Eerie ‘Dumb Waiter’ Has Life of Its Own

Gus and Ben need a vacation. The two sheepishly obedient hit men in Harold Pinter’s landmark one-act, “The Dumb Waiter,” suffer from strained nerves. Like Beckett’s Didi and Gogo, they are waiting, somewhat dumbly, not for a personage like Godot but for their next job. Their last “assignment”--a woman--unhinged both of them. Gus noticed that “they don’t seem to hold together like men . . . women.”

Waiting in a dank basement apartment, the men receive mysterious messages that only increase their tension. And the tenser they get, the more insignificant they seem and the funnier the play becomes. This 1960 work may no longer be as obscure as it once was thought, but director Susannah Elliott Knight shows it to be taut, fraught and comic in her clean and elegant production at the Lee Strasberg Theatre.

Knight and her two actors are all direct from the Royal Shakespeare Company. The men are terrific foils--Ben (Dominic Carter) is a bulldog to Mark Gillis’ Gus, who is a crane--leaner, looser, more boyish. Carter has an up-to-date menace; with his shaved head and furrowed brow, he looks fresh out of “Trainspotting.” Gillis is less the ruffian, more the undertaker’s son. What little power they have is awesome--they kill people--but their own cluelessness makes them everymen, stripped of any sentimental adornment playwrights usually attach to everymen.

First, an envelope with matches is slipped under the door. Matches could be helpful. The men would like some tea. But Gus, the de facto second, discovers there’s no gas in the tiny, grimy kitchen--so the matches metamorphosize from a gift to a taunt. Someone’s playing a cosmic joke on their nerves. Worse, there’s nothing to do. Ben keeps reading the same paper over and over. But wait--what’s this box in the wall? A clanky old dumbwaiter, from some former, more civilized time when things made sense and workers understood the nature of the work they performed. The dumbwaiter starts delivering messages to them.

Their reaction to it is dominated by a frantic need to obey. At first, the dumbwaiter’s demands lie ingeniously between reasonable and eccentric. “Soup of the day. Liver and onions. Jam tart.” The orders grow ornate and indecipherable: “Macaroni pastitsio. Ormitha macarounada.” Later, they are sharp. “Scampi!” The men are as incapable of understanding why these things are being asked for as they are of fulfilling the orders. The dumbwaiter seems to mock their own hunger.

For anyone who’s never seen this odd and important play, now is the time. Carter and Gillis are both wonderfully restrained, whether in their outrage or their befuddlement. This “Dumb Waiter” is far from clanky; it’s precise, efficient and eerie, human and funny.

* “The Dumb Waiter,” Lee Strasberg Theatre, 7936 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, Wednesday-Saturday, 8 p.m. Ends Nov. 8. $15. (213) 650-7777.