Pseudo-Drama

"Betrayal

(Pause)

(Pause, withering stare) "You saw it?' (disinterested gaze, combined with sip from sherry glass and lengthy stare at shoelaces) "Yes." (raised eyebrows, implication of deep passions long ago; brutal, passionate love, spurned by a lover ago; brutal, passionate love, spurned by a lover who came out of the closet on a Venetian gondola and shtupped his wife in their bridal suite).

"How nice."

HAROLD PINTER'S THEATRE, as with most things, including birth, is all in the delivery. But unlike birth--which does not lend itself to baseball pitching metaphors--Pinter has to come at you with a curve or it'll go straight to the (bridal) showers.

The biggest crime in putting on Betrayal, Pinter's anthem to anomie--beyond counting aloud the dramatic pauses--is to present the play like Cliff Notes for Brief Encounter; in other words, to play it on the level.

Betrayal is minimalist self-conscious pseudo-drama at its most lean and mean, a love triangle chopped up, robbed of emotional content, shorn of traditional character relationships, and pasted together in reverse order. What remains (a lot) is 90 minutes of ersatz psychodrama that flip-flops the protagonists' emotions, the concept of the dramatic narrative, and traditional notions of romance, nostalgia, friendship and adultery.

At his by pergola seeds to have escaped the gang performing Betrayal over at Dunster House, in the comfy climes of the bad-portrait-of-House-master-laden JCR.

Though David Wingrove has offered up a perfectly acceptable rendition of the play, he misses numerous chances to partake in Pinter's gleeful subversiveness and turn Betrayal into a work directly relevant to the thousands of nascent Harvard Yuppies trading self-conscious banalities over demitasse at Tommy's Lunch.

Kevin Jennings (Robert), whom. The Harvard Independent has lovingly described as a "spiritual Marxist" who doesn't live in Adams House and "doesn't give a shit," is excellent as usual. Jennings, his clipped, staccato lines and pregnant pauses packing an equally venomous wallop, superbly masters the complicated role of the misogynist husband/book publisher who is destined to live a life as unromantic as the books he rejects for publication.

MORE THAN THE other cast members or the director, he appears to understand that Pinter's dialogue is significant for its superficiality, for what it doesn't say. He is the only member of the play's trio to pull off the line "How are you doing?" with just the proper lack of conviction.

Nicole Galland (Emma) and Brad Dalton (Jerry) also turn in fine performances as the deux et trois of the menage, though they are unable to shake an inability to project the midlife angst of English Big Chillers nearing the big four-oh. Eric Rosencrantz contributes a refreshing dose of Italo-campiness in his waiter cameo.

DIRECTOR DAVID WINGROVE fails to take advantage of a number of opportunities, in campus tradition, to build on past productions of what is already a widely performed play. The Dunster JCR is well suited to intimate theatre-in-the-round, but Wingrove relies on a clumsy slide projection system to suggest locales and environment.

The white sheet used to show the slides before each of the play's nine scenes only distracts from the action in front. If, however, the bedsheet serves a vital symbolic purpose for Wingrove's vision of modern love and commitment, then he fails to show us what.

There is great promise in Pinter, but also an added challenge. Unlike the stock dramas and comedies that annually fail to challenge House and Loeb audiences. Betrayal offers and requires something more from its Harvard interpreters, Failing that, Pinter becomes little more than a few banalities and a lot of dead space.