THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019 69
Emma: she’s just another diamond in
the rough, a recruitable talent.
Lloyd has directed Pinter before,
so he’s familiar with the playwright’s
uniquely jolting rhythms and the ironic,
half-articulate music of his conversa-
tions. Those pauses bloom with inter-
personal meaning and a kind of dread.
Zawe Ashton is particularly deft at using
the silences as ramps into and out of
sonorous line deliveries. At one point,
in the middle of an excruciating con-
versation, just before a deadly pause,
she sighs two words—“I see”—turning
them into a sad song’s final cadence. If
Lloyd’s staging creates a kind of des-
ert, the pauses are his crocuses—pale,
fragile, miraculous.
More simply, the pauses act as phrase
markers between graceful volleys of Brit-
ish-accented English speech. Michael
Goldstein, one of Pinter’s childhood best
friends and a lifelong intellectual inter-
locutor, put Pinter onto the composer
Leoš Janáček, whose string quartet “In-
timate Letters” tries to mimic spoken
Czech. Michael Billington, in his biog-
raphy of Pinter, suggests that this ex-
change, which eventually led the friends
to a discussion of Beethoven’s use of si-
lence, might have been one of several
sources of Pinter’s own pauses. (Another
feature of the show has a symphonic
touch: at center stage there’s a rotating
circle, with another moving ring around
it. Between scenes, the characters spin
through time, choreographing their ad-
justments of the furniture like Jamiro-
quai on his treadmill, sometimes mov-
ing in parallel and sometimes in wistful
counterpoint.) I can’t tell if Lloyd’s in-
terpretative minimalism makes “Betrayal”
more or less culturally British, but Pinter’s
words and tones—his native, brutal id-
iom—do shine through. Lloyd’s enjoy-
able, astringent experiment feels tran-
sitional, and plows new ground for
interpreter-directors of Pinter to come.“
E
ureka Day,” a new play written
by Jonathan Spector, directed by
Adrienne Campbell-Holt, and produced
by the company Colt Coeur (at Walker-
space), is, by contrast, so brilliantly yoked
to the current American moment—its
flighty politics, its deadly folly—that it
makes you want to jump out of your skin.
Eureka Day is a private elementary school
in Berkeley, California. On the walls
of the classroom—which, except for a
quick hospital visit, is the play’s only set—
are written hyper-progressive maxims:
“EVERYONE is welcome here”; “We
Are the Resistance”; “What does social
justice mean to you?”
The school is stewarded by an un-
bearably well-intentioned board of di-
rectors, which comes to decisions not by
way of democracy’s crudest tool—the
vote—but by searching, endlessly, through
so many squeaking, brightly colored
markers, for “consensus.” The head of
the school, a hippieish guy named Don
(Thomas Jay Ryan), reads quotes from
Rumi during meetings; Eli (Brian Wiles),
a rich ex-techster who won’t allow any-
body else to finish a sentence, is worried
about “othering” or “negating” potential
applicants with the Web site’s drop-down
menu of possible ethnicities. The whole
ethos of this quirky, notionally kind place
goes up in a nuclear cloud when some-
body catches the mumps, and a large
number of the parents reveal their op-
position to vaccinations.
The play’s most astonishingly accuratemoment comes when the board convenes
a live stream—over, of all mediums,
Facebook—in order to discuss the cri-
sis with the school’s parents. The board
bickers while, online, the comments sec-
tion turns into a free-for-all. The par-
ents trash one another like professional
wrestlers as the board members stam-
mer genteelly, swathing their similar
hostilities in H.R.-department-safe pas-
sive aggression. Emojis and insults and
near-threats keep coming until poor,
scandalized Don has to close his laptop
and scoot away, as if on the run from a
feral creature poised to bite. I’m still try-
ing to figure out how hard is appropri-
ate for a critic to laugh at the theatre;
this night, I made myself hoarse.
The core argument lives in the rela-
tionship between Carina (a perfectly
wary Elizabeth Carter), a newcomer to
the school and to the board, and Su-
zanne (Tina Benko), a founder of the
school who would rather see the place
burn than let it impinge on any of the
members’ personal preferences. During
their most vicious tête-à-tête, Suzanne
asks Carina why, if she’s so worried about
the commonweal, she sends her kid to
private school. Carina can’t really an-
swer, and therein lies Spector’s tough
point. “Eureka Day” shows how, despite
all our cushioned language and prac-
ticed maxims, “right-thinking” people
have lately inched dangerously close to
the limits of liberalism. Live and let live
won’t always do, and privacy isn’t nec-
essarily the highest good. As the electri-
cally funny Ryan’s Don says, with a help-
less wiggle of the body, “This is hard
stuff, folks. Let’s just all take a moment
to acknowledge that.” What he doesn’t
get is that words won’t make it easier. THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2019 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
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