The party's over. Or nearly so. After 25 years at the helm of American Conservatory Theater, Carey Perloff will soon blow out the candles, make a passel of wishes, and hope to open a present that will start the next chapter in her life. It's fitting on many levels that the last play she will direct as ACT's artistic director is Harold Pinter's "The Birthday Party."
"It was like finding my soulmate when I discovered Pinter," Perloff said in a recent conversation. That was during her sophomore year at Stanford University in the late 1970s, in a class taught by Martin Esslin, who helped coin the term "theater of the absurd." But Perloff didn't see Pinter as a member of the absurdist community.
"Pinter's writing was the perfect combination of emotional truth and linguistic outrageousness," she said. "It's not naturalistic, but it's completely grounded in real human behavior. Where does language have traction, where does language tell the truth, and where is language there to mask, as he said, the nakedness within us?"
"The Birthday Party" starts performances at the Geary Theater on Jan. 10, nearly 30 years after Perloff first directed the play early in her career at New York's Classic Stage Company. By then, it had been accepted as a modern classic and as an exemplar of all things Pinteresque. But when it first opened in London in 1958, the critics attacked with a vengeance.
One challenge of a Pinter play is that theatergoers are required, in a sense, to fill in the blanks. The situations he sets up are recognizable enough as they provoke visceral tensions among the characters, but their motivations can be frustratingly opaque and the truth so elusive that even the concept of truth becomes irrelevant.
"In the many years since I first directed 'The Birthday Party,' the play feels much darker and much more realistic," Perloff said. "The thing that seemed so abstract, the knock at the door signaling the arrival of a nameless terror, now seems very real. We're living in an age of such blatant thuggery, and a president can make bizarre, narcissistic claims that then become a form of truth. Pinter would have been horrified but fascinated to be living in these times."
In "The Birthday Party," the terror arrives in the form of two mismatched mates seeking lodging at a rundown seaside guesthouse. The obsequiously eloquent Goldberg and the brutish McCann haven't happened upon the place by chance. Their interest is in the sole boarder, the reclusive Stanley, who claims to have once been a popular pianist. Innkeepers Meg and Petey, in a marriage strangled by leaden routine, brighten at the prospect of a party proposed by their new guests, while failing to observe their increasing verbal torment unleashed on Stanley for transgressions never made clear.
"After the election, I thought that this is the time to do great and metaphoric and nuanced work, rather than obvious political drama where everything is black-and-white," Perloff said. "We should be doing work that's the most complex and that really aspires to beauty in these really dark times. And that's why I wanted Pinter to be part of the season."
Perloff didn't sound particularly wistful as she readies her final production as ACT's artistic director. "On the opening night of 'Hamlet' I did feel incredibly nostalgic," she said of the season's opening production. "But I'm having such a rich time rehearsing 'The Birthday Party,' and I feel for lots of reasons that I'm really ready to hand it all off and go."
Perloff's departure was announced in March, but the decision has actually been percolating for several years. "It's now been 25 years, and that's an enormous commitment to any single organization and an enormous commitment by any organization to an individual artist," she said. "I probably would have done it sooner but then the Strand Theater project began happening, and I had dreamed of having a second stage since the day I took the job, so I said I can't very well leave now. And that was a five-year project."
Perloff doesn't yet know what her next career move will be, or whether San Francisco will remain her home. "Five years ago, I would have said I'm definitely staying in the Bay Area, but now this town just discourages me so. Income inequality, astronomical rents for places where you're climbing over needles onto the filthiest streets, and all of that has a big impact on theatergoing."
She's thought a lot about moving back to New York, where a job possibility is being dangled. "I've been headhunting for a lot of things, and I'm trying to decide whether to go run something else or whether I can actually be brave enough to really focus on [freelance directing and playwriting] projects that I want to do."
One of her regrets about her ACT tenure is that Harold Pinter was never able to make it to the theater. She first met Pinter when he attended rehearsals for Perloff's 1989 production of "The Birthday Party," and they stayed in touch in person, by phone, and the mail over the years. "He was supposed to come when we were doing 'The Room' and his new play 'Celebration,' but then 9/11 happened and his trip was canceled. And then he got sick, won the Nobel Prize, and died shortly thereafter. It still makes me incredibly sad that he never did get to ACT."