Steppenwolf Theatre Company Blog – Chicago Theater, World-Class Ensemble

Betrayal is painful. It hurts when someone you love is lying to you. But, sometimes confronting the “truth” proves too complicated and even more dangerous than lying. So…LET THE GAMES BEGIN !!! It’s interesting to me to hear what story people believe to be true. There are many lies told in this play and it’s fascinating to hear the variety of interpretations of “the truth”. In Pinter’s marvelously subjective puzzle, the audience gets to put the pieces together by catching a glimpse of the end of the story at the beginning of the play. This provides a kind of template of the story for them to fill in as the play moves forward - backward in time.

There is a great deal of stillness in the acting of this material. It’s essentially people sitting or standing and talking to each other. For me, one of the remarkable aspects of this is what you find in your partner’s EYES. How often we catch each other’s eyes in an arrested moment of truth and then cower away behind our manipulations and needs.

Near the end of the play I even say to Emma (Amy) - “Your eyes kill me” (which they do) and then a minute or so later, after I’ve said to Robert (Tracy) “I speak as your oldest friend - your best man” he looks me right in the eye and says “You are actually.” The eyes don’t lie.

This entry was posted by Ian Barford on Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 8:49 am and is filed under Betrayal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.