By Doug Trumm

“The Pinter Project” is a collection of nine sketches written by Harold Pinter in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

Theater prof and director Adam Houghton selected the nine sketches from the 15 that Pinter has published.

“Other theaters have done different revues with different combinations of sketches,” he said.

One sketch takes place in an office, another on a street where people are hailing cabs and one happens in a café, just to name a few.

Two days before opening night, Houghton, though confident, fretted over every aspect of his play.

“We should keep the mop buckets offstage until we need them later in the play,” Houghton said just moments before dress rehearsal.

Notepad in hand, he sat back to watch the show in the empty Colman Black Box Theater.

Seating surrounded the stage on all sides, which was unadorned save for a few simple props.

“It’s minimally costumed and furnished to provide an opportunity to showcase the acting,” Houghton said of the set choice.

The play lasted less than an hour in rehearsal.

After the rehearsal, Houghton instructed junior actor Dano Colon on techniques to prevent him from putting his hat on backwards in the dark, critiqued the actors’ pronunciation of certain words in British dialect and obsessed over distracting noises during the performance.

To reduce offstage noise, he advised the crew to switch to nonverbal lighting cues and implored his actors to tread lightly backstage.

After all these suggestions for improvement, Houghton assured his somewhat uneasy cast that they were ready to deliver an excellent show on Thursday.

The cast has been hard at work for the past month. In addition to all their rehearsing, the cast has worked specifically on perfecting their dialects for at least 15 minutes each day. Some of the actors had used a British accent before, but none had previously attempted such an authentic dialect. At the practice, sophomore actor Jaselyn Taubel even maintained her accent in casual conversation.

The accents should add to the dialogue that sophomore actor Emily Borka considers very authentic and immersing.

“The dialogue imitates real-life conversations very well,” she said.

The dialogue takes places within ordinary circumstances.

“The play shows that the mundane aspects of life have some of the most tragic and comical moments,” Houghton said.

Houghton said that the play explores the inflexibility of memory and how two people often remember the same event very differently. The sketches seem to start in the middle of the action and end without definite resolution.

“I hope our audience can appreciate the play’s raw emotional power despite no running plot line,” Colon said.

Senior actor Jake Swenson saw a similar challenge for the play.

“The audience has to believe in nine different stories,” he said.

Performing nine sketches rather than one continuous story line has its advantages too.

“It’s not a comedy or a tragedy,” said senior actor Shari Gubash. “It’s both.”

Filed under: Arts, Variety by Justin Roth