Who’s afraid of ‘Betrayal’? Harold Pinter drama exposes marital mazes

The plot of “Betrayal,” now running at Penobscot Theatre, is simple enough. Robert and Jerry are best friends. Robert and Emma are married. Jerry and Emma are lovers. The question of who is the betrayer and who is the betrayee are not, however, so simple to answer. This is, after all, Harold Pinter, the master of the minimal. So while the plot is sparse, the internal life of this play is anything but.

“Betrayal” is among Pinter’s most popular stage plays – as much for its theme as for the device of taking place in reverse chronological order. The play opens two years after Jerry and Emma have broken off a seven-year affair and, from there, takes baby steps forward and giant steps backward through nine years of elusive emotional mazes. It’s an artful analysis of the way marital infidelity spreads its tentacles over these cerebral Londoners.

First produced in the 1970s, the play is based on Pinter’s own extramarital activities. But the issues move beyond autobiography and find a place in the world of sophisticated modern lives. Jerry is a literary agent, Robert a book publisher and Emma runs an art gallery. They all drink. A lot. Their interactions have, as a backdrop, discussions of novels and poetry, travels to Venice and America, and the children they each have with their respective spouses. It’s anti-romance, soap opera and sublimated sex comedy all rolled into one.

New York-based Gregg W. Brevoort, guest director at Penobscot Theatre, crafts a production that does not back away from the questions the play raises and knows better than to answer them. Brevoort is interested primarily in the journeys of all three of the characters and never pushes the plot toward indicting any one or two players as the responsible party. They are all complicit, Brevoort asserts. More than that, however, they all love each other. It’s a stunning and decentering conclusion.

If you see the play as centrally about Jerry and Robert, whose commitment to each other is greater than either of their individual relationships to Emma, then Brevoort’s viewpoint may seem as flat as the white-wine hues that creamily bathe this production. Yet the only real casualty of this approach comes at the end when we witness the exact origin of the affair. This could be a chilling, revelatory moment, but instead seems as plaintive as the Chopin and Scarlatti scores that play in the background.

While Brevoort’s production could benefit from being a bit more brittle, it captures much of the elegant convolution and confusion of this play. He chooses to add an intermission to the nine scenes (which typically run under 90 minutes), and that, too, diffuses some of the intensity.

Nevertheless, this production is provocative on a number of other levels. The cast, for instance, honors Brevoort’s take by working as a solid ensemble. Sometimes the actors overplay the anger in a scene and their British accents sound slightly as if they have provenance in New Jersey. But Patrick Dizney (Jerry), Rita Rehn (Emma) and David Sitler (Robert) offer insight into the embroiled complexities of crisscrossing relationships.

Putnam Smith also makes a fine appearance as a waiter. No small role is played by Gabriella D’Italia’s beige and black costumes, Lynne Chase’s penetrating lights and Matthew Myhrum’s moveable sets.

Still, it’s the three primary characters whose journey Brevoort wants us on, and they slip into the heart of this play by mingling in the mysterious company of menace and menage.

Some may find the action of the play too slow but that’s signature Pinter. In theater parlance, “pinteresque” practically means pregnant pause. So the silences are not meant to be affected but affecting. The style has often been compared to music, in which rests carry as much imaginative potential as the notes themselves.

At the beginning of the play, Emma has just discovered that her husband has been having affairs, too. She returns to her old lover for consolation and connection. “It’s nice, sometimes, to think back. Isn’t it?” Emma asks Jerry. The poet T. S. Eliot put it another way. He wrote that through exploration of our lives we will “arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” Penobscot Theatre’s “Betrayal” takes us back to where it all started, puts us on the journey of hindsight, and let’s us peer into that unexpected and shattering first time.

Penobscot Theatre will present “Betrayal” through April 21 at 183 Main St. in Bangor. For tickets and information, call 942-3333.