Bummed

GOOD ACTING OFTEN GETS WASTED in a bad play and that tragedy occurs in the Class Act Production's staging of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker, currently at the Lyric Stage Theater in Boston. Pre performances by the three-woman cast are high powered and believable, yet the characters they play are one dimensional and difficult to understand.

Originally written for three men, this adaptation for women depicts the lives of two sisters and an interloping bum who disrupts their mundane lives and relationships to each other. Although each actress delves into her character and moulds a clearly defined personality filled with idiosyncracies, the script does not enable them to develop fully into a person with whom the audience can identify. Not only are the characters confined physically in the one room where the play takes place, but they are also limited mentally by the sketchy world Pinter creates for them.

The Caretaker's plot centers around a bum named May Davies (Faith Justice) who is taken in by one of the sisters. Aston (Sandra Shipley) who collects junk and seems slightly moronic. The other sister, Mick (Pamela Dritt Knickrehm) is a highly volatile punkish woman who is dissatisfied with her sister's ineffectuality in making only one of their large house habitable. The bum works her way into the sisters' lives and gradually becomes more selfish and demanding of the sisters as time passes. Since nothing really happens in the women's lives even after the bum moves in, the play depicts a series of conversations and confrontations between the women. Helping their dialogues are their excellent Cockney accents (easiest for Sandra Shipley, who is English).

The play's long duration (two and three quarter hours) contributes to the audience's frustration as the play's loosely linked series of scenes progress very slowly. All three women live in their own unsuccessful worlds which cannot sustain any interaction when forced to allow others to enter. After she takes in the bum, Aston's altruism causes her to suffer painful flashbacks of her past in a mental hospital and to recall her inability to deal with people. Shipley creates a very neurotic and tense Aston who has tremendous difficulty finishing thoughts. Her taut facial expressions constantly match her nervous and fidgety personality. Shipley has many opportunities to reveal her feelings to the audience, most notably in a long monologue when she describes her experiences in the mental hospital with electric shock treatments. She is able to effectively display her character's anger and frustration when trying to do anything productive.

ALTHOUGH PAMELA DRITT KNICKREHM has less of a chance to develop Mick, she effectively presents a physically menacing woman. Mick is tough and apparently insensitive as the dreams of succeeding in the world which has little room for her passive sister. Knickrehm's energetic performance never wanes as we watch her burgeoning dissatisfaction with her sister once the tramp urges her to take over the house. Knickrehm has a tremendous physical presence; tall and very thin, she carouses the stage wearing bright red and black clothes with dark eye makeup. Her sensual appearance and movements become aroused when she feels her chances for happiness are threatened.

The oppressed worlds in which the characters live have no redeeming qualities, and consequently the audience leaves the play dissatisfied as if the play wright had no theme in mind when he wrote the play and ended up in creating merely a mood piece. It seems to end in exactly the same place it started, coming to no conclusion about the character's futures.

Justice's bum epitomizes the futility prevalent throughout The Caretaker Justice portrays a derelict who seems emasculated in the brutal world. Her filthiness complements her undeveloped personality and her selfishness seems ill suited to her poverty-stricken position in society.

Pinter's vision of an oppressive world comes through in The Caretaker's staging, which takes up most of the space in the theater. Surrounded on three sides by the audience, the characters employ all sections of the stage. The actresses make excellent use of the props and the stage even when the audience is one foot away from their faces, they never blink out of character. Their costumes match their personalities, which are intense and never letting up.

But despite the excellent staging of the play, everything seems diluted by the incomprehensible material. The plot lacks coherence as we question why the characters' lives are so low and slovenly. The world outside their one room is hazy and vague so we don't feel the oppressive world Pinter tries so hard to create. And in the end we really don't feel as if we have entered their lives because their lives are so inconsequential and difficult to penetrate.