STAGE REVIEW : Two Harold Pinter One-Act Plays at the Waterfront Stage

Like most people who live long enough, great playwrights carry baggage around with them--some of which they’re not responsible for.

Harold Pinter’s particular baggage, more a problem in the States than in his native England, is a reputation for heaviness and his refusal to pin matters down. As baggage goes, Pinter’s is downright un-American.

Some U.S. actors and directors confess that they won’t touch him. What to do with all those pauses and absurdities and silences? How silent? And for how long?

Pinter himself showed how misguided much of this was when he staged his “Old Times” at the Henry Fonda four years ago. Listeners could hear that there were words in those silences, and they were often funny.

That was a non-American production, though. And some of his work, like his spare one-acts, “Silence” and “Landscape,” is seldom funny. The word that a local group, the Aresis Ensemble, was staging this pair at their Waterfront Stage didn’t exactly quicken the heart.

So it’s nice to report that some domestic actors can pick up Pinter, throw away the nonsense baggage, and carry him somewhere. For a small theater, the Waterfront has a big stage, but directors Charles Duncombe Jr.’s (“Silence”) and Kevin McMahon’s (“Landscape”) actors fill it with well-spoken words, as well as unspoken ones.

McMahon’s duo of Strawn Bovee and Richard Courtney as “Landscape’s” estranged spouses and ex-servants interplay almost perfectly with each other. She is lost in the memory of a past love, which doesn’t include her husband. While she sits in a slender rocking chair, he attempts eye contact with her over an enormously thick work table.

The husband is all work, with little time out for feelings, which makes the wife’s attempt at memory--the great quest in all of Pinter’s work--all the more understandable and desperate.

Bovee wears the mantle of weariness, but not so much that she can’t rise to grasp a thought that might refresh her soul. Courtney, looking like a burly seaman, couldn’t be more at visual and verbal odds; yet the contrast isn’t a black-and-white cartoon, but a theatricalization of how far couples can drift from each other.

Duncombe’s “Silence” is nearly as good, but Sherry Landau’s Ellen feels the Pinter baggage too much. She plays a woman in the middle, bounded on each side by her two past lovers (the older Harvey Solin, the younger Lawrence Levy, all caught in Kevin Graves’ beautiful, harsh pools of light). If the strategy is to suggest Ellen being in an emotional straitjacket now that she is without a sexual Other, Duncombe and Landau push the idea too far.

The men, though, are powerfully real. Solin makes us think of all sorts of dark and wonderful things for his character: this moment, he’s a father substitute, and loving it; next moment, he’s painfully lonely, and she’s his last chance. Levy looks like a thoughtful guy on the prowl, and lets the contradictions that description suggests come through the words. All the clues to Pinter are in the words, and the Aresis people have done some good detective work.

At 250 Santa Monica Pier, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Re-opens Jan. 9, through Jan. 17. Tickets: $10; (213) 393-6672.