Through darkness and silences, Pinter burns, baby

For much of Ashes to Ashes, Devlin (Benjamin Vershbow, BR '01) approaches his wife Rebecca (Leslie Klug, DC '00) with the confused trepidation of a scientist trying to lock down an erratic cold fusion experiment. In a futile effort to learn about Rebecca's former lover, he tries one method of inquiry after another. Occasionally, she responds to some unconsidered stimulus and yields tidbits of cryptic, ambiguous infor -mation. Though, as with cold fusion, we eventually fail to arrive at a satisfying answer, the trip itself is tantalizing and enjoyable.

JOHN YI/YH Stylized rationalist husband contemplates stylized dreamer wife. How do people like this get married in the first place?

As Harold Pinter's script has it, each of these characters is as much in the dark as we are when the play begins: Devlin knows nothing of Rebecca's previous lover except his existence, while Rebecca has buried her memories in circular fantasy. The play opens with the two suspended in the middle of one of Pinter's trademark pauses. Rebecca then activates, speaking in clipped sentences about how her lover used to make her "kiss his fist," and we're off, with Devlin growing increasingly flustered by his wife's inability to make her memory cohere, and Rebecca herself inching toward what appears to be an increasingly horrible revelation.

Much of the enjoyment of Ashes to Ashes is in watching Vershbow and Klug play these two extremely stylized characters off of one another. Vershbow's Devlin is an addled rationalist, insisting upon concrete detail about Rebecca's unseen, unnamed lover. Pacing and sucking down drinks, he is reminiscent of a student in the middle of an all-nighter, still doggedly trying to extract meaning from material that no longer makes sense.

If Devlin has been up far too long, then Klug's Rebecca is a sleepwalker. She delivers many of her speeches with the deadpan detachment of someone attempting to reconstruct a dream from the night before, and indeed many of her recollections are peppered with dream images. While recalling a visit to a factory with her lover, she remembers smiling at the workers, and that "each and every one of them smiled back." She also remembers that she "couldn't find the bathroom."

Klug is faced with a difficult balancing act here—when her character does show emotion, it's often in response to absurd symbolic details. She becomes upset by a passing police siren and has a fit of grief over a pen which falls off a table. Ridiculous as they may seem, Klug manages to make these instances both funny and creepy.

Together, Versh-bow's academic and Klug's dreamer perform a kind of anti-joust. In each round, Devlin decides upon a line of questioning. Rebecca's responses then either tie him in knots or arrive from some parallel universe, confusing him. Flustered, he spirals off into rumination or argument until something triggers in Rebecca, who then recounts another memory filled with Byzantine fragments of dream imagery and references to some unknown atrocity. These are the best sections of the play; under Brian Mullins', DC '01, direction, the two miss each other so adeptly on each pass that, for a while, Ashes to Ashes walks an exhilarating tightrope between farce and horror.

However much fun each of these successive iterations is, however, the play must eventually make a show toward revealing what has caused Rebecca to crawl into her shell, and it's here that Ashes to Ashes falters somewhat. Pinter merges Rebecca with her memories a little too quickly: they are suspended and distant, then suddenly they crash down and own her. Devlin, too, becomes something else so rapidly that the play does not so much twist as jackknife—it tries to bring itself full circle, to merge the brutality of its opening image with that of its closing image, and instead locks up, petering out in an odd coda that comes too quickly for it to have the head-crunching resonance that Pinter seems to be seeking.

That said, the production is superb—Sean Marlaire's, CC '00, slightly raised set does a great job of suspending the characters in the space of the Whitney Humanities Center Gym, and of using the spartan furnishings to offer hints about both Devlin and Rebecca's natures. It is striking, yet subtle. Likewise, Mullin's direction is solid, building tension throughout the meat of the play without resorting to histrionics or calling attention to itself. He does make one unfortunate slip-up, falling into the trap of using color-intense "This is an important recollection" lighting during one of Rebecca's more important recollections, but it is a forgivable one. Ashes to Ashes is a skillful piece of work that manages to create a great deal of entertainment from very sparse ingredients.

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