Spirited Skull-Puzzler

By T.E. Kalem

To see a distinctive play distinctively performed at Lincoln Center is rather like finding a tree in Death Valley. Well, the age of miracles has not passed. The revival of Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party at the 299-seat Forum Theater has been directed with a sure and sensitive hand by Jules Irving, and the actors not only seem to be comfortable with each other, but also to cherish the play. They deliver their lines with an easy fluency that makes the drama itself a spirited pleasure rather than a tortuous skull-puzzler.

Perhaps the highest compliment that may be paid to their mutual work is that they raise Pinter's first full-length drama to virtually equivalent rank with such later, more lavishly acclaimed dramas as The Caretaker and The Homecoming. Actually, The Birthday Party seems to possess a more vivid symbolic imagery and a greater sense of motion than the other two plays. Like Waiting for Godot, although in a totally ominous sense, this is a play about waiting. Stanley (Robert Phalen) is a piano-playing recluse hiding out as a boarder in a small provincial town. The landlady (Betty Field) has a letch for him, and her husband (Ray Fry) treats him as a son. Stanley has apparently betrayed some secret organization.

A sentimental Jew, Goldberg (Robert Symonds), and a defrocked Irish priest, McCann (John Markins), come to get Stanley. They riddle him with a barrage of non sequiturs, lobotomize his mind, and since he can only make horrible animal noises at the end of the play, there is a suggestion that they have cut out his tongue, which could be the penalty for squealing.

Grisly stuff, one might think, but not so, thanks to Pinter's sense of the ludicrous and his love of vaudeville and word juggling. While tickling the mind and prickling the skin, Pinter makes one giggle and gasp in the same breath.

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