So, What Do You Have To Lose?

Harold Pinter has his own ideas about what is, is.

In a lecture cited in The Sherman Playhouse program for "The Birthday Party," the playwright is quoted saying "There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false."

"The Birthday Party" plays with this idea, flirting with reality and fantasy. It keeps the audience in the dark about what is really going on with the characters, so the fractured story forces us in the audience to try gluing the pieces together.

No one can get too comfortable.

The truth, or what the truth seems to be, is never presented in a clear way, and uncertainty swirls around the characters as they move in curious ways.

Petey (Viv Berger) and Meg (Ellen Burnett) own a seaside boarding house. A problem arises when their boarder, Stanley (Chris Marker), encounters two men, Goldberg (Brad Bouchard) and McCann (John Taylor), who wish to stay for a night. Meg, who is a rather unstable and feeble older woman, declares it is Stanley’s birthday, although Stanley denies it. She wants to throw him a birthday party, inviting the two new guests as well as Lulu, a woman interested in Stanley, to the party.

Too much liquor and a round of blindman’s buff kick off the celebration. An attempted strangling and possible rape end it.

The chaos begins with Stanley’s turn at the game. He is blindfolded and has to walk around the room until he touches another person. When he is tripped by McCann, Stanley is enraged, and steps through the toy drum that Meg had given him for his birthday. The lights go out and Stanley grabs Meg by the throat. He releases her quickly and moves on to assault Lulu.

The close of the play offers no answers to what has happened here, leaving me feeling confusion and discomfort. What was happening below the surface was never addressed and the events that were on the surface were not dealt with. Why would a play force the audience into such a precarious place?

Goldberg and McCann grill Stanley before his outbreak, throwing all sorts of questions at him like, "Why did you betray us?" and "Why did you leave the organization?" progressing to the more ridiculous "Why did the chicken cross the road?"

The line between what is real and what is not is blurred. It is all absurd because the audience has no idea what the men are talking about, and it appears that they have no idea either.

In some way this absurdity works, though. For the characters, there is no true and false. Matters are both real and imaginary at the same time. But why? There is that devil of a question again. What is the point?

"Let yourself go. What do you have to lose?" Goldberg tells McCann.

This may be an instruction to the audience as well.

Pinter is all about the fluidity of time and the ambiguity of life itself. In a play about real and unreal, true and false, a mirror image of our world is painted with the absurdities appearing more pronounced.

Through this medium we can see Pinter’s world. It is completely fractured. Little pieces try to fit together, but nothing ever makes perfect sense. There is never a seamless fit. "The Birthday Party" makes us ask, is it better to realize this disconnect, or pretend that it simply does not exist? In true Pinter style, the play leaves that up to us.