Archive: Arts & Entertainment

The Kitchen Theatre Company will present with Harold Pinter’s  haunting classic OLD TIMES. In 1971 The Observer said of the play “Wonderfully taut, comic and ominous, OLD TIMES shows Pinter more and more himself and less like any other playwright writing today.”  More than thirty years later, Pinter's plays continue to intrigue and challenge audiences with Pinter’s signature “comedy of menace.” Harold Pinter is widely viewed as the most influential and accomplished playwright in postwar Britain and was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Kate (Camilla Schade) and her husband, Deeley (Greg Bostwick), live in an isolated farmhouse by the sea.  The mundane harmony of their lives is disturbed when Kate’s old friend Anna (Leigh Keeley) comes to stay. A night of reminiscing between the married couple and the old friend becomes a struggle to discover the truth in memory, desire in love, and to whom the past belongs.  A battle for possession begins in which past and present merge with shattering consequences.

OLD TIMES is the fifth of six productions in the Kitchen Theatre Company’s 2007-08 17th Main Stage Season and will feature the return of NYC director Margarett Perry. Perry is known to Kitchen Theatre audiences for her work last season on Brian Dykstra’s toxic comedy CLEAN ALTERNATIVES and David Wiltse’s bedroom farce A MARRIAGE MINUET. Perry returned earlier this season to direct Brian Dykstra’s explosive STRANGERHORSE and to work with two of our Counter Culture artists, Darian Dauchan and Vickie Tanner. 

Kitchen Theatre Artistic Director Rachel Lampert notes an interesting parallel between this play and others proudced this season:  “I often discover an unexpected and unplanned synergy within a season of plays at the Kitchen Theatre. In THE CLEAN HOUSE by Sarah Ruhl, the play that opened our season, a complicated triangle including a married couple is at the center of the play.  Another more deadly triangle powers the play in STRANGERHORSE, our second play this season.  Pinter’s mysterious triumvirate in OLD TIMES, again including a married couple, is another astonishing look at the forces that come in threes.” 

Director Margarett Perry is interested in exploring what lies underneath those power dynamics.  “In a New Yorker article I read recently,” says Perry, “Pinter was quoted as saying, ‘We are faced with the immense difficulty, if not the impossibility of verifying the past.  I don’t mean merely years ago, but yesterday, this morning. What took place, what was the nature of what took place, what happened?---There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, 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.’  It is this battle over the past that Pinter is exploring in Old Times and within that battle he creates a psychological warfare between characters using language as their only weapon.  It’s the psychological warfare that makes his plays so juicy and fun to explore. It’s a nasty, violent world, but there’s also a deliciousness in that nastiness that makes it taste sweet.”

The OLD TIMES cast includes KTC veterans Greg Bostwick (AFTER ASHLEY, COMFORT FOOD, THE PRICE among others), Leigh Keeley (THE CLEAN HOUSE, THE PRICE, A DELICATE BALANCE among others) and Camilla Schade (48 Hour Playwriting Festival/Teen Extreme).

Set and lighting design is by Brian Prather, Professor of Scenic Design at Ithaca College. Prather designed the lighting for the Kitchen’s most recent production, BED NO BREAKFAST. Stage management is by resident stage manager Stephen A.Wagner.

Performance Dates:
March 20, 2008, Thursday at 7:30 pm (Preview 1 of 2)
March 21, 2008, Friday at 8:00 pm (Preview 2 of 2)
March 22, 2008, Saturday at 8:00 pm (Press/Opening/Reception)
March 23, 2008,  Sunday at 4:00 pm (Matinee 1 of 4)
March 26, 2008, Wednesday at 7:30 pm
March 27, 2008, Thursday at 7:30 pm
March 28, 2008, Friday at 8:00 pm
March 29, 2008, Saturday at 8:00 pm
March 30, 2008, Sunday at 4:00 pm (Matinee 2 of 4)
April 2, 2008, Wednesday at 7:30 pm
April 3, 2008, Thursday at 7:30 pm
April 4, 2008, Friday at 8:00 pm
April 5, 2008, Saturday at 8:00 pm
April 6, 2008, Sunday at 4 pm (Matinee 3 of 4)
April 9, 2008, Wednesday at 7:30 pm
April 10, 2008, Thursday at 7:30 pm
April 11, 2008, Friday at 8:00 pm
April 12, 2008, Saturday at 8:00 pm
April 13, 2008, Sunday at 4:00 pm (Matinee 4 of 4 / Closing)

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