A PINTER DUET: THE LOVER & ASHES TO ASHES

Watertown theater company valiantly takes on the po-mo king

By JENNA SCHERER

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Staging a Harold Pinter play is a little like choreographing a very intricate waltz without a dance floor—in fact, without any floor at all. Postmodern British playwrights can't be bothered with laying down the bland linoleum tiles of, you know, plot.

As for staging two Pinter plays at the same time? Might as well ring up the asylum and call it a day. Yet the New Repertory Theatre in Watertown is turning its black box space into a hothouse of lust and confusion for A Pinter Duet. Restaging a production he did three summers ago at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, director Rick Lombardo combines two one-acts, The Lover and Ashes to Ashes, into one night's entertainment. Each play features two characters, and he's using the same two actors (Rachel Harker and Stephen Russell) for both.

"With Pinter, you never know what a moment is about. Never never," Lombardo says. He fiddles thoughtfully with a plastic coffee stirrer as he speaks.

This type of writing is the stuff of directors' dreams and nightmares. Pinter's plays represent theater at its most elemental: a group of people, an enclosed space and a power struggle. Niceties like story and context are left to whoever cares to venture a guess.

The London-born legend is one of those irritatingly accomplished types, the kind that makes you wonder why you haven't done something totally awesome yet. In addition to his playwright credit, the Nobel Laureate has worn the hats of poet, actor, director, screenwriter and political rabble-rouser. Last year, at the age of 76, Pinter took to the stage for a much-lauded production of Beckett's one-man Krapp's Last Tape. Suffice to say the man's showing no signs of calling it quits.

The Lover and Ashes to Ashes were written 34 years apart, in 1962 and 1996 respectively, but they share a menacing ambiguity. It's like careening toward a clown from a long distance, and you can't quite make out if he's Bozo or It.

Take Ashes to Ashes, for instance. A man and a woman are in an English country house. The man seems collected, the woman unhinged. Are they husband and wife? Shrink and patient? Brother and sister? Porpoise and catfish? Search me. And what moment in history is this, exactly? They're dressed in modern clothes and seem rather banal, but the woman keeps bringing up train stations and stolen babies and troops of people marching into the sea. Creeeeepy.

Lombardo must know what Pinter's about He's the director, so he's got to. Right?

"What do you think it's about?" he asks.

"Umm ... the Holocaust?" I answer impotently. "Er ...not the Holocaust. A holocaust?" I feel like an ass.

But he doesn't know either. "There isn't any one specific story to be found. Pinter's plays are like a Rorschach test for the audience."

Lombardo recalls how, during the Wellfleet stagings, he'd begin each day's rehearsal with a different backstory for the characters and watch how the play changed.

This time around, the director has a new challenge. It's the night before opening, and Harker (who's also, incidentally, Lombardo's wife) has come down with something nasty and mucus-y. Tech rehearsal for The Lover features a bizarre phenomenon, one that you could almost call Pinteresque: Harker silently acts out her part, while an intern on the side speaks her lines. As soon as they take five, Harker breaks out in a painful coughing fit. It's one of those moments that reminds me that "The show must go on" is more than just an aphorism.

For Ashes, Harker has a go at speaking; the hoarseness of her voice makes the character's eerie meanderings all the more sinister. It also makes lines like "You're a fuckpig" even more fun. Harker and Russell's chemistry onstage is both electric and terrifying, especially in the Arsenal Center's tiny black box.

I ask Lombardo why Pinter's still potent for modern audiences, but I'm pretty sure I already know the answer.

"Pinter's biggest question is: Can we really know what's true?" he explains, bending the stirrer to its utmost limit. "And today, that's what a lot of people are asking. There's very little bedrock we can hold onto. We ask questions of everything."

So maybe in the here and now, we're all Pinter's people—weird collections of quirks and memories, floating in a nowhere space, locked in a never-ending battle for the biggest slice of ... something or other.

Aw man, now I'm depressed.

A PINTER DUET: THE LOVER & ASHES TO ASHES

THROUGH 2.10.08

NEW REPERTORY THEATRE AT ARSENAL CENTER FOR THE ARTS

321 ARSENAL ST., WATERTOWN

866.811.4111

$11-$31

NEWREP.ORG FOR TIMES