No Man's Land

Spooner and Hirst are two aging writers, locked in the no man’s land of late middle age. They meet on Hampstead Heath and return to Hirst’s home for a late-night session of witty banter, sinister power games, and the worship of alcohol. Harold Pinter’s elegant, haunting play is part mystery drama, part homage to the ghosts of the past and the fiction of memory. David Wheeler returns to the A.R.T. to direct this tragicomic gem from Britain’s Nobel Prize-winning playwright.

SYNOPSIS

An aging writer named Hirst finds himself in “the last lap of a race” he has “long forgotten to run.” He brings home Spooner, a down-at-heel poet he has encountered in a pub. The older men reminisce about their pasts, which may or may not intersect. Another pair of men burst in and claim to be Hirst’s young servants; but who is really the master here? Who is trapped and who is free? The booze flows, the facts get slippery, and nothing is exactly what it seems. Hirst is caught between the peril of old age and a youth that may have been a lie, in a “no man’s land . . . forever silent.”

Director’s Sponsor Joel and Lisa Alvord

Production Sponsor Paul and Katie Buttenwieser