Saroyan and Pinter

To open its new season the Theatre Company of Boston is, as usual, presenting a pair of expertly staged modern plays. With works by Camus, cummings, Brecht, and Ibsen in prospect for the fall and winter, the Hotel Bostonian Playhouse should continue to offer the liveliest and most interesting drama in town.

William Saroyan's Talking to You is a play of no special merit, but excellent acting and direction make up for the playwright's vapidness. An exuberant, brilliantly unaffected performance by Mel Hopson leads the work of a fine cast, ably directed by David Wheeler.

Saroyan calls Talking to You "one of the many dreams of one man of our time." The dreamer evidently has a prosaic fantasy-life: the play turns our to be a straightforward polemic against a gallery of standard evils--hatred, social injustice, fate, racial prejudice. Blackstone, a gentle Negro heavyweight, can't kick the habit of goodness in spite of the suffering whites inflict on his race. Tiger, the blind man who wishes he were "better dreamed," and Fancy Dan, an embittered ex-convict, take their knocks with less dignity. "A little love somewhere is better," counsels Saroyan; "too much hate melts the bones, makes me cry." His scandalized commentary serves passably as a vehicle for the dramatic skills of Hopson, Jerome Raphael, Lazaro Perez, and John Karlen, if it does little else.

The same calibre of acting and direction is bestowed on the more substantial piece, Harold Pinter's A Slight Ache. This one-acter contains a scriptful of challenging subtleties which the Theatre Company converts into highly entertaining drama. Bronia Stefan and Paul Benedict sculpture their roles flawlessly, David Wheeler paces the play smoothly, while music and an ingeniously designed set accent mood and action effectively.

In plot A Slight Ache is more tense and aggressive than most plays by Pinter, who usually floats his characters toward realization of inner predicaments on a stream of small talk and petty routine. Here, however, the characters slide quickly into a current of self-revelation that sweeps on to a grim transfer of identities at the end. Though Stefan and Benedict wring an ironic humor out of their parts, there is no room in A Slight Ache for the mocking tedium that helps to cushion the themes of The Caretaker and The Dumbwaiter.

The opening scene is a country house where Edward, an essayist, and Flora, his wife, are having breakfast. After desultory chatter about flowers and a duel with a wasp, their attention turns to an old matchseller standing by the back gate. The man disturbs Edward, but Flora finds him faintly attractive. Both are alternately fascinated and repelled by him. Edward interrogates him, insults him, soliloquizes on youthful glories now defunct. Flora too interviews him, trying to find out why she feels drawn to him. Gradually it becomes evident that the couple knows the old man intimately, either in memory or in imagination, because of a rape he committed (or may have committed) many years before. His intrusion first subverts, then inverts their relationship; in the end it appears that Edward is more of an impostor than the matchseller.

The play is densely overgrown with metaphors and allusions. Pinter cultivates a whole thicket of symbolic references to vision, light, and self-knowledge: Edward's eyes hurt; the matchseller seems blind; the day is the longest in the year; Edward prefers the darkness of the house to the sunlight; and so on. Trying to chart this jungle would be a presumptuous sort of auto-analysis from which I will excuse myself--anyone who sees A Slight Ache should read the play and attack it with his own interpretive machete. And that "any-one" should be everyone who appreciates soundly produced modern theater.