Much overdue thanks to James Comtois for his kind words.
Check out the pretend trailer for Hail Satan!
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So obviously I'm pretty happy to hear about this. Earlier this year, a friend of mine who is a teacher asked me to write to her why I thought students should study Pinter. Here's what I wrote back to her. The piece I refer to is currently being beautifully performed at manhattantheatresource by Amy Lee Pearsall and Julie Marie Paparella under the direction of Jordana Williams as part of the Estrogenius Festival. Info is here.
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One criticism of Pintert is that his plays are nothing more than "acting excercises," that by stripping everything away from his characters but their motivation, he's dehumanized them and left them as nothing more than test subjects for actors to practice on before moving on to fully fleshed out characters. While I would dispute the "stripped down" criticism (I think his characters are often actually flamboyant), the "acting-exercise" theory is a good place for me to start, I think. Here's why:
In an acting class (a straightforward Stanislavsky-derived class, I mean, nothing fancy), the primary focus is on motivation. The idea seems to be, we can get to language and physicality once we've answered for ourselves the question: what are we doing at this moment? What are we trying to accomplish? What is your character trying to do to the other character?
I think this is appropriate because I come at theater-creation from a storytelling point of view. Beautiful images on a stage and beautiful language in an actor's mouth fascinate me for a moment, and then I'm bored again. The only thing that holds my interest is a story. What is a story, exactly? I think it's two or more agendas coming into conflict with each other. When I'm watching a story, what I'm actually watching is at least two people who each want something and are trying to get it, and it's impossible for both of them to get the thing they want. Only one can, or neither. So they're forced to interfere with one another. That's what interests me.
Playwrights understood this before Pinter. I understood this before I began reading and watching Pinter. But Pinter does, in fact, "strip down" this blood-sport of life until the belts and cogs show.
Let's say someone notices a few things about destructive families. Maybe they notice that when one person escapes a stagnant, destructive family to make an independent life of their own, that the remainder of the family notices, and feels envy and implied insult, both of which combine into long-running, low-level anger. This anger manifests itself subtly whenever the successful escapee occasionally returns to the orbit of the destructive family. The remaining family members say and do things designed to subtly (or not) tear down the successful escapee and take away the energy and confidence that he/she used to escape and succeed in the first place. The idea is, once the escapee has been broken down, the rest of the family doesn't have to feel bad about themselves anymore.
Well, Harold Pinter noticed this. And he wrote a play called The Homecoming that presents this dynamic in such a stripped-down, elemental form (man visits family with his wife, family takes his wife away) that it has a primal power.
A couple has been married a long time. They have accrued enough shared past that their recollections about it begin to diverge. Eventually small arguments over differing memories become large ones. Both members of the couple are fighting for their version of the past because it validates something that they want to believe about the present. In Old Times, Pinter makes this battle theatrical by bringing an old friend of both husband and wife in who can back up some of the wife's claims and some of the husband's. it's almost as if they've conjured her.
Eventually Pinter's laser-focus on motivations narrowed even further into a study of pure power, it seems to me. As his plays got more political, they were increasingly based around two figures on stage, one all-powerful, one virtually powerless. (See One For The Road, Mountain Language, Ashes To Ashes, Party Time.) Since it's clear who's bound to be the winner from the beginning, the plays are primarily valuable for studying how powerful people manifest their power through language and action, and how powerless people hold on to their humanity. These plays are all good for one quick bang apiece, but I miss the days when he pitted two relatively matched opponents against each other.
I think Pinter built on the influence of Beckett, his idol. Beckett's play are like gorgeous still photos - taken by a photigrapher with an eye for texture and nuance, sure, but they still don't move. "Here is a truth about life," Beckett said each time. Pinter, at his best, said, drew on the power of Beckett's spare language and mysterious visual compositions, but he made the picture move by adding struggle. Things could still go a couple ways in Pinter's best plays, and though it's hard to believe now, since the stories are so well known, they once had suspense. "The Caretaker," produced well and without all that stupid reverence (a huge problem in productions of both Beckett and Pinter), is actually edge-of-your-seat.
(Pinter's other big, less-acknowledged influence - and Albee's as well - was Noel Coward. His characters are often erudite and fussy about language - and often pick on others for choosing the wrong words. And of course, they're awfully British.)
Here's why students should read Pinter, whether or not they like his stuff: in addition to building on his heritage, Pinter left room to build atop what he created. Dominic Drumgoole called him something like "the aircraft carrier almost everyone else's plane takes off from." My version of that would be to call him "Playwriting 101." Pinter's plays have all the basics: tight construction, economy of language and movement, and most importantly, the clear rendering of motivation and theme - airy by themselves - in theatrical action.
My plays got much shorter after I started reading Pinter because he made me rethink how I made them. I don't come up with a story, do a rough outline of scenes, and just start writing anymore. I think about plays as theatrical events, a series of movements and sounds taking place inside a box, fueled by the clear depiction of conflicting agendas. I think of a play as a physical thing now. If I get a story idea, and I can't imagine rendering it through these means, then I think, "Well, maybe one day I'll write that as a short story or a screenplay or a novel or a poem, but it's not a play."
The first couple plays I wrote after I read Pinter were hilariously obvious Pinter knock-offs; I found that living inside his language made it hard for me to imagine any other language. But eventually my personality reasserted itself, and I found that Pinter gave me a set of tools I could then use in my own way. The piece I posted on my blog is all Mac, and about Mac-based interests, but built with Pinter's tools and Pinter's assumptions, the most central of which, it seems to me, is, "We learn very little about characters when they explain themselves. We learn everything about them when watching them in the act of trying to extract something from someone else."
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