Poetry in Motion
You know, I go to a lot of theater, and some of it’s pretty darned exciting. But rarely have I seen people get so giddy about going to see a play as with No Man’s Land at Berkeley Rep. Friends of mine who aren’t even theater people went to extraordinary lengths to score tickets to it, because that’s how much the kids love Harold Pinter nowadays.
Fathers and Sons
Even if they’ve never read Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, a lot of people have at least heard some variant of the opening sentence: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The characters in Harold Pinter’s 1965 play The Homecoming are unhappy in the most vicious ways possible. “They’re very warm people, really,” the eldest son Teddy says to his wife before she meets his father and brothers. “They’re my family. They’re not ogres.” It’s a funny line because by the time he says it we’ve already met his family and know perfect well that’s not true.
