Make no mistake. Pinter is hard. He’s sharp and quick and brittle, a sentiment-free, malevolent anti-Cupid armed with words that leave puncture wounds. With Old Times, the king of cryptic ambiguity and sinister pauses is at his terse finest. The dialogue in the 90-minute, three-person drama is as precise as a Bach fugue. At the American Players Theatre’s elegant, intimate (and indoor) Touchstone space, it is also calibrated to ominous perfection.
Directed by Laura Gordon, Old Times is a shifting triangle balanced on spare, ever-shifting waves of unease and outright terror. From the deafening roar of the ocean that opens the piece to the final, harsh flare of hot white lights, Old Times keeps you off balance. Think for a moment that the sand is solid and you’ve got a firm grasp of precisely what is unfolding here, and Pinter unleashes another rip tide. The sand swirls, the bottom drops off beneath you and you’re back navigating among icebergs, at the mercy of currents whose depths you cannot fathom.
Which isn’t to say Pinter is frustrating or prone to leaving loose and dead ends all over his terrifying landscape. With his infamous, fraught silences and superficially innocuous dialogue, Pinter is a wicked delight, a puzzler who leaves the possibility of infinite dark solutions in his wake. Director Gordon understands this, and while making the dynamics of Old Times as clear as the shiny reflection in a razor blade, she wisely refrains from trying to tie everything up in a tidy bundle.
With Tracy Michelle Arnold, Carey Cannon and Jonathan Smoots, we get an etched-in-acid portrait of three people and infinite combinations of sexual aggression, oppression and the kind of mind-games that’ll mess you up but good. For days.
On its sleek, polished surface, nothing much happens in Old Times. But stare even momentarily into Pinter’s elliptical poetry and monsters start crawling up from the depths. You may not ever make out more than their hulking outlines, but that’s enough. Pinter’s art is in the ambiance as much as the events of his plays. Vague terrors are not less unsettling because of their vagueness. If anything, the monster under the bed is all the more threatening when you can sense him more than see him. Turn the light on and stare the menace in the face and its power dissipates. But Pinter – and painterly lighting designer Jason Fassl – make sure shadows dominate.
Old Times unfolds in two sleekly minimalist, sparsely furnished rooms (appropriately understated work by Nathan Stuber), a parlor and a bedroom where castors on the beds tellingly make for any number of permutations in sleeping arrangements. Herein, Katie (Arnold, all clipped speech and birdlike gestures, a deceptively docile quarry for predatory friends and lovers) and her husband Deeley (Jonathan Smoots, using his very shape as a threat) welcome Katie’s one-time best friend Anna (Carey Cannon, paradoxically managing to be both androgynous and flagrantly, dangerously seductive)
As the trio discusses movies (significantly, a film called “Odd Man Out”), former haunts (The Wayfarer pub, also a name of no accident) and their contradicting, overlapping pasts, a to-the-death battle for prominence in Katie’s shrouded, unknowable heart emerges. It’s murder by dueling memories, each one recollected for its power to humiliate and eviscerate. Snippets of great American love songs become verbal daggers, anecdotes about long-past parties poison-tipped darts employed to leave their quarry pinned and wriggling like butterflies on a corkboard.
Fitz Patton’s overpowering sea sounds and eerie, brittle original music provide a broken-glass background that ups the fear factor significantly.
That the endgame remains murky is part of the enigmatic joy of Old Times. You wouldn’t necessarily want to know how things turn out for Deeley, Katie and Anna, or even just what happened to these three. The fun’s in their in their lethal process.
Old Times’ final performance is this evening, Sept. 11, at American Players Theatre, Spring Green, Wisconsin. For more information, click here call 608/588-2361 or go to www.playinthewoods.org.
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