The Hothouse, by Harold Pinter, was written in 1958 (contemporary to his reputation-building The Dumb Waiter and The Birthday Party) but not produced and published until 1980. The play may look back to conventional British satire and sex farce, but it does so shaded with Harold Pinter’s signature coloring of offstage menace. We watch the staff of a sanatorium for mental illnesses bumble through the investigation of a mysterious birth by one of the patients. What ensues includes gratuitously painful electroshock therapy and mayhem that leaves many of the professional staff dead. Although Roote, the administrator of the deathly place (played by Michael John Casey as a marionette martinet who gradually comes unstrung), declares that the maintenance of Order is the most important thing to him, what he gets is anything but.
Each member of the cast incorporates a distinctive physical style into his or her character, and this serves to animate what can be at times a talky script (especially for Pinter, the poet of silences). Noteworthy among them are Jason Lott’s naive and pop-eyed Lamb, a night watchman who lives up to his Dickensian tag name, and Jonathon Church’s menacing, cat-like Lush, lithely negotiating the huge level changes in Elizabeth Jenkins McFadden’s practical set.
Kathleen Akerley, in a director’s note, suggests that the play offers the possibility of hope, its events occurring as they do on Christmas Day. But it’s a Christmas Day when the falling snow has turned to slush, and the closing scene shows us that this hope is misplaced.
- The Hothouse, by Harold Pinter, directed by Kathleen Akerley, produced by Longacre Lea, Callan Theatre, Washington