The Dumbwaiter and The Room

The Theatre Company of Boston is closing out a financially harrowing season with a pair of stark one-acters by Harold Pinter. Choosing such a fashionable playwright for its finale is almost reactionary by the standards of this audacious group, which has included several rarely seen plays among its avant garde offerings this year. Pinter already has a shiny reputation, and the Theatre Company's polished productions do it justice.

Pinter makes arresting drama out of platitudes. His characters are listless nobodies who prattle witlessly about the weather, the neighbors, about eating and sleeping. Cooped up in wretched little rooms, they fondle material possessions and mull over memories like savages, so drugged by habit that paltry incidents pass for news. They soak up mundane sensory experience through a screen of simple-minded, petulant prejudices.

These bleak puppets seek shelter in squalid, motionless routine. Instead of moving toward a comforting resolution, Pinter's plays develop by shedding obscurities until emotions and paradoxes in a situation are uncovered.

Carefully Pinter scrapes away the aimless talk and blank expressions that coat real feelings. Underneath we discover a galaxy of neurotic horrors: curious inversions of appearances, petrified wills, secret dreads, loneliness, and despair. These interior stresses are just as commonplace as the banalities that overlay them, even though they are revealed in bizarre ways. The pettiness and self-deception begin to seem less an insipid veneer than a shield for sanity.

Although his themes are hollowness and banality, Pinter never gets boring or inane. Symbols constantly tempt the imagination. The pathetic small talk that dominates his dialogue generates a grotesque humor. While Pinter's characters chatter the same phrases over and over, his plays take on a futility that makes them funny and an expectancy that makes them suspenseful. The comic tone shuts off as a climax approaches, because in Pinter's drama a slow disinterment of inner tragedy creates the suspense.

The Theatre Company begins the evening with The Dumbwaiter, a perplexing piece about two gunmen holed up in a restaurant basement waiting for orders to murder someone. For a while the action is sparse; Gus, stalking restlessly about the room, distracts Ben from his newspaper. The two trade non sequiturs until somebody slides an envelope full of matches under the door--but there is no gas to make a fire. Their consternation grows when a dumbwaiter arrives from upstairs bearing an order for steaks, pudding, and tea.

The harried mobsters load the dumbwaiter with the few provisions they have. From the boss above, though, they get nothing but complaints and increasingly exotic orders (Ormith Macarounada, Char Siu, Scampi). The pair pick at each other jumpily: "We've been through our tests, haven't we? . . . . What's he playing these games for?" At last Ben receives their instructions and the play rushes to a finish, knotted at the end with a violent twist.

Director David Wheeler paces The Dumbwaiter very fast and packs a bit too much levity into it, so that transitions between ludicrousness and anxiety sometimes come off awkwardly. But neither mood overpowers the other, and the pulse of Pinter's story never misses a beat. Dustin Hoffman and Paul Benedict are well-matched as the brains-and-lummox partners; only Hoffman's antics occasionally smack of Kellogg's Cornflakes, and he tends to mix up his Cockney with Brooklynese.

In The Room a nondescript couple named Hudd have recently moved into a ramshackle single room. Mrs. Hudd gabbles cheerfully about how cosy and secluded it is: "We don't bother anybody . . . We keep ourselves to ourselves." Preferring not to know the identity of her neighbors, she huddles jealously in her stranded little apartment. Her husband stonily pores over a Classics Illustrated while she speaks to him.

The Hudds' haven cracks slightly when Mr. Kidd, their senile landlord, half-remembers that their apartment used to be his bedroom. Then a man and his wife looking for lodging threaten to rent the Hudds' room; and a blind Negro who had been living in the cellar asks Mrs. Hudd to come back to a mysterious unsavory past, to her home. Like The Dumbwaiter, the play ends with a grotesque shock.

Mr. Wheeler directs The Room perfectly. He loses none of the mingled nonsense and horror in Pinter's writing and modulates the tension smoothly as it climbs toward a climax.

Jo Lane makes excellent use of her plastic features and voice to characterize Mrs. Hudd. Slowly her voluble good spirits curdle into nervousness and sorrow. Ed Finnegan also gives an outstanding performance, musing and whining with great finesse as the elderly Mr. Kidd. Dustin Hoffman plays Mr. Hudd with realistic stolidness. The other parts are handled skillfully by Paul Benedicts, Vera Lee, and Lester Gilmore.

The two brief plays at the Hotel Bostonian do credit to the Theatre Company and to modern drama--the two being closely connected in Boston. They certainly deserve a response enthusiastic enough to encourage them to open another season next fall.