Monthly Archives: May 2015

By Roger Martin, ATCA

Ah, the happy night at the theatre when everything is just right, simply brilliant; an experience not often found. But, lucky you, there’s such a pleasure on display right now, thanks to Zoetic Stage.

Photo Credit Justin Namon.
LEFT: Amy McKenna and Nicholas Richberg. RIGHT: Amy McKenna and Nicholas Richberg.

They’re back at the Arsht Center with their production of Pinter’s Betrayal, a classic of the English stage. Marriage vows? Who needs ’em?

Two Oxbridge cads, life long friends and the wife of one who’s mistress of the other; love and rue through the years until the inevitable end. Which, as Pinter has it, is actually the beginning. The first scene is the final...

Christine Dolan, May 16, 2015

cdolan@miamiherlad.com

The silences in Zoetic Stage’s emotionally devastating production of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal are complicated, haunting and riveting.

Coached before the show begins by young actor Daniel Llaca who has a brief comic turn as a waiter, the audience quietly observes Pinter’s roiling told-in-reverse story of an affair without contributing its own “whispered” commentary or making the noisy exits and reentries that too often distract from performances in the Arsht Center’s Carnival Studio Theater.

But the theater lovers in the Betrayal audience isn’t simply following instructions. They’re mesmerized by a fascinating, superbly acted production of...

By Bill Hirschman

If God is omniscient, He must be inconsolably sad. Zoetic Stage’s superb production of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal puts its audience in that poignant and painful position in which Knowledge is, indeed, the poisoned apple in Eden.

Since Betrayal charts the dissolution of an adulterous affair in reverse chronological order, we know at each receding step what will happen to these people. Watching the lovers and the woman’s cuckolded husband, we easily chart the tragic arc. It begins with a final regret-tinted reunion tamped down by civilized don’t-make-a-fuss good behavior and ends with a scene of the erupting unbridled passions that initiated the relationship nine years...