Being Harold Pinter

Tony Kushner maintained an office down the hall from where I work for several years. Our building required each floor to have a certain number of fire wardens and "searchers" in case of emergency, and for some reason, all of these positions were held within our office. As much as I love my colleagues, I wouldn't say that we're actually the sort of people you'd want to leave in charge of other people's safety. That said, we did have a pact that if any emergency did occur, one of us would make sure to go down the hall to save "national treasure Tony Kushner." Now that he's no longer in the building, let's be honest: everyone else is screwed.

This has little to do with the performance I saw tonight beyond the fact that Tony cohosted a presentation at the Public Theater, with Tom Stoppard, of the Belarus Free Theater's production of Being Harold Pinter. Here's some backstory: after massive political unrest led to members of the company being arrested for oppositional points of view, the members had to sneak out of the country to make it to the States to perform this work, a mash-up of Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize speech, excerpts from his plays, and interviews with Belarusian political prisoners. The two week run sold out before I got tickets, so I scoured the internet to try to snag one. When the Public Theater announced a special encore performance, I was determined to see it, cost be damned. Then I saw that the $50 and $100 tickets sold out (it was a benefit). Remaining seats? $500. Um...no. Long story short(er), I eventually got a $50 seat.

Confession: I've never really understood Pinter. I read his plays back when I was a Dramatic Literature student (before dropping that major because the lighting class demanded WAY too many hours, and why did I need to take a lighting class anyway?); I saw The Homecoming on Broadway. What I read? What I saw? Baffled me. My reaction in short: What the huh?

So...you know what's more confusing than a Harold Pinter play? Harold Pinter...in Russian. And Belarusian. Okay, yes, there were supertitles, but as I ping-ponged between them and the action of the play, I occasionally got very, very lost. At least unlike the schmuck next to me, I didn't fall asleep on anyone (he's lucky he didn't drool).

No, I didn't understand it all. But there were moments of incredible power, particularly in the last third of the play which explored the politics of torture and was the most cogent and coherent piece of the evening, at least for me. A man is stripped and tortured for unnamed crimes. His wife is brought in, and we learn she has been brutally raped. His seven-year-old son is questioned. When the original prisoner is told he can leave, he is given his own clothes to put back on...and his son's shoes. It's an excruciating moment, made all the more painful by the knowledge that the people on stage are legitimately at risk, that their families are broken up by their decision to speak out, and that they can not go back and perform there without risking a similar fate.

In an odd turn (and presumably to give people who paid benefit prices some star quality), a small section of the play was performed in English by the likes of Mandy Patinkin, Lou Reed, Kevin Kline, and other luminaries, most of whom conveyed gravitas by speaking too quietly to hear them in a theater that only had seven rows. I wanted to shout, "Speak UP, national treasure Olympia Dukakis!"

It was a strange evening--poorly organized since it was put together in 9 days and difficult and dense. But being able to step back and watch people for whom the act of conveying their own truth is a literal act of revolution...it was blisteringly sad and immensely moving, and it made me feel so, so small. If only national treasure Tony Kushner was still down the hall, maybe he could have explained the finer points to me.