This marked the only time I was really directed by Joe Garry. I came into Candide at the last minute-about a week before we opened as I recall, and so this was the first time we really got to work together. It also marked my Eldred stage debut. I had taught a course at Case when I first got to Cleveland, but I had never been in the Eldred Company, so this was rather fun. I remember during the run that an old chum and his wife came to celebrate their anniversary with us. We put them up, and when they found I was doing this show, they wanted very much to come and could not be dissuaded. So the David Eastons spent their anniversary watching their old friend re-enact this sad little play about a best friend's betrayal. Soap with a gimmick. Not Pinter's best. Still we had good notices and as I recall, good houses.

REVIEWS:

THE CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER

A tale finely told--backward by Marianne Evett

The Eldred Company at Case Western Reserve University saved its best for last--a haunting, delicately modulated production of Harold Pinter's "Betrayal."

Director Joseph J. Jarry Jr. and his cast have gotten under the skin of this wry, sad story of adultery among ordinary, cultivated people. In fact, it's surprisingly funny, thanks to Robert Hawkes as Robert, the husband who deliberately buries his knowledge of the affair between his wife and best friend in the laconic pleasantries of ordinary conversation.

Pinter tells the story backward, beginning with a meeting between Robert's wife, Emma (Catherine Albers), and his friend Jerry (Wayne Turney) two years after their seven-year affair was ended. Noww, after it's all over, Emma's marriage has broken up. From that point (and a subsequent conversation between Jerry and Robert), it goes back to the breakup of the affair, then to when Emma told Robert about it and finally to the heady moment it all began.

Pinter tells the story this way not to be clever but to let us come to each moment knowing the future, thus giving us distance and understanding. Even though time unrolls backward, it still feels suspenseful. We can't really understand it until the end--or the beginning.

That's because the events only make up half the play, which runs through Aug. 2. The currents of feeling that swirl under the dialogue and fill the pauses are the real story. This is a play about betrayal and each of the three characters is dishonest, in a sense betraying the other two.

All three actors at Eldred suggest the contradictory, unspoken feeling lurking in what they say, giving us whole, flawed people, like ourselves. Turney's Jerry is a bit stuffy, shallow, facile, conventional--a showy literary agent who doesn't mind making love to his best friend's wife as long as the friend doesn't know about it. Once that happens, he's horrified. And he has no intention of divorcing his wife, just deceiving her.

Emma is a deeper character. Albers makes her a woman who dramtizes her emotions, who thinks she's weak and anxious to please but has her own agenda. Maybe she is having a new affair, maybe she's lying to Jerry because Robert is leaving her--she has a mysterious core. But Albers also lets us see her as victim, the real loser in this three-handed game.

Hawkes is superb as the enigmatic Robert, who seems uncaring. Under the jokes we glimpse real pain--an uncommunicative man (so Jerry's attraction for Emma seems natural) who copes by withdrawing still further and getting his own kicks from ironies only he (and we) understands.

The one flaw in this otherwise fine production is the very last scene. It doesn't help that it plays in the back corner--Charles Lawrence's set seems crowded because it has to have six locations all onstage. (His lighting is evocative, however, and MOlli McAndrew's costumes are witty--Jerry and Robert have almost identical suits.)

The scene, however, has to show the ardent Jerry, whose flood of romantic eloquence captured Emma. But Turney's Jerry seems like such a phony by then that it doesn't quite work. And yet, watching it, knowing what will happen, the moment crystallizes, a brief meeting outside time that will change three lives irrevocably.