Pink Banana’s “Hothouse” set to fire up Milwaukee

There are lots of reasons why James Boland is excited to direct Pink Banana Theatre’s production of The Hothouse, opening Thursday. It’s the Milwaukee premiere of the neglected Harold Pinter work, in a city that he says neglects the Nobel-winning playwright to begin with. There’s a blend of ominous menace and black comedy to the play that’s hard to find elsewhere. He thinks its exploration of bureaucratic ineffectiveness and institutional corruption is startlingly fitting to our modern political and social climate, even though the play was written in 1958 and first produced in 1980.

The reason he keeps coming back to, though, is because the open-ended play’s been such a challenge and joy for him and the cast to interpret – and because he knows the audience won’t be able to see the show without having to think about at it in much the same way.

“You shouldn’t just be asleep and entertained with theater,” Boland said. “You should have to think. This play requires you to think.”

At the very least, the play’s deliberate ambiguities and opacities will force the audience to sit up and pay attention. The Hothouse depicts staffers in an institution alternately referred to as a “rest house” or “sanitorium.” Roote (Jim Huston), the man in charge, discovers one of the patients has been killed and another impregnated, and is obligated to hunt down the person responsible.

But Boland said Roote’s motivation is based on politics over patient well-being. He and the staff refer to them by numerical designations, not names, and at one point Roote demands a subordinate shut off the building’s heat, even after he’s told the upper floors where the patients live will get deathly cold as a result.

“It doesn’t matter to him if patients are inconvenienced or even die,” Boland said. “The people with power get what they want.”

Roote’s relationship is little better with his underlings, including right-hand man Gibbs (Tim Palecek) and Miss Cutts (Ellen Dunphy), their shared lover. But when the power structure is destabilized and those underlings begin to supplant him, they follow his pattern of behavior. How people with power treat those with less or none – and how those actions don’t change when those in power do – is a key theme Boland and the cast latched onto.

Other elements weren’t so easy to come by. Boland said Pinter’s dialogue requires a cast to do their own exploration of the script’s meaning; no two productions will be exactly alike. But once they worked out an interpretation that made sense, they stuck with it. “We’ve tried to be as clear with the meaning of the play and dialogue once we figured out what we wanted,” Boland said.

Also challenging: The Hothouse is easily as dark as Pinter’s more famous plays, like The Birthday Party or Betrayal, but it’s got a satirical, black comic edge that is equally necessary. Boland said he had the cast focus on the comedy first, since the play’s sinister elements would come through no matter what they did. He thinks the proportions are right, but expects the audience to be more than a little unsettled by the results: “It’s going to take a while for the audience to realize they can laugh.”

But as complicated as Pinter’s play can be, Boland said the reason he’s so enthralled by it – and Pinter in general – is how the playwright can take the most basic phrase or archetype and give it depth and nuance. “Pinter’s the best at taking a simple line and putting it different places and having it mean something different each time,” Boland said. “He takes the mundane and elevates it.”

Pink Banana’s production of Harold Pinter’s The Hothouse, also featuring Robb Maass, Nate Press, Harry Loeffler-Bell and Lori Morse, will run Nov. 1 to 17; all shows are at 7:30 p.m. and tickets are $18 at the door, $15 in advance online. Performances take place at Pink Banana’s new Arcade Theater in the Underground Collaborative, located on the lower level of the Plankinton Building at Grand Avenue Mall, 161 W. Wisconsin Ave.