STAGE REVIEW : PINTER’S ‘OTHER PLACES’ TURNS UP IN RIGHT PLACE

It was bound to happen.

Someone had to discover the raw power of Harold Pinter’s “One for the Road.” It comes to us as the culmination of “Other Places,” a triple bill of recent Pinter one-acts that also includes “A Kind of Alaska” and “Victoria Station.” All are new to Los Angeles.

MZH Productions (Lowell Harris, Neil Hunt, Inga Swenson) has come up with a sinewy duplication of a bill that had been successfully staged last spring in London.

The real wonder is that it took the plays this long to get here.

“Other Places” is new wine--Pinter vintage ’82 and ’84. It is also crisper, clearer Pinter, overtly political and unambiguous in “One for the Road” and--in “Victoria Station”--dead-on, deadpan-funny.

Call it comedy of nerves.

But doing Pinter is one thing and doing Pinter effectively another. The profound pleasure at the Odyssey, where “Other Places” just opened, is watching director Ethan D. Silverman and his actors (all of them English, innately so in their visceral understanding of these pieces) do a smashing job.

“A Kind of Alaska” takes its cue from Dr. Oliver Sacks’ “Awakenings,” a fascinating collection of studies of patients with encephalitis lethargica, the mysterious sleeping sickness that became prevalent near the end of World War I and was only relieved by the discovery of the drug L-Dopa.

Lucy Gutteridge is Deborah, a sleeping beauty who slipped into her trance-like state at the age of 12 and “wakes up” 29 years later unaware of the passage of any time at all. How do you tell a preteen that she has slept through the most crucial years of her life and become a child/woman of 41?

The play is about the enormity of this revelation and Deborah’s complex reaction to it: confronting a sister (Elizabeth Coulter) who has grown middle-aged; a doctor (Ian Abercrombie) who’s a total stranger, though he has “lived” with her in a sense far more real than living with his wife; the truth about parents aging or dead; worst of all, the truth about biological clocks that simply never stopped ticking.

Gutteridge, Abercrombie and Coulter are equally superb in the outbursts and restraints of these difficult responses, more terse and urgent in Pinter, where silence speaks volumes, than almost anywhere else in dramatic literature.

No wonder “Victoria Station” comes as a relief after such a tense 40 minutes, but make no mistake: Its comedy is predicated on exasperation--a negative emotion that never strays far from violence. As we listen to the quite incredible conversation between his dispatcher (Abercrombie, again astonishing) and the driver of cab 274 (Barry Philips, a likable dimwit), the mounting absurdity makes us laugh and makes us crazy.

Philips is the foil, a nerd who doesn’t have a clear sense of what London is, where he is in it, what driving a taxi might be or, for that matter, any sense of life itself.

Abercrombie gets tied up in progressive knots of incredulity listening to this jerk, which is incisively comical. But we miss an essential edge of real danger when his full-blown anger still leaves us laughing rather than ill at ease, wondering about his next move.

No such ambiguity exists in “One for the Road,” the evening’s bludgeon and in many ways a proclamation for the hitherto more politically closeted Pinter. In its series of intensely elliptical, Kafkaesque duologues between a nameless interrogator and his detainees in an unnamed country, the tension is cool, clear, unimpeded, direct as an arrow--and horrific. It is a heavy indictment of totalitarianism in all its permutations, not the least of which is religious dogma perverted to suit government policies.

Philips and Coulter as the victims are again impressive, most eloquent in what they leave unsaid. Neil Hunt’s interrogator is taut as a spring--a badger prowling for the kill. Seth Thompson completed the cast Sunday as the 7-year-old son of the older prisoners. (He alternates with Jason Greenberg.)

Above all, in contemplating the achievement of “Other Places,” one must admire the exceptional work of director Silverman, unafraid of spareness and understatement. No performance exists in a vacuum. The depth, range, delicacy and leanness of the actors’ portrayals, J. Allen Highfill’s subdued costumes, Russell Pyle’s white lighting and minimal settings--offset by a clinically tiled floor and countless venetian blinds (symbolizing the large areas of concealment in all of our lives?)--honor the word Pinteresque. They add up to an extremely deft, discomforting, dexterous production.

Performances at 12111 Ohio St. (near Bundy) in West Los Angeles run Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8:30 p.m., Sundays 7:30 p.m., until May 25 (213-826-1626).