Belarus Free Theatre's "Being Harold Pinter'

On a cold, snowy Wednesday evening this past week, dozens of people huddled in the drafty lobby of the tiny La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in downtown New York. They had braved the drifts, the subway delays and the icy sidewalks to journey to the East Village and queue for tickets to a performance of Being Harold Pinter by the Belarus Free Theatre Company.

Some of us had waited more than two hours. The production had been sold out for days after rave reviews, and would run only until Sunday, so expectations ran high. At 6:59, a minute before curtain, these hopefuls were admitted into the 99-seat theater. I was lucky to have been second in the line. As we entered, we lucky few congratulated each other for our fortitude and tenacity.

Then we watched the play and were appropriately humbled. What do we American theatergoers know of courage or perseverance?

Being Harold Pinter is the unique creation of a theater company whose members literally had to escape under cover from Belarus, the last remaining despotic dictatorship in Eastern Europe, in order to come to New York to appear in the Festival. The description of their journey— changing trucks and cars to avoid the state police— rivals any plot of the recent Bourne films. (One member of the troupe was arrested last month following massive street protests in Minsk against the rigged re-election of Aleksandr Lukashenko, the state's ruler, and jailed under inhumane conditions until New Year's Eve.)

Going underground

Since its founding in 2005 as an artistic expression of resistance, the Belarus Free Theatre has been routinely censored, persecuted and denied official registration, facilities or permission to perform. Accordingly, the company has gone underground, and has survived despite constant harassment.

Its productions are never publicized for fear of retaliation (several company members and their relatives have already lost their day jobs). Its audience members are notified by text messages and escorted by company members to secret performance sites (basements, private apartments) in Minsk or the surrounding countryside.

The company's co-founders are the playwright Nikolai Khalezin and his wife, Natalia Kolyada, a producer and human rights activist; their troupe consists of ten actors, a dramaturg and a six-person production staff. To date, the company has produced seven works and has performed to more than 5,000 people in Belarus.

"It's a company that is prepared to die for their work", says Fritzie Brown, executive director of CEC ArtsLink, the American philanthropic organization that has sponsored some of the troupe's international travel.

Solidarity from Stoppard

The Belarus Free Theatre first attracted international notice in 2007 when it performed Being Harold Pinter in Leeds, England, where the playwright was receiving an honorary doctorate from Leeds University. The company used the opportunity to disseminate information about the repressive conditions in Belarus.

Playwrights Tom Stoppard, the troupe's patron, and playwright/statesman Vaclav Havel have rallied behind them, offering solidarity and support"“ as did Pinter, before his death. Last year the company members were able to travel to London to perform several of their works at the Young Vic, where admiration for the art and for their courage grew.

And now they've come to New York with this production, providing unique insight into Pinter's work as well as transforming Pinter's plays into a cry for attention to what is happening in their own part of the world. In the process, they are establishing a model of what political theater really means.

Pinter's Nobel speech

The framing structure of the play, performed by seven actors on a bare stage, consists of the Nobel Prize speech that Harold Pinter delivered in Stockholm in 2005. It's a powerful speech, ranging from his process of writing for the stage and his sources of inspiration to a passionate indictment of U.S. foreign policy to reflections on the essence of political theater. Within the speech's framework, the company then breaks out to perform excerpts from a number of Pinter's plays, including Mountain Language, One for the Road, The Homecoming, Old Times and Ashes to Ashes.

The stark mise-en-scène offers only a few set elements (four chairs at each corner and, upstage, four apples placed on cubes). The actors are clad in severe black and white "“ red being the only accent color offered by the seat cushions and the fruit. At stage center is a cane, which becomes the unifying metaphor for power, violence and abuse, both in Pinter's plays and in the actors' reality.

Violent images

The play begins with an actor portraying Pinter, holding that cane and telling of a fall he took on the sidewalk shortly before the Nobel Prize was announced. Another actor takes a spray can and splashes blood red over the Pinter-impersonator's face. It's a jolting, violent image, and a harbinger of other vivid and violent ones to come.

What follows is a collage of text from the Nobel speech and scenes from Pinter's plays. "There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal," the Pinter-impersonator begins, quoting from the Nobel speech, "nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false."

That leitmotif"“ what is true and what is false in relationships between human beings, between family members, between the individual and the state— is illustrated in the subsequent scenes. An interchange between father and son from The Homecoming becomes sadistic and violent. An ordinary conversation between a man and a woman, from Ashes to Ashes, becomes a frightening interrogation.

Suffocating in plastic

As scene follows scene, Pinter's dark view of a dangerous world filled with crimes against humanity is revealed. The inventory includes political torture, men's cruelty to women, adults' cruelty to children, the tyranny of the state, the mendacity of religion, and the viciousness of anti-Semitism.

These are dramatized in arresting, unforgettable images, such as one following Pinter's narrative from his Nobel speech on how his characters take form in his imagination. A huge transparent plastic sheet is produced onstage, covering the entire company (see photo above). As the actors writhe beneath it, open-mouthed, clawing at the sheet that is suffocating them, stifling their voices, we see a terrifying image of "stillbirth" in art, representing what these actors are experiencing in their own country.

Equally compelling is a political-religious image, as a naked, blindfolded actor is impaled on the cane, while his tormenters circle, taunt and interrogate him in a symbolic crucifixion of the artist.

In the anguished finale, the play text segues from Pinter's own words into verbatim reports of political abuse from Belarusian's themselves. The metamorphosis is seamless.

Pinter's elusive meaning

I've always admired Pinter's plays for their magnitude and power, but I never fully understood their elusive meaning. Now, refracted through the eyes of this brave, bold troupe, performing as if their lives depend on it (and they do), I grasp the full profundity of Pinter's indictment of man's inhumanity against man.

After the performance (it was over in a 75-minute flash of black, white and blood-red, indelible in our imagination), we fumbled our way out of the black box theater and into the dark street, anxiety-ridden despite the familiar New York surroundings.

What next?

But what will become of this troupe, we asked? A benefit for the company in the Village next week, the usher said, then a trip to Washington to meet with members of the State Department. Next, they'll head for London, to work on a new piece in residence at a hosting theater company. From there they will take part in the Hong Kong Theatre Festival.

But after that, the company members have difficult decisions to face. Several are currently sought by the Belarus KGB, and if they return to Belarus they will be arrested. If they don't return, their close relatives back home are at risk for harassment.

Whatever happens, these courageous performers have set change in motion"“ in our own perception of political theater, and in the world's understanding of what is happening in their tortured land, in our own appreciation of what theatre can mean.