Ian Barford and Amy Morton in Betrayal. Below: Tracy Letts (from left), Guy Barile and Ian Barford.
This review was oiginally published in February, 2007 in The Windy City Times.
Variations on an eternal theme run with exquisite precision through Harold Pinter’s Betrayal. Directed by Rick Snyder, this is a piercing three-voice micro-symphony of rejuvenation spinning into disillusionment, a chamber piece of sex, lies and the sort of brightly burning joy that makes the world seem grayer, sadder and just a bit more futile after it is extinguished. And while the title is singular, the deceptions that propel Betrayal are many.
Betrayal is a backward-spinning triangle where the tumbling points in the relationship is portrayed with exacting nuance and richness by Amy Morton, Tracy Letts and Ian Barford. Each is a force that subtly dazzles at delivering the audible portions of Pinter’s clipped, exacting text. And each is equally deft at pulling the audience into the seismic emotional fissures forever cracking and shifting in the silences and pauses between and just beneath the words. 
Bertrayal runs in reverse, beginning two years after the stale, bickering end of an affair and ending at it’s giddy, luscious onset. It’s a structure that can be contrived and gimmicky, as anyone who has sat through Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years can attest. Here, as we flash back and back again through Pinter’s spare, scalpel-exact language, it’s harrowing. We know how the affair between Emma (Morton) and her husband Robert’s (Letts) best friend Jerry (Barford) will end. That knowledge makes the scenes of its development all the more piercing.
Dreams flush with the potential for ecstasy and operatic explosions of will wind up as shrugging whimpers, portent and high-stakes drama dulled to inconsequential footnotes in unremarkable lives. Stare at it too long and the devolution takes on a sheen of pure tragedy. If we knew how many electrifying beginnings were destined to ash-cold endings, would we even bother to get up in the morning? That’s the philosophical conundrum. The specific issues Betrayal so provocatively deals with center on the shadings of betrayal in a very particular tale of adultery.
Morton’s Emma is a cold, hard-edged beauty, not somebody prone to superfluous emotional frilliness or bleeding-heart displays of ardor. That makes her final, wonderstruck moment in Betrayal all the more wrenching. No less thrilling is Barford’s drunk-with-truth, blundering and thunderous confession that sets the affair off on its seven-year progression from passion to dust. Letts is endlessly fascinating as a wounded but still fanged and canny psychological predator of a husband and best friend, calculating like a chessmaster in endgame.
The words are stilettos, the infamous Pinter pauses razor blades deceptively cottoned in silence. The end result is a brittle, sharp brilliance.
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