Blog Layout

Affair In Reverse Provides Thoughtful Fodder In Betrayal, FLORIDA THEATRE ON STAGE

May 17, 2015

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 […]

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 earlier.

Few companies in South Florida could conquer this elliptical tale in which little substantive is actually said and even that is usually suffocated in banal chit chat separated by pregnant pauses. Emotionally, everything happens below the surface like lava roiling under the volcano’s cooled crust.

Zoetic’s arsenal here encompasses a trio of actors and a creative team all precisely and deftly molded by artistic director Stuart Meltzer. They shine particularly in that the audience always knows exactly what the characters are thinking and feeling despite the maddeningly oblique banter and silences.

To glean the most out of the irony and poignancy, in fact to get anything out of it at all, the audience must invest itself and its attention for the entire uninterrupted 90 minutes. But it is well-rewarded.

Set among the “veddy British” intelligentsia, Betrayal opens with gallery owner Emma (Amy McKenna) and literary agent Jerry (Nicholas Richberg) having drinks at bar two years after their affair ended. After a perfunctory but protracted round of innocuous inquiries about their families, Emma tells Jerry that she is leaving her husband Robert (Chaz Mena) who is Jerry’s oldest and best friend, as well as the publisher of Jerry’s clients. She says that in the heat of an all-night fight, she revealed to Robert the seven-year illicit relationship.

But in the next scene in which Jerry and Robert have a “civilized” confrontation, it becomes clear that Emma has lied to Jerry. She confirmed the affair to Jerry four years earlier – long before the lovers broke up and while the three maintained their various relationships. In a paradigm that is repeated in different ways in succeeding scenes, we realize that Robert has kept his knowledge of the betrayal a secret from Jerry. Jerry, in fact, feels betrayed that Robert never revealed that knowledge in some kind of anger.

Pinter addresses several issues simultaneously, although obliquely enough to provide fodder for many a post-show debate. He has created a triangle not so much with three sides so much as with three razor sharp corners.

The late actor/director/screenwriter/political activist and Nobel laureate, of course, was and is one of the most influential British playwrights of the second half of the 20 th Century. His works are so difficult that they have rarely been attempted in South Florida ( The Dumbwaiter by The Promethean Theatre back in 2010 and Old Times at Palm Beach Dramaworks last year). His scripts are famously sketchy blueprints filled with meaningless chatter and pauses that require directors and casts to discover, develop and insert crucial subtext.

Fortunately, the play is in the hands of Meltzer who keeps revealing an ability to analyze, pace and mount an astonishing range of work from satirical comedy (such as Clark Gable Slept Here ) to harrowing social commentary ( Fear Up Harsh ) to musicals ( Assassins ). While Betrayal was evolving, he also directed a New World School of the Arts production of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth.

His essential colleagues here include that cast. Richberg and McKenna were Zoetic members when the troupe was initially envisioned in 2010 as a loose repertory company. Mena was part of the Assassins cast last season and Detroit last fall.

Usually, critics use adjectives as space-saving shorthand to describe performances. But all three actors create beings so fully credible that their essence can no more be adequately reduced to traits than if you were trying to describe your neighbor.

The lovely McKenna exuding a casual sexiness has constructed someone cradling secret knowledge deep in her being. Much of the time, Emma’s private knowledge is neither a curse nor a source of power, but a fact of life that must be monitored. Oddly, but believably, McKenna’s Emma does not seem plagued by guilt at her betrayals of both men in various ways, only concerned at avoiding the devastation she knows will follow if the secrets tumble into the light.

As Jerry, the handsome Richberg (equal time here for physical description) initially seems more the model of a controlled upper-middle class British, but over the course of the play Richberg reveals Jerry to be a hapless slave to the emotional high and lows as the relationship devolves – or actually evolves.

Both actors’ characters change so subtly by millimeters that you become aware in the middle of some scene that these people have morphed from who they were two or three scenes ago. Compare their cauterized reigned emotions in the first scene with the ardent declarations in the later scenes.

But the triumph, a word we often overuse, belongs to Mena in a performance that once again makes you feel cheated that he simply isn’t seen often enough. His Robert, who also is a serial adulterer, prizes a seemingly impenetrable veneer of correct civilized behavior imbued in all classes of British society. Yet, Mena brilliantly exposes the tumult underneath when the shell briefly cracks open.

There’s a terrific moment when Robert confronts Emma that he sussed out the existence of the affair the day before, quietly reveling in his ability to keep his composure in the exchange. But when she tells him the affair actually has been going on years, his smugness vanishes in a paroxysm of stunned anguish.

Once the audience knows that Robert knows — but that in separate scenes Jerry and Emma don’t know he knows — Mena is a fascinating portrait of a spring-loaded bear trap flawlessly camouflaged from his prey.

One of the best executed scenes thanks to Metlzer and company is when Robert blithely tosses off a bunch of meaningless small talk in an Italian vacation hotel while his wife tries to read a manuscript. At some point, long after the tipping point has actually occurred, the audience realizes that Robert has been pricking ever more pointedly at Emma until she knows that he has tumbled to the affair. From a scene of domestic banality, we see Emma frozen still in the bed and Robert digging ever deeper without actually spelling out that he knows of the liaison.

As always, the creative team at Zoetic does exemplary work including Michael McKeever’s thrust setting of bleached blond wood to contrast with Estella Vrancovich’s stylish black outfits. The lengthy scene changes were made palatable with the jazzy plucking at an upright bass by Dave Wilkinson.

The fact that Zoetic Stage would attempt such a piece, artistically and commercially, let alone succeed so thoroughly, is validation of what has been increasingly evident: that Zoetic no longer is an up-and-coming company of great promise; it has arrived as a mature, reliable purveyor of fine theater.

Side note: Zoetic went the extra mile opening night by having Daniel Llaca, who later played a waiter in café scenes, give a genial, collegial but clear admonition to the audience to take out their cellphones and turn them completely off. He then asked everyone to raise their phones in the air to confirm they had complied. You know what’s coming: About 15 minutes was all one privileged self-centered woman could stand; she had, of course, somehow thought the plea did not apply to her, not her. She read emails and texted until someone cleared his throat for the fourth time.

By Chaz Mena 21 May, 2021
Trumbull's "Declaration of Independence," Oil on Canvas, 12' X 18'
By Chaz Mena 15 Mar, 2021
Interviewed by Chaz Mena 15 March, 2021 Celia, you've been a poet for a while, published in many literary journals around the country. You're a mother of two beautiful little girls, the editor of Prospectus: A Literary Offering. You’re keeping house with your husband, Rafael Montes , a renowned professor at St. Thomas University. HOW DO YOU DO IT? I don’t! I haven’t done the laundry in over a month! It seems like I do because I’m very good at assessing and prioritizing. I figure out what the most important thing that needs to get done now is, and I do it until it’s done. The bad part of that attitude is that I let things that are not priority no. 1 fall away, like the laundry, for example. But often it’s more serious things, like my writing and my constant battle with mommy guilt. But I’m a workaholic. It’s what I’m best at. Is Multiverses your first book-length collection? How did Finishing Line Press come across your manuscript? Was yours an unsolicited submission, or had they contacted you? Tell us. Yes, I had two chapbooks before Multiverses , my first full-length collection. I was looking for places to send it to when I came across the fact that Finishing Line was now publishing full-length collections. That was not the case when The Stones came out. Of course I sent it to them, and they accepted it right away. The genesis of Multiverses is clear to your reader. Would you feel comfortable describing to us that moment when you decided - if it was a conscious choice at all! - to have it become book-length? Were you planning an arc or a structure from the beginning? I knew I had a lot to say, and that it had a narrative arc, but I wasn’t thinking about length as I wrote. I wrote until I finished saying what I wanted to say, and then I looked at the page count and realized I had gone beyond chapbook length. At that point I was surprised because it’s very hard for me to write things that go well together, which is what you look for when you’re trying to write a full-length collection. My writing is all over the place, so it’s hard for me to publish more than individual poems in journals. I'm struck by the many epic conventions implemented: beginning in the middle, a tribute to ancestors, a type of arming for battle as you and Rafael prepare for the infant's arrival, the inciting loss as the gods turned their backs to you, the subsequent katabasis (descent into the Underworld) wherein long-passed relatives file in, rehearsing family memories helping you in your trials, etc. Think of it as a mini-epic. The events were epic to me, and I wrote them so. I still don’t believe it’s possible to capture in words the loss of a child. The gut-wrenching, universe-shaking, time-bending nature of seeing such a tiny, innocent creature suffer so much only to die in such a horrific way as my son did. It can’t be spoken of, only remembered. That’s the epicenter of the book, and from there sprout other losses and memories so that it seems like there’s a sort of temporal journey taking place. The past is haunted by the present—the glossy photographs and memories of parents and grandparents when they were young and full of vigor that you know now went nowhere. Our parents’ immigrant generation was epic. I still remember when they used to talk about getting back to their Ithaca, Cuba. They never made it. What was to be a temporary home became their last resting place. If there is no pathos in that, I don’t know where there is. Thinking about it makes me cringe. When I lost my son, I became unhinged. I had to remake someone new from scratch. The materials I had at hand were memory and desire. The memories grounded me while the desire to erase that one event in my life and make everything okay again sent me flying apart. Multiverses comprises pieces that don’t fit. They are shards of a broken mirror that can’t be glued back together no matter how hard you try. Pieces are lost, shattered irretrievably . From there comes the sense of an epic quest at hand, a quest to rebuild my psyche, perhaps. But it’s a failed quest that’s resolved only in fantasy. Let's talk about the verse. The meter is dactyl in the beginning, fitting for a lament, as it begins with a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed: a sudden lashing out, followed by a limping recovery. The narrator's voice is tripped up as if wounded, hobbling. It's very evocative and draws great sympathy from your reader. Later, the voice changes and more disparate tones (meters) play out. You also change lengths - even using alexandrines! Was this planned? Yes and no. I was very interested in preserving the breath of the words, of writing as if I were speaking directly. When I noticed there was a certain pattern or the possibility for a certain pattern—the dactyl and the alexandrine, as you point out, the trochee, too—I chose to follow that pattern as long as it didn’t result in violating my idea of the breath. I didn’t feel that this subject fit with too much structure; the whole point of the book is that “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” That doesn’t jive well with neat little patterns, so I let anarchy reign when it should. There is one sonnet, but it’s a nonce sonnet. The word and/or concept of "illusion" in English and its translation into Spanish crop up. Illusion connotes a mirage or a quixotic striving for something not there, misinterpreted. But in Spanish, ' ilusión’ evokes hoping for a hidden desire, cherished and kept secret - a furtive wish for something beyond your means, perhaps. Is this a thread worth examining in this work? Definitely. In the English sense, illusion has somewhat of a negative connotation, a foolish belief that often occludes the truth. In that sense, all the narratives that take place in parallel universes, with the last poem especially, are illusions, frustrations of the mind that cannot accept the truth. You and a few other readers have mentioned that I give equal weight to the parallel universes as I do to the one we really inhabit. I meant to do that. I wanted the stories of the parallel universes to seem just as truthful as the truth. It was very satisfying emotionally, which is where the Spanish notion of ilusión comes in. I had ilusiones for my family that were broken. In the Spanish sense, there are a lot more pathos involved. I tried not to give in to that pathos (though I’m sure I failed a couple of times) because it would break the illusion in the English sense. The emotional charge of the real narrative would set it apart from the parallel narratives, and I did not want this to be a memoir plus fantasies (though I have used that word to describe the parallel narratives). I wanted to give credence to the multiverse theory by keeping the reader in a constant state of flux. OK, 'multiverses': one of the most satisfying aspects of this work is how you play out its conceit of alternate existence (s) with such detail. You give integrity and specificity to every life played out in alternate universes. Nothing is derivative, and all possibilities are legitimate. May you speak to that? This question is connected to your previous one. Had I made any of the parallel narratives anything less than hyper-realistic, the project would have fallen apart. It would have become a regular narrative, musing on different fantastical possibilities. So I tried very hard to keep to that notion that a butterfly flaps its wings halfway around the world and it can change everything. I think I achieved this mostly in the sequence of poems after they discharge my father from the hospital “healthy.” I have often berated myself for not having reacted to that situation differently—to have demanded a diagnosis for his collapse, to have been able to take him to a cardiologist or even to a witch doctor if necessary instead of having waited a month to watch him die. Could his death have been avoided by calling the social worker at the hospital and demanding he not be discharged so abruptly? By a phone call? I allowed myself to explore these possibilities in poems that are near identical, yet wholly different. The only poem in which I let the curtain part to reveal the wizard is the last poem which is so obviously a fantasy of closure impossible to achieve in the actual memoir. You've begun reading parts of the poem to audiences (online, for now); what has been the response so far? Mixed. Some people have commented that the poems moved them. My favorite comment I have received is from a woman who said she felt “met.” She is a caretaker and could relate to the poems where my father loses his mind. No one has accused me of being aloof, but the implication of some comments (such as “you are very brave to be able to write about these things so unflinchingly”) is that I perhaps don’t feel the weight of the emotions that’s because of the events I narrate. I think it might be difficult for some readers to realize the almost clinical detachment I had to create in order to write about this. I wanted the truth to be spoken, recorded, not glossed over in any way. To think of it cinematically, I wanted the camera to pan in and focus on the hardest events. Why I wanted that is difficult to explain. I think it has something to do with the way we grieve in this culture, how we are expected to show our strength by moving past disaster as quickly as possible. Like the old Nike slogan, “Acknowledge, move on.” That can be very helpful in minor situations, but I think catastrophic events are more suited to the mourning we used to do—covering mirrors, stopping clocks, wearing black for a full year. It was an acknowledgement that something horrible had happened. In Multiverses I don’t hesitate in including even the most gruesome details, because they happened, and I wanted them to be acknowledged. The narrator is so Miamian - Cuban. You bring in place names and ethnic food, contextualizing the poem so specifically. How did that help you tell this story (ies)? Multiverses was the first time I didn’t write with a white American audience in mind. I was writing these poems for myself, so I didn’t feel the need to explain baffling details such as my parents living with us, or to smatter the poems with Spanish words and then translate them. I did that only once, I think, when I called my father ‘un vividor’ and I couldn’t find the right word in English to express the same idea. Otherwise, I just wrote in English words that were spoken in Spanish. When my father, for example, confuses the words plane and bird, he is confusing avión and pájaro. But what would have been the point of emphasizing that? I wasn’t writing about being Cuban, I was writing about being human. So the references of my life just worked themselves into the book. I felt the Cuban influence more strongly when writing about my granduncle Arturito, who to the day he died loved tangos and reminisced about being young, which meant being in Cuba. Incorporating those details helped me pin him down as an individual, and not just some generic grandfather figure. What's next Celia, what are you working on between making meals, going through scores of submissions for Prospectus , and being interviewed? Has quarantining hindered or helped your writing? I hate to say it, but the pandemic has really helped my writing! I wrote the entirety of Multiverses at the beginning of the pandemic. I also started sending some older poems out again, and so far have found eight of them new homes. Now what I’m doing is assessing. I took a long hiatus from writing (four years) while I was teaching high school, so I’m reacquainting myself with my work and trying to see what’s there that has potential. I have a bunch of really good pop-culture poems, but that has so been done already (and by better poets than I) that I don’t know whether pursuing that theme is worth the time. I think I might just want to write all new poems, like I did with Multiverses . It was very liberating, not having to write to a “theme.” The problem is running Prospectus , which is time-consuming. I might just have to concentrate on being an editor for a little while. PREORDER SHIPS MAY 7, 2021 Multiverses by Celia Lisset Alvarez $19.99, Full-length, paper RESERVE YOUR COPY TODAY Celia Lisset Alvarez , born in Spain to Cuban parents fleeing Fidel Castro’s regime, immigrated to Miami in 1974, where she has been living since. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Miami, and proceeded to publish two chapbooks of poetry, Shapeshifting (Spire Press, 2006) and The Stones (Finishing Line Press, 2006). Her stories and poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Multiverses (Finishing Line Press, 2021) is her first full-length collection. She is currently the editor of Prospectus: A Literary Offering , and lives with her husband Rafael, daughters Lucy and Sara, and her mother, Sonia.
By Chaz Mena 30 Mar, 2020
All that made me split hairs in argument in debates over which end of the egg should be cracked, are muted by days which run out of purpose, blanketed over by a mimed virus. A dumb show. 'Scrambled or fried?' to my daughter who plays with a doll that has an eye missing. Another is armless for which we compensate. We hug her over and over. We join hands behind each other’s backs and keep at bay the dusk of reason and the dawn's caprice. I know that we have been here before, plagued by suspicion held close to our bosoms, cards kept close to our wheezing chests, a two-card draw where bets are sheared and yawned. We are at a littoral standstill, bereft of people whom would wade in slow moving tides - the marsh behind, the dunes' rise. ‘Taking your shawl?’ I ask my wife and she submits for once, itself an event. Whips it over her shoulders, evoked Iberian mothers who at Finisterre looked out at anarchy, an unkind ocean and waited for their lost men, though foretold of their deaths. Augured. Sure. We pack lunches and eat on marmalade porches, pour olive oil over salted bread. We eat in silence. We keep to ourselves in temps de peste , a virus which sends word ahead but comes and waits on the landing. We hide inside and not answer the door. Seclude. Have I forgot our deca millennium-old marches? Exoduses up a levant that skirted untread beaches sylvan sands where predecessors drew in deep breaths, filled their neolithic lungs with trekked salt spray our short-lived friends risked all as if called forward, as if summoned up from richer game and recorded sandprints that veered into being 'forever-ago.' I'll listen to them. They will call me and I'll answer.
By Chaz Mena 02 Dec, 2019
Tartarus Press has printed a limited edition of Robert Aickman‘s complete works in ten volumes. I have been reading this author–known as “Britain’s best-kept secret” in short story literature–for close to a month. His prose is among the best that […]
By Chaz Mena 10 Oct, 2019
…an impulse after all these years.
By Chaz Mena 09 Sep, 2019
El cannabis medicinal y las vivencias en Puerto Rico luego de los estragos del huracán María en 2017, sirvieron de base para la nueva película del director boricua Bruno Irizarry, titulada Yerba Buena y protagonizada por Karla Monroig. El filme, […]
By Chaz Mena 18 Aug, 2019
Diccionario Del Pensamiento Martiano by Ramiro Gallaraga, (Ciencias Sociales, Havana, 2002). Out of Print, alas. Galarraga’s seminal work (in Spanish) is an indispensable reference for all Martí readers and the result of thousands of hours of painstaking work, combing through […]
By Chaz Mena 12 Jul, 2019
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN: In this bonus episode there’s a chance to hear Franklin D Roosevelt’s speech after Pearl Harbour as performed by American actor Chaz Mena. Legendary broadcaster Ed Murrow and World at War narrator Laurence Olivier also get […]
By Chaz Mena 12 Jul, 2019
On a bicycle—and they rarely lie—down Martin Drove End it seemed as if the Wiltshire Hills winked as I rode past. Cradled w/in grassland waves the lambs bleated me into Blake’s epigraph: “Dost thou know who made thee …?” etc. […]
By Chaz Mena 29 Apr, 2019
A drawer you left open invited dead parents to visit demanding that you tidy up. Or it may be a promise unfulfilled or maybe the clue to a crime, or a prompt to mend your ways and reform. Suddenly, you […]
More Posts
Share by: