CAPSULE REVIEW : A Look Back: Plays of Years Ago

Are we ready for this? Thirteen plays from the ‘50s and ‘60s, undiluted, unupdated, unmolested?

This writer is. A look back enhances looking ahead. And Edward Parone, who conceived and produced “50/60 Vision” at the Mark Taper Forum has been picky about which ones to include.

The first three--Harold Pinter’s “The Collection” and Samuel Beckett’s “Play” and “Krapp’s Last Tape”--kicked off the event at a press preview Tuesday, attended by an enthusiastic but smallish audience. Is anyone out there intimidated by these plays?

No need to be. The passage of time has only magnified their large quotient of humor, and changing theatrical conventions--new then, familiar now--have made them more accessible. Starting with Beckett’s 30-minute “Play.” What comedy could be more human than that of three people standing in their funerary urns, only their talking heads exposed, endlessly regurgitating the important events in their lives?

These dead persons were once in love or at least in lust. The man (John Nesci) is flanked by his mistress and his wife (Teri Garr and Gloria Mann). It’s nearly impossible to follow what they say, except that they say it three times and eventually you get it.

This is the laughter one chooses when one is beyond tears. The ruined old man at the center of “Krapp’s Last Tape” is still trying to figure out what hit him. Where did his youth, ambition, affirmation and energy all go? We hear their former presence in the arrogant timbre of his voice resurrected on the old spools on his battered reel-to-reel, as he sits disheveled in his disheveled room.

When it comes to Pinter, the interplay is more circumspect. In “The Collection,” we confront the instability of truth. James (Christopher Allport) has reason to believe that his wife Stella (Maria O’Brien) has fooled around with Bill (Michael Tulin), a young man who lives with an older man named Harry (Alan Oppenheimer).

A complete review runs in Thursday’s Calendar section.