BETRAYAL
by Harold Pinter
Directed by Cathy Kurz
June 14 - 28, 2022
Joslyn Castle
Robert, disillusioned, with a painfully-controlled fury about life and the mundane. Jerry, his longtime best friend, a compartmentalizer of principle and lust. And Emma, Robert's wife, Jerry's lover--once-upon-a-time for seven years of her marriage. Who is she? Yet we don't meet these three at the beginning, but two years after the end of the affair--and then travel backward—1977, 1975, 1974, 1973, 1971… to an accidental prelude in 1968.
But Harold Pinter's play isn't an old, familiar melodrama about infidelity, and the "labyrinthine" structure isn't a gimmick. Its unique, backward-in-time perspective enables us to see beneath actions, far more deeply than the characters can, into the labyrinth of motivations and self-deceptions, that is the very nature of betrayal itself. A winding, unpredictable path that all three characters travel.
BACKGROUND
Nobel Prize, Tony, and Olivier Award winner Harold Pinter's masterpiece, Betrayal, is a "dangerous, funny, sexy, and deeply personal journey backward, the molten intimacy of the three characters setting the stage for a thrilling meditation on passion, trust, friendship"--and memory. (Quotes from The Guardian and Theatre Chicago)
Winner in New York of the Drama Critics Circle Award as best foreign play and in London of the West End Award as best play of the season.