Review: Betrayal at Rec Room Arts

Ask any knowledgeable theater professional and they will tell you that playing Pinter is a dream job. It is not for nothing that the British playwright Harold Pinter (1930-2008) is known as an actors’ playwright. Its plots are riddles, its characters oscillate while spouting the most mundane conversations, and above it all, like a fog, is a fog of menace. Something bad this way comes. Like Chekhov’s gun, sooner or later something or someone is going to explode.

Winner of the Nobel Prize, the Tony Award and the Olivier Award, Pinter is considered one of the most influential and important voices in “modern” theater. Although his greatest works span decades, his pieces, The birthday party, the return home And Treason are classics of modern theater, and his screenplay adaptations of The servant, the intermediary, the wife of the French lieutenant and even a populist murder mystery Detectiveevoke the golden age of Hollywood at its finest.

He loved acting and his plays certainly show his talent for the limelight. They resplendent with terse monologues, intriguing dialogue that always says much more than is said, and an air of danger, even if none is seemingly present. And these pauses, these ellipses, are mother’s milk for the actors. You can do so much with these. It’s all beneath the surface, the subtext, if you will, and that’s why actors love to sink their teeth into Pinter’s meaty, elliptical speech. You can do almost anything with it. His style is so unique that it was patented under the name “Pinteresque”.

The three actors of Treason, somewhat hypnotizing at Rec Room Arts, sketches Pinter as dinner with Escoffier. They eat it. Well, to be honest, there are two: Jay Sullivan and Molly Wetzel. It’s a mystery to me why Brandon J. Morgan has remained silent. One of Houston’s best, Morgan has such ease and class in his acting that we often forget his immense talent. He fills his characters with grace and simple truth, no matter who they are. You just know you’ve encountered them somewhere because its characters are so realistic. What happened here?

He speaks so quietly that you strain to hear him. Rec Room may be the smallest theater in Houston, why is it talking so we can’t hear it or the author’s provocative words? Why did director Sophia Watt reduce it to a whisper? His character Jerry, a literary agent, certainly has things to hide – just like the three of them; four of them, in fact, if you count Jerry’s wife backstage – but who speaks quietly in the theater? In the scene where he first declares his love to Emma, ​​the wife of his best friend Robert, which triggers the play, he turns his back on us. We lose all connection. We totally lose it.

Wetzel and Sullivan, as married couple Robert and Emma, ​​are better off because we can hear them. Complicit insinuations, oblique references, cat-and-mouse games are at the forefront. We have to look at Morgan, and that trips us up. Not only does this make Pinter’s thorny drama much less interesting, but we lose important information along the way as the intimate drama recedes.

Because you see, Pinter, this cunning cat, is playing with us. His drama about adultery and the lies one tells during a betrayal is told in reverse order. In nine scenes, beginning with the ex-lovers meeting in 1977, Betrayal travels back in time to Robert and Emma’s wedding in 1968, with each subsequent scene adding a little more exposition, a little more introspection, a little no more jealousy, much more. tension. Passionate about theater, Pinter must have known the sardonic comedy of Kaufman and Hart Merry we ride (1934), which also features nine scenes and travels back in time to the now-damaged trio’s innocent youth.

Rec Room’s production is reduced to the essentials. Designer Stefän Azizi uses just a table and chairs to serve as a bar, a restaurant, a Venice hotel room, the couple’s date apartment. The walls are curtains and the passage of time is done by means of a turntable, although it seems to have a life of its own and rotate during scenes before time reverses, indicated by the titles projected on the walls . This is all very minimal, which pushes Pinter to the forefront where he should be. But Jerry, who has his back to us, remains suspended in time, very far away, nibbling Pinter but leaving us wanting more.

Betrayal continues through July 6 at 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at Rec Room Arts, 100 Jackson. For more information, call 713-344-1291 or visit (email protected). $21.50 – $46.50.