Pink Banana rehabilitates Pinter’s “Hothouse”

Harold Pinter’s The Hothouse is one of the Nobel-winning playwright’s more neglected works. Written in 1958 and set aside until 1980, it’s never taken a prominent position in a body of work that includes well-known plays like The Birthday Party or Betrayal.

Pink Banana Theatre makes a strong case for its rehabilitation. The Milwaukee premiere of this masterfully blended dark comedy/chilling drama, led by director James Boland, is captivating from the moment the first flickering fluorescent snaps on, even as opacities intentional and unintentional cloud the play.

Pinter’s play focuses on the staff of an ambiguously defined “rest home.” Roote (Jim Huston), the head of the institution and a man near past his prime, discovers that one patient has given birth to a child, and charges his subordinates with finding the father.

That search quickly gets subsumed into an overarching power struggle that drives the play. Huston plays Roote as a man of another era, well past his prime and slipping into senility, madness or both.

Enter Roote’s subordinates, each with their own set of weapons to either overthrow him or maintain the status quo. Miss Cutts’ (Ellen Dunphy) are a praying mantis’ sexuality and dagger-sharp sarcasm. Lush’s (Rob Maass) are a glass of alcohol and the tempting suggestion of anarchic apathy. Gibbs (Tim Palacek), Roote’s right-hand man, uses the secretive nature of the labyrinthine bureaucracy itself.

The conflict – and play – can be disorienting. Mood and opinion shift in instants, as do the rules of the institution that Roote continually cites. And more disconcerting still, there’s more than the suggestion that Roote himself is the father of the nameless patient’s child, even as he rages about the culprit to his underlings. You never know where the characters stand, but their consistent inconsistencies are terribly fun to watch.

The play’s sardonic bent further enthralls. Dry humor saturates the play like black mold, ranging from the quick laughs after an expressionless Roote tosses a drink in Lush’s face – twice – to the long, drawn-out hilarity of an early scene where the institution’s animated, manic lockchecker Lamb (Harry Loeffler-Bell) painstakingly tries to engage Cutts in conversation, only to be met with steadfast, irritated silence and eyebrow raises as she does her crossword.

That levity keeps the play’s more aggressively grim moments from overpowering the play. The Hothouse’s darkest scene, an Orwellian bit where Gibbs and Cutts bring in Lamb for questioning, begins silly, with the hyperactive Lamb unwilling to sit in the chair and chasing the uptight Gibbs around the stage. But once they get him in the chair, a series of blaring reverbs, flashing lights and rapid-fire questions funneled into his headphones produce an absurdist terror, only intensified by a long silence only broken by Loeffler-Bell’s panicked cries and the intermission.

It, and the rest of the play, are especially jarring because of the extreme proximity of the seating to the stage. Boland’s set is only a few feet from the front row, maximizing the voyeuristic, uncomfortable feel of the play by putting the actors practically in your lap – at one point, a smashed Lush, knocked to the ground by Roote, nearly rolled onto my feet.

The one element of The Hothouse that jarred me in the wrong kind of way was the ending: a reverse deux ex machina that unravels and reroutes the play’s plot rather than neatly tying it up.

Its abruptness, paired with Boland’s decision to stage it as nothing but sound effects and a set change that isn’t even immediately apparent as being in-character, left me reeling, By the time I had the chance to appreciate the development, the play was basically over. Perhaps it’s a problem with script over staging, but Pink Banana got so much of The Hothouse right that it was disheartening to see such a well-performed, intuitive play end on such a haphazard note.

The Hothouse, also featuring Nate Press and Lori Morse, runs at Pink Banana’s new Arcade Theatre in the Underground Collaborative, on the lower level of the Grand Avenue Mall, 161 W. Wisconsin Ave. Shows are at 7:30 p.m. through Nov. 17, and tickets are $18 at the door or $15 in advance online.