Netflix has made it easy for anyone to be an autodidact when it comes to the history of cinema—you just order up movies from the Classics category, and they arrive in your mailbox in whatever sequence you choose for your syllabus. But you can't design your own independent study in 20th century drama, for you're dependent on what the local high schools, colleges and theater companies choose to produce. Thus, most of us have seen umpteen productions of Our Town and Oklahoma! but have huge gaps in our theater education, which cannot be rectified by going to the library and reading plays. Thankfully, one of Berkshire Theatre Festival's missions is to introduce (or reintroduce) us to the plays that every dramaturge knows backwards and forwards. I am not positive that seeing Harold Pinter's 1960 breakthrough play The Caretaker at BTF will explain exactly why he won a Nobel Prize for Literature, but certainly one could not expect a better rendition of this enigmatic story about a tramp who is rescued from the streets by two oddball brothers. Every element is exactly right: the set is a veritable pack rat's den of clutter that is so artfully layered that you keep discovering clever details throughout the evening; the tramp's costume is so frayed and tattered that you can practically smell how filthy it is; and the acting is at once strong and subtle. As Davies, Jonathan Epstein acts with his eyes as much as his body, and expressions of puzzlement, disappointment and fear crisscross his grizzled face, and you know his terror of being found insignificant. As the eccentric brothers Mick and Aston, James Barry and Tommy Shrider manage to bring authenticity to these characters who don't seem tethered to the real world. It is disturbingly unclear whether any of these men are capable of care-taking for themselves or anyone else. I wouldn't normally trust the review of a theater company's own PR director, but Gina Hyams is a writer and blogger, who just happens to make a living as a publicist for BTF, and I think she hit the nail on the head with her pithy critique this morning on Gina's Blog of Curiosities.
