? You reach a state of complete exhaustion and you cannot gone on. There is nowhere, in this milieu, beyond the last line. Life goes on beyond the play, as it inevitably will, as it must, just as life existed before the wisenheimer protagonist opened his mouth to piss off the bestial antagonist.

Of course, this is not the end of this process; in many ways only the beginning. Today it is a punctuation! Good enough to send off for feedback and the beginning of the process leading to the reading. How did this play begin?

A year ago I wrote a 10 min. play called WHITE NOISE; it played for eight performances at H-B Playwrights Theatre, Bank St, NYC, as part of “The Waiting Room” series.  In the play an over-zealous New York PR guys puts the moves on a crazed marketing exec in the waiting room of a therapists office. They test each other for 10 minutes and resolve to meet, after the PR guy rants about his horrible boss nicknamed The Beast.

What if that guy actually went to work the next morning? I asked myself, on my way to work one morning, as the bitterly cold wind whipped around Riverside Park. I used the 10 min. play as the the first Scene and built on that for a full length play. The Play was called PUBLIC RELATIONS and we went through two readings in Donna De Matteo’s playwriting class. At the end of that process I realized that:

• I had no idea what this play was about
• There were too many characters
• The action was too diffuse
• There was no climax
• I failed to establish the language and rhythm necessary to carry this play

I realized that as long as I was tethered to the 10 min play the full-length play would not be able to find its own life. So I:

• Deleted Scene 1; started at Scene 2
• Deleted 6 characters; pared down to 5
• Compressed action time frame to 48 hours
• Wrote the ending first, then the climax

In other words, I took Lee Blessing’s advice. Thanks Lee.