FEBRUARY 24 TO MARCH 11

The Birthday Party delights audiences with oddball wit, ribaldry, philosophical flights and bizarre series of small shocks accompanied with their eloquent partners, pause and silence. Watch Meg Boles mother and smother her boarder, Stanley; watch Lulu lose her innocence; watch McCann grotesquely revive his partner, Goldberg; watch a simple birthday party turn vicious. All of the action of the play is intensified by the intimate nature of the Acorn Studio Theater which makes the audience feel not so much observers but actual participants as the drama unfolds before them.

featuring Harlan Baker, Joshua Brassard, Elizabeth Guest,
Kat Moraros, Joe Quinn, and Jeffrey Roberts

The late, great Harold Pinter brings us a world from 1958 very like the one we live in today: devoid of reliable answers. He creates a world with a prose of diamond hard lucidity where what is said and done are perfectly clear; it is the rest -- the rationalizing clutter and exposition, that is missing. Pinter legitimized uncertainty as viable drama. The Birthday Party titillates, amuses and terrifies. For Stanley Webber, the prodigal member of some undefined "organization," safety is an illusion and at any mysterious moment strangers might come to the door and take him, or those who protect him, away. As to why the avengers from "the organization" have come, we don't know, they won't tell us -- Has Stanley betrayed this "organization"? Although the threat that his safety net will not hold pervades the play, laughter antidotes the menace and we are left as an audience with oxymoron combinations of mirth and dread.