No place like home in Harold Pinter's 'The Room'

Though written in 1957, Harold Pinter's "The Room" — his first produced script — might well be the best thing to see to understand the U.K.'s Brexit vote earlier this year. In Dado's staging for A Red Orchid Theatre, it's also a fine choice for those who seek seasonal chills without overt gore.

The play's origin myth — a chance encounter Pinter had with the famously flamboyant flaneur Quentin Crisp and a silent comic book-reading companion in a bedsit a couple of years earlier — belies its final execution. In place of a lavender-haired quipster, the decaying bedsit here is occupied by Rose (Kirsten Fitzgerald), a voluble middle-aged woman and apparent agoraphobe. At the beginning of the one-act, Rose is frying eggs and bacon for Bert (H.B. Ward), who silently thumbs through a magazine, ignoring her stream of questions and comments.

Many of these reinforce her belief that their room is a better place to be than the basement. "I don't know who lives down there now," she says. "Whoever it is, they're taking a big chance. Maybe they're foreigners." A visit from the landlord, Mr. Kidd (Anish Jethmalani), adds confusion rather than clarity — he claims to not know how many floors are in the house, while musing about his dead mother, who may have been "a Jewess" (in his phrase), and his also-deceased sister. He also tells Rose that her room used to be his.

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So who really owns the shabby sanctuary of the room? After Bert's departure, Rose's domain is invaded by a married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Sands (Dano Duran and Mierka Girten, respectively). Here Dado's staging moves from clammy minimalism to allegorical absurdism, with a dash of Monty Python-esque wit. (If you've seen the Python sketch about a couple's romantic date at home interrupted by a gaggle of crass strangers, you'll see similarities.) Duran's Mr. Sands sheds black feathers everywhere, while Girten (sporting a whimsical birds-nest hat in Kotryna Hilko's costume) affixes a bird knickknack to the stovepipe.

Arbiters of death, as in the Sands of Time? Figments of Rose's unsettled mind? Well, it's Pinter so of course no clear answer can be expected. But what is clear is that Rose's fear of the outside and of strangers — particularly foreigners — captures England's postwar identity crisis. (Rationing had only ended three years before Pinter wrote the play, which may account for the improbable amount of potatoes scattered all over the room.) Even the triangular platform housing Rose's comforting rocking chair moves around, suggesting that despite her claims of coziness for her little world, it's literally shifting under her feet. (Grant Sabin's flexible set, with its claustrophobic tilted pressed-tin ceiling, adds to the overall sense of clamminess and dislocation. )

The final encounter with the mysterious man in the basement, Riley (Jo Jo Brown), adds horror to the confusion. Badly scarred and apparently blind, Riley calls Rose "Sal" and tells her that her father wants her to come home. A call to the afterworld? A suggestion that Rose is "passing" as something that she is not, since Riley is not white?

"The Room" obviously points the direction for much of Pinter's later and best-known plays, such as "The Birthday Party," "The Homecoming" and "The Caretaker," where "home" is never the same as "haven" and mysterious strangers bring portents of possible doom.

Dado treats each section in a nearly musical way, each with its own tone — from the slightly off-kilter realism of the Rose-and-Bert opening to the comic-book menace of the invasion of the Sandses to the darker encounter with Riley. But Fitzgerald is the solid anchor here in the center of an admirably well-tuned cast. Her Rose's fears, veiled prejudices and suggestions of OCD (constantly rearranging the piles of potatoes) capture someone who hates to see her world invaded by others, no matter how dire it may be without them.

"You've got a chance in a place like this," she tells Bert. But does she really? This production leaves one with the vague but insistent feeling that shutting out the damp winds of change in favor of some idealized notion of being safer alone ultimately leaves us all shivering in the dark.

Kerry Reid is a freelance critic.

ctc-arts@chicagotribune.com

"The Room" - 3 Stars

When: Through Nov. 13

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Where: A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N. Wells St.

Running time: 70 minutes

Tickets: $30-$35 at 312-943-8722 or www.aredorchidtheatre.org

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