ARTicles vol. 2 i.3b: Welcome: The Birthday Party

Welcome to the fourth production of the 2003-04 season, Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis.

On March 30 1958, the eve of the first rehearsal of the original production of The Birthday Party, Harold Pinter wrote a letter to the director Peter Wood. Wood had asked Pinter to write some additional lines for Stanley the play’s central character, which would clarify the mystery of his circumstances. Pinter refused, explaining that the ambiguity was central to the play, and that to seek precise explanations was to miss the point. “Meaning begins in the words, in the action, continues in your head and ends nowhere,” he wrote to Wood. “There is no end to meaning. Meaning which is resolved, parceled, labeled and ready for export is dead, impertinent – and meaningless.”

Almost fifty years later, the mysteries of The Birthday Party no longer seem troubling; indeed they account for the play’s continued success. The Birthday Party is truly an open text, available to infinite interpretations – political, allegorical, religious, psychological – that a more literal treatment would have foreclosed. Though superficially related to the social realism that dominated British and American theatre in the 1950s, Pinter’s early masterpiece now seems closer to the poetic and absurdist dramas of Beckett, Genet, or Ionesco, whose theatre subverts tidy morality in favor of more complex systems of resonance and association.

It is a great pleasure to revisit the enigmatic home of Meg and Petey with the benefit of fifty years’ hindsight, and in the company of director JoAnne Akalaitis, well-known to A.R.T. audiences for her seminal productions of Genet’s Balcony and Beckett’s Endgame. Above all, Pinter writes outstanding parts for actors – no surprise, given that his career began as a performer in a repertory company. We hope that you agree with us that The Birthday Party provides ideal material for the actors of our own Company. From the Mechanicals and Fairy Queen of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the singing nomads of Highway Ulysses or the inhabitants of a seedy boarding house by the English seaside, they astonish us with their range and virtuosity.

With best wishes,

Robert Woodruff, Artistic Director

Robert J. Orchard, Executive Director

Gideon Lester, Associate Artistic Director