Many feel that Harold Pinter is a “difficult” playwright and, if so, it is probably because he writes about a very difficult thing, understanding human beings and observing them trying to understand each other. His work is acutely aware of the insufficiency of language to faithfully express our identity and experience and the tenuous relationship between the truth of events and the contrivance of interpretation and statement.  

For actors, his work requires the highest level of fidelity to characters who largely exist beneath the text and to conflicts and relationships that define subtly shifting interpersonal dynamics. Many have remarked on the importance of silence in Pinter’s plays, or rather the importance of unsaid things given a context of great meaning, and it is always a bit surprising to find such tension and dramatic intensity in plays that rarely have a great deal of physical action. A Nobel Prize-winner, Pinter is a profoundly important playwright and it is a genuine gift to Seattle that a group of distinguished artists have founded a new theater company, the Shadow and Light Theatre, specifically to produce his work. Their first production of a pair of substantial one-acts, “Ashes to Ashes” and “A Kind of Alaska” is an impressive accomplishment and an exciting promise of the contribution they can make.

In “A Kind of Alaska” a woman, Deborah, is restored to consciousness after being asleep for nearly three decades, the victim of a curious brain-chemical imbalance that afflicted up to five million people between 1916 and 1926, and which was only treatable with the injection of the drug L-Dopa in the 1960’s. That re-emergence into a disorienting present was unimaginably difficult for the patient to comprehend, and often short-lived before they returned to their unconscious, frozen state. Oliver Sacks wrote about the phenomena in his book, “Awakenings” which was also made into a major film.  

Pinter takes us inside the room where this woman has been lying abed for all those years on the day that her faithful physician, Dr. Hornby, brings her back to her future. Her now middle-aged sister, Pauline, tries to catch her up on what has happened in the world during her absence, what has happened to the family she left as a young girl, and what has happened to her body while her mind has been in stasis. Nothing about this woman’s purloined life is easily accepted by anyone, and the gradual comprehension of Deborah’s circumstance is an exquisite balance of discovery, definition and loss. Pinter has a great deal to say about the interstices of memory, aging, acceptance and denial, all within a very brief window of one woman’s full-consciousness, as perhaps our own lives are realized in just such a brief window. 

Suzanne Bouchard is stunning as Deborah, introducing us to the woman and to her situation with precise eye movements, the only movement of her body, suddenly seeing a world of detail that had been, for all those years, “a hall of glass with a dripping tap.” From the first line, “Something is happening” she gradually and exactingly moves from her mind into a physical world, from childhood to this something else, from non-being to an incomprehensible existence. What she cannot accept of her sister’s physical changes, embodied in a dignified and immensely sad performance by Kimberly King, is exactly what she cannot face in her own life. She will not look in a mirror, and most likely would not recognize what was there if she did. As the physician who has cared for her over three decades, Frank Corrado is an entirely professional man, but we can see in his delicate guidance that he has deep feelings for this woman whose life has inhabited his, perhaps more than it has inhabited hers, for so very long.  

The production, superbly directed by Victor Pappas, is gripping and quietly moving, exactly right for the intimate scale of the Bullitt Theatre at ACT. The second play, “Ashes to Ashes” has the same high quality of performance and interpretation. 

In “Ashes to Ashes” we are with a married couple, Rebecca (Suzanne Bouchard) and Devlin (Frank Corrado) as dark secrets of a terrible past are revealed, secrets which may or may not be true but are nonetheless defining of who these two people are and what their relationship is. It is a play about the violence of interpersonal power and the ways in which our creation of a story of our history often becomes our history. Both actors are entirely different people in this play, of course, but the control of the material and the technical expertise of their performance is the same. In this play, Pinter’s extraordinarily stylized language creates ever-shifting layers of reality and invention, revelation and imagination, leaving us to decide for ourselves what of these people we believe, and why. 

Shadow and Light is a theatrical gift to Seattle and they deserve the enthusiastic support of an audience interested in dramatic writing on the highest, most challenging level, performed by professional artists of enormous sensitivity, insight and accomplishment. 

PICTURED ABOVE: Suzanne Bouchard and Frank Corrado in "A Kind of Alaska". Shadow and Light Theatre at ACT.
PHOTO BY: Chris Bennion.