Turn back the clock

By structuring Betrayal in reverse-chronological order, Harold Pinter makes his most famous play into a study in foreshadowing. The drama chronicles a love affair, beginning some years after it’s over, with subsequent scenes turning back the clock until the play ends with the affair’s inception. Knowing the sad outcome of the adulterous romance, the audience gets to see spent emotions rekindle and, in effect, the bloom return to a rose.
PushPush Theater’s intimate performance space and simple sets nicely fit Pinter’s style, where the most powerful feelings typically go unsaid. Directed by Jim Peck, PushPush’s Betrayal has a couple of distracting elements, but it facilitates the audience in focusing on the undercurrents between the three characters, all of whom are effectively played.
Emma (Mary Lynn Owen) has been having an illicit relationship with Jerry (Frank Roberts), best friend of Emma’s husband Robert (Tim Habeger), but that’s only one of the betrayals that gives the play its title. In the first scene, Emma and Jerry meet for lunch, and Jerry is stung to learn that not only has Emma revealed their long-standing, long-ended affair to her husband, but that her husband had affairs of his own, about which Jerry knew nothing. Jerry’s so flustered, it’s as if the revealing of secrets is worse than any infidelity.
The following scene takes place later that night, with Jerry confessing his guilt to Robert, only to discover that Emma’s husband has known about them for years. Robert may be literature’s least sympathetic cuckold, matter-of-factly mentioning that he’s beaten his wife: “I simply felt like giving her a good bashing.” From his first appearance, Habeger consistently conveys his character’s icy-eyed ruthlessness, although you’re never sure if he’s cruel because Emma strayed, or if Emma strayed because he’s cruel.
Beginning by clearing away the deceits between Emma, Jerry and Robert, Betrayal then reconstructs them. We see Emma and Jerry meet at their “love nest” to give their flat-lining romance a mercy-killing, then during a scene set years earlier, we find them playing house at the same secret place, thrilled to be together. Or when Jerry visits Emma and Robert one evening, their innocent conversation barely conceals darker emotions, although you can’t be exactly sure where the tension comes from. But at least you’re clued into the subtext.
Betrayal is often considered Pinter’s “easiest” script, as he usually injects his people into situations or relationships that remain unknown, alien and sinister. For any Pinter play, a pause is not the same thing as silence, and a line like, “You read Yeats once,” can be rife with implication. Not to perpetuate a stereotype, but the playwright’s emotional constriction and the Englishness of his characters and settings seem to go hand-in-hand.
The Push-Push production finds more humor here than you’d expect from Pinter. In the play’s first moments, Emma discretely checks her underarm while nervously waiting for Jerry’s arrival. As Jerry, Roberts can be amusingly befuddled yet oddly romantic, as if this indiscretion is the boldest he’s ever been in his life. Despite violating the confidence of his best friend, Roberts interprets Jerry as an innocent.
The production’s smallest details tend to be magnified, since, in a way, there’s so little of the show: The sentences tend to be short, and the set consists of little more than two small chairs and a table. When Emma clutches Robert’s shirt in an embrace, for instance, it represents all sorts of repressed passions. But you can be all too aware of the decision to have Shelby Hofer (who plays an exuberant Italian waitress at one point) barge in to begin rearranging the props just before each scene ends, providing a kind of “two-minute warning” that makes you unnecessarily aware of the play’s theatricality.
Less significantly, you can’t help but notice the use of the song “Just One of Those Things” between each scene, or the way the characters booze it up nearly non-stop, suggesting that alcohol is both a sop and a shield to these supposedly cultured individuals. PushPush’s effectively enigmatic treatment of Pinter’s classic brings to mind one of Oscar Wilde’s quips that says, “Work is the curse of the drinking class.”
Betrayal plays through Nov. 18 at PushPush Theater, 1123 Zonolite Road, Suite 3, with performances at 8 p.m. Wed.-Sat. and 7 p.m. Sun. $10-$15. 404-892-7876.