The language of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal is spare and elegant. On the page, it can seem intellectual, even a little cold. But in performance, the play is “an emotional traffic accident and you have to watch,” says Goodman Theatre artistic director, Susan Booth, who helms the show at the Chicago institution February 8–March 30.
The play’s three high-profile stars—Helen Hunt, Ian Barford, and Robert Sean Leonard—agree that this is an intense and emotional story, in which what is unseen and unsaid is just as important as what is in the text. Performed without intermission, its nine scenes chronicle an extramarital affair backwards in time, with the first scenes showing the aftermath, and the last showing how it all began. “The title is relevant in this play in every page, in every character, in every moment,” says Academy Award-winner Helen Hunt, who plays Emma, the wife-turned- lover. “It’s the betrayal of friendship, the betrayal of romance, the betrayal of truth.”
“Every character in the play is a betrayer and betrayed,” relates Ian Barford, a veteran Chicago actor, producer, and Tony nominee who plays Emma’s husband, Robert. Barford, who had previously played Robert’s friend Jerry in a 2007 Steppenwolf production, says the play asks crucial questions: Who are we? How well do we ever know the people we think we know? Why do people lie?
Robert Sean Leonard, the Tony Award-winning actor who plays Jerry, quips that Pinter had really “sharpened his pencils” by the time he wrote Betrayal in 1978, which he based on his own extramarital affair. “It’s a very human story and there’s a lot of heartbreak in it and a lot of tears,” says Leonard. Describing Pinter as a “weird guy” who had strange views about relationships, Leonard says the play is a “little disorienting” to be in.
Hunt had been asked to do the play on Broadway years ago, but her schedule didn’t allow her to take it on. “Then,” says Hunt, “Susan Booth asked me about it and I talked to her about the productions I’ve seen and didn’t love, which is great when you want to work on something, because there’s no point in doing something someone did perfectly.” The actress took to Booth immediately. “She’s so smart and so clear and listens in such a clear way, too, which is a rare thing in anybody, much less a director.”
Leonard had appeared with the late Brian Dennehy in the 2003 Broadway production of EugeneO’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, directed by the Goodman’s former longtime artistic director, Robert Falls. Leonard says Dennehy “yelled” at him for years to do a play in Chicago. “New York is changing,” suggests Leonard. “It’s different than it used to be, theater- wise, and the things I love don’t happen in New York very much anymore. That’s what Brian always said. The places that are absolutely still doing things are Minneapolis and Chicago and San Diego. Of all those places, Chicago’s the closest, so I thought it might be time to go.”
Leonard sees his own character, Jerry, as the most honest in the play, yet given to compartmentalization. “He’s extremely deluded, but I think his intentions are good, certainly a little better than the other two,” says Leonard. “He thinks it’s okay that you have a wife and you have kids that you love and you meet someone that just turns your head and makes you feel things you never felt before and doesn’t seem to have any problem with those things happening in the same lifetime.”
Barford sees the three characters as bound together in a complex web, and each of the nine scenes as a “perfect little play.” Overall, he observes, Pinter “is very much interested in dialogue that leads an audience into silences, when people are not able to speak because there is a kind of truth that has been discovered that significantly alters them.”
The characters in Betrayal often talk about people who never appear—Jerry’s wife, for example. Hunt says a big part of her work as an actor is filling in the parts of a character’s life the audience doesn’t see. That’s especially true in this play. “There’s magical thinking that I subscribe to that somehow the audience feels all these things,” Hunt says. “Once in a while, I have to go, ‘Right, seven people might get that’. But I have faith in those seven people, and I have faith that at least the people who don’t get it will feel that it’s filled in.”
Barford says the unseen characters in the play are all vivid in the performers’ minds. “We hope that audiences have a strong sense of who they are,” he says, noting that Pinter intended that some mysteries are revealed by way of omission. “On some level, this allows audience members to infer whatever they might.” Whatever ticket holders decide about Betrayal, they will have plenty to talk about—or avoid talking about—once their curtain comes down. Barford predicts “some quiet car rides” home.
