Pinter of ‘Old Times’

Harold Pinter’s plays are built on two levels. A ground floor of realism sits atop a basement of mystery and menace. American productions tend to have more trouble portraying the inhabitants of those quintessentially English rooms than they do capturing the ambiguous terrors lurking beneath them.

In the Lost Studio staging of “Old Times,” Pinter’s 1971 classic about a British filmmaker’s fraught meeting with his enigmatic wife’s old roommate, who shows up two decades later at the couple’s chicly redone farmhouse, the cast at least has the right retro look. In particular, Dan Cowan’s Deeley has a debonair style (kudos to costume designer Esther Rydell) that hints at the movie director’s bohemian London existence before marriage and early middle age brought him to a quieter life in the country.

Directed by John Pleshette, whose acclaimed productions of “Moonlight,” “No Man’s Land” and “The Caretaker” make him something of a Pinter specialist, the drama is most convincingly brought to life during the author’s famous pauses and silences. Unfortunately, when the actors speak Pinter’s score (“dialogue” doesn’t quite do it justice), they’re less confident in their demeanor.

Cowan tries his best to seem natural, but his well-chosen clothes and shaken martinis aren’t enough to hide a fuzzy characterization. And Cerris Morgan-Moyer, who plays the intruding Anna, strikes a few oddly contemporary notes as the long-lost friend with an unresolved (and possibly lesbian) attachment to Deeley’s better half.

As the contested object of desire, Cecelia Specht’s Kate has more moods than words, which may explain why she’s the most believable figure onstage. She carefully preserves her feminine inscrutability, never allowing her husband and former flat-mate know what satisfaction she derives from their company.

The ensuing competition for possession of Kate takes place through Deeley and Anna’s surreally charged chit-chat. Simple questions swell with erotic suspicion, and even lyrics of half-forgotten songs are recollected in a fierce game of one-upmanship.

Pinter’s perennial themes are on scintillating display -- the malleability of reality through subjective memory, the territorial instincts that modern civility can’t quite conceal and the Oedipal helplessness of men, who are as bewildered as they are bewitched by the female other.

“Old Times,” like the past itself, never fully discloses its meaning. You’re meant to be left bobbing in a sea of uncertainty. Although not all the identity issues in Pleshette’s production are existential -- a few are the product of the ensemble’s occasional awkwardness -- the essential aloneness of every lover, and would-be lover, painfully pierces through.

-- Charles McNulty

“Old Times,” Lost Studio Theatre, 130 S. La Brea Ave., Hollywood. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 4 p.m. Sundays. Ends April 13. Tickets: $20. (800) 595-4849. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

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David J stages Edie Sedgwick

When David Bowie kills someone to your song, rock immortality is pretty much a given. Now David J of Bauhaus, whose “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” scored the goth shriek opening of “The Hunger,” turns his sights on another member of the undead in “Silver for Gold (The Odyssey of Edie Sedgwick).”

A stripped-down Met Theatre main stage becomes a Chelsea Hotel room in Purgatory, where Edie (Monique Jenkinson) recounts her journey from sheltered Santa Barbara princess to anorexic icon, as a mythical equine being (Steven Oliver Price) guides her to transcendence. On platforms above them, the Silver for Gold band, featuring David J and three others, plays a sequence of Edie-inspired songs with titles like “Chain Smoking the Memories” and “O.D. Royale.”

This is concept album as theater event, merging David J’s melancholy erotics with a visual sensibility drawn from Jean Cocteau and the tatty glamour of the Factory. As Edie, Jenkinson is a wry, graceful presence, but she struggles to activate the brief anecdotes David J has strung together. Ultimately, she seems too resilient and aware to evoke the despair that drove Sedgwick (and two of her brothers) to early deaths. David J’s curiously Warholian presence -- watchful stillness behind shades -- inadvertently upstages his leading lady, and you feel he’s yet to master how to project his own cool onto another performer.

“Silver for Gold” begins and ends with two of the more striking images I’ve seen on an L.A. stage, but the evening has yet to find the kind of thematic clarity and momentum it needs to land emotionally. “Spring Awakening” proved rock stars can draw bright young things to a musical, in part because Duncan Sheik had the seasoned stage expertise of Michael Mayer and Bill T. Jones in his corner. If David J can leverage some major talent to this project, he could become the next guitar hero to cross over to theater.

-- Charlotte Stoudt

“Silver for Gold (The Odyssey of Edie Sedgwick)” The Met Theatre, 1089 N. Oxford Ave., Hollywood. 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday. $20. Ends March 16. (323) 960-7846 Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.

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Dilemma of the wronged woman

If you find out your husband has been unfaithful, should you forgive -- or flee? That’s the quandary that faces Elly (Johanna McKay), the frustrated, wronged wife in Alexandra Gersten’s comedy-drama, “My Thing of Love,” now being presented by the Syzygy Theatre Group at the GTC Burbank.

Elly and her husband, Jack (Josh Randall), have two daughters, a suburban home and a faltering marriage. Elly, a stay-at-home mom, learns that Jack is having an affair with the much younger Kelly (Heather Fox). Not that Jack wants to break up his marriage. Chafing within the bonds of his middle-class lifestyle, he just wants a little adventure. However, whether he can reassemble the pieces of Elly’s shattered trust is an open question.

If that sounds like a stock premise, it is, but Gersten gives a fierce, funny spin to the familiar. Not that the play is faultless. A stilted and misplaced scene featuring Elly, Kelly and an eccentric school counselor (John Schumacher) lapses into sitcom silliness -- a baffling atonal lapse in Gersten’s otherwise melodious dialogue.

The show’s superb technical elements -- Tom Buderwitz’s subtly cluttered set, David B. Marling’s sound, Dan Jenkins’ lighting and Sherry Linnell’s costumes -- all add to the tensely charged atmosphere of fast-unraveling domesticity.

In an optimum staging, director Darin Anthony and his gifted cast mine both the pathos and hilarity of their material.

More feckless than villainous, Randall’s Jack conveniently ignores the pain he’s inflicting on both women in his life, while Fox captures the selfishness beneath Kelly’s deceptive dizziness. In the standout turn of the show, McKay invests Elly with an acerbic matter-of-factness that is memorable. Full of pith, vinegar and hardy love, her Elly is a heroine for our times.

-- F. Kathleen Foley

“My Thing of Love,” GTC Burbank, 1111-B W. Olive Ave. (in George Izay Park), Burbank. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. Also 8 p.m. Thursday March 27. Ends April 5. $20. (800) 838-3006. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.

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Abridged ‘Crime’ isn’t criminal

Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” isn’t what you would call an easy fit for the stage. The woolly mammoth of a novel features an epic cast of characters and a plot that involves murder, poverty and lost faith. Actors Co-op’s 90-minute production takes a machete to the literary beast, and the results are messy. But there are moments of surreal and penetrating beauty that make this adaptation a mesmerizing failure to watch.

One of those moments occurs at the very beginning: Raskolnikov (Ben Hunter) is on his knees in prayer-like contemplation as a single spotlight burns a silhouette of his body into the smoky air. This stark image unifies body and spirit in a way that haunts the rest of this tragic story. A tormented writer, Raskolnikov lives in abject poverty in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg. A detective (Paul Witten) suspects him of murdering an elderly pawnshop worker and her daughter, prompting a series of visits to the writer’s squalid apartment.

The production, which uses an adaptation by Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus, flashes back and forth between the investigation and Raskolnikov’s past. The transitions are clumsy and often disorienting, especially because all of the young female roles are played by one actress (Suzanne Friedline), who wears the same dress throughout the play. Director Ken Sawyer makes the most of the Crossley Theatre’s tiny stage, but he can’t generate much momentum from the compacted narrative. The play retains the novel’s major plot points minus any sense of psychological urgency.

Audiences will find more to savor in the production’s visual flourishes, which are modest but effective at externalizing Raskolnikov’s mind-soul schism. A shirt splattered in red (is it paint or blood?) creates a chilling moment of ambiguity between Raskolnikov and the detective. Later, we get a taste of actual violence during a flashback to the murder, which is powerfully staged using strategic bursts of light. The displays of visual panache pump some much-needed creative blood into this anemic adaptation.

-- David Ng

“Crime and Punishment,” The Crossley Theatre, 1760 N. Gower St., Hollywood. 8 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. Sundays. Ends April 13. $20-$30. (323) 462-8460. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.