Connections

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

OLD TIMES by Harold Pinter

Memory is the personal journalism of the soul. From eyewitness accounts of yesterday's melodramas and mundanities, it fashions plausible, self-serving reports that it passes off as truth. Indeed, polished by repetition, they become truth.

Old Times, Harold Pinter's 1971 play, is perhaps his most gnomic meditation on this, his most preoccupying theme. A woman named Anna (Jane Alexander) comes to visit her roommate of 20 years before. She discovers (if she did not already know) that Kate (Marsha Mason) is married to a man named Deeley (Anthony Hopkins), with whom Anna had some ambiguous contact. Anna has a taste for hot climates, hard angles and social dominance. Kate prefers the steam from her long baths, or a heavy rain to blur reality.

Deeley is an anecdotalist who resists making dangerous connections between life's incidents, and may feel that if these two women could be made one, all the right connections would be made for him. Their evening together is a contest of wills. If one of them can impose his or her version of the past on the others, then that metaphor will control not one life but three. But at the end they are sprawled in various attitudes of exhaustion and despair, with the truth still lying somewhere in between.

In Director Kenneth Frankel's austere revival, his three stars play Pinter's witty melodies and ironic rhythms with graceful professionalism. If they soft-pedal the play's bass line of sexual tension, one is grateful for a clear rendering of the text. It encourages one to conjure with the work of postmodernism's most hypnotic theatrical voice.

--By Richard Schickel