Preview: ‘Birthday Party’ challenges Aris Theatre actors to fill in characters’ blanks

English playwright Harold Pinter gave many people pause, on and off stage, for his work defies easy synopsis. Moments in plays like The Birthday Party are filled with tension and possible violence, but no one onstage bothers to explain why. The danger is just there, casting a shadow over everything.

Labeled a “comedy of menace” by critics when it was originally produced in 1958, The Birthday Party will be staged by Aris Theatre at 7 Stages’ black box space from October 2 through October 11.

During the play, a lodger named Stanley (Phil Mann) is set to celebrate his birthday at an English seaside boarding house run by an older couple, Meg (Nhadyne Banton Brown) and Petey (Dan Reichard). Two mysterious men, Goldberg (Jeff Hathcoat) and McCann (Louis Kyper), arrive, intent on confronting Stanley and taking him away — turning a happy occasion into a nightmare.

The play’s absurd, weird vibe is what attracted the Aris team to the material. Aris Theatre’s mission is to celebrate works from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. And Pinter is a Nobel Prize-winning master, said director Rob Shaw-Smith.

“The whole thing is that we don’t know who anyone is or what their backstory is; we don’t know their motivations,” Shaw-Smith said in a recent interview. “They are inconsistent about who they are to themselves and to other characters in the play. So what Pinter seems to be doing is trying to ask serious questions about what it means to create a plausible character and have them move through a play.”

Pinter’s work challenged audiences to question their own expectations of theater, as life also doesn’t often provide us with context or clear answers. 

“What he has done is create implausible characters who look like they’re in a plausible situation, but we never find out who these two men are who come to take Stanley away,” the director said. “They terrorize and traumatize him, and we don’t really know why.”

Hathcoat said that portraying a Pinter character like Goldberg has been a bucket-list goal since he was introduced to the playwright in college.

“What I find so exciting about The Birthday Party is you feel all those things: fear, hilarity, all the above — yet you don’t really know why, because the characters are all talking around what’s really going on,” the actor said. “The exciting thing about The Birthday Party is Pinter really never tells you. He never really tells the audience why people are doing what they’re doing and what’s really concrete.”

Hathcoat said he had to develop his own motivations for Goldberg, using the limited, often contradictory details the dialogue provides to justify the character’s behavior.

“Our job in the show is to show up, get him under control and take him away from this boarding house,” he said. “Where we’re taking him, the audience never finds out. Where we’re coming from, the audience never finds out. What did he do that made us come and get him? The audience never finds out. It’s alluded to, it’s talked about and talked around, but it’s all subtext and it’s all underneath. Now we, as actors, have our own answers. We have our secrets, but they’re never shared with the audience. And I think that that is a huge challenge as you’re building the play, because you’ve got to know what you’re talking about. You’ve got to decide for yourself.”

Shaw-Smith said he instructed the actors not to share among each other what backstories they gave their roles. He also told the actors not to “break the fourth wall” — acknowledging to the audience in any way that the world of the play is humorous or absurd. 

Instead, the director thinks the audience will find fun in the power struggles between the characters.

“This is a play about power dynamics,” Shaw-Smith said. “So every scene that you’re in, you are either winning or losing some kind of power struggle. And this is the joy for the audience. The whole play has a series of scenes in which people — in large and small ways — are navigating the power structure of the relationship or the move. And at every point, I want the performers to understand where they are in the power dynamic, what to play in the power dynamic. But they don’t know why. All they know is that they want to win that moment.”

Where and When

Aris Theatre’s production of The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter is at 7 Stages Black Box Theatre October 2 through October 11. 1105 Euclid Ave. NE.

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Benjamin Carr is an ArtsATL editor-at-large who has contributed to the publication since 2019 and is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association, the Dramatists Guild, the Atlanta Press Club and the Horror Writers Association. His writing has been featured in podcasts for iHeartMedia, onstage as part of the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival and online in The Guardian. His debut novel, Impacted, was published by The Story Plant.