Pinter of Our Discontent: Moonlight and A Piece of My Heart An unsettling family drama; an unsatisfactory Vietnam retrospective

When anyone busts out the term ‘Pinteresque,’ it’s usually Harold Pinter’s use of silence they’re talking about. But that gives short shrift to the distinctive way Pinter bracketed those long pauses with intricate lingual whirligigs of ironic circumlocution. After all, it’s his dialogue, not its absence, that his characters employ to dazzle, to entice, or, frequently, to gut one another like fish.

1993’s Moonlight finds Pinter’s dialogue in fine, filleting form—much of it delivered in Studio Theatre’s production with particular caustic relish by Ted van Griethusen’s Andy as he lies in bed preparing for death. “What a wonderful woman you were,” he says to wife Bel (Sybil Lines). “You had such a great heart. You still have, of course. I can hear it from here, banging away.”

The fact that his estranged sons, played by Anatol Yusef and Tom Story, have not come to pay their last respects moves Andy to fury—though of course it’s not a long trip. “A sponging parasitical pair of ponces,” he fumes, “sucking on the tit of the State.”

Why the estrangement? And why are Andy’s drunk, indolent sons so drunk, so indolent, and so given to odd flights of circular verbal gamesmanship? And what of the ghost of Bridget (Libby Woodbridge), Andy’s teenage daughter, watching over all of them? What’s her story?

Those aren’t questions that Pinter or director Joy Zinoman are much interested in answering. So we the audience feel a lot like Andy himself, whose memory is slippery: We know that Something Has Happened to this family, and we can’t uncover its nature, so all we can do is absorb its repercussions.

Happily, Zinoman has filled those repercussions with small, lovely touches that connect the play’s action in ways its narrative won’t: Greithuysen and Yusef, father and son, briefly strike the same pose; Michael Philippi’s lights unite the actors under the same blue lunar glow; Debra Booth’s set isolates the characters from one another downstage, while upstage the same massive, crumbling wall looms over them all.

The performances are smart and unfussy, though you may wonder where Yusef’s sudden, feral anger comes from and what it’s really doing. You may also wonder, while you’re at it, why Zinoman chooses to introduce the characters of Maria (Catherine Flye) and Ralph (James Slaughter) on the same catwalk prowled by the dead Brigid, which makes them seem at first like fellow ghosts.

And there’s just something impassive and willfully abstruse about the way the production refuses to feed our narrative hunger that makes its ending seem…well, my seatmate put it better than I can:

“I knew it was over when the lights went out.”

Shirley Lauro’s 1991 play tracing the Vietnam War experiences of six women who served in various capacities (an intelligence officer, an entertainer, a “Red Cross Girl,” and three nurses) has a lot that it wants to say about duty and service. Lauro based A Piece of My Heart on an oral history of 26 women who volunteered to go to Vietnam.

Lysistrata and China Beach aside, tales of war from a woman’s perspective aren’t exactly thick on the ground. But in adapting these real women’s voices into a two-and-a-half-hour theatrical piece, Lauro flattens them into broad types. As a result, the overt and ham-fisted theatricality of A Piece of my Heart superimposes itself over what these women went through, obscuring exactly the thing it means to reveal.

Out at the Gunston Arts Center, director Jason M. Beagle has the six actors continually rotating positions around HannaH J Crowell’s multilevel stage. They’re forever trotting up and down its steps, toting benches and swapping hats as they declaim extended monologues or take up temporary roles in one another’s tales.

That’d be fine, if the playwright and production allowed any of these interactions between the actors to stand on their own without feeling compelled to comment on them. But few exchanges pass without getting followed up by a musical interlude—courtesy the guitar-strummin’ stylin’s of country-and-western singer MaryJo (Melissa W. Bailey). According to Lauro’s script, “MaryJo, as she sings these songs, often is singing the sub-text of the play.” The problem, in fact, is that there’s little if anything that’s sub- about her text. Over and over again, these songs listlessly underscore the point of the scenes that accompanies them in a less-than-illuminating manner, as when the women get indoctrinated into military life to a dolorous rendition of “Knick Knack Paddy Whack.”

The production ticks all the mandated boxes: the women’s naive expectations of what Vietnam will be like, their shock and disgust upon seeing the horrors of war, their flirtations with men, booze, and dope,

their confrontations with enemy fire and military brass. The second act, with its

lightning-round, Movie of the Week explorations of post-traumatic stress, alcoholism, and Agent Orange disease, is never anything less than terribly earnest, sincerely felt…and merely dutiful.

But there is Jeri Marshall, bringing shrewd intelligence to her intelligence officer, and there is Anne Veal, one of those D.C. actors whose mere presence in a production is enough to incline you favorably toward it. Watch her face, here, as she is informed that “sexual involvements of any kind” are forbidden; it’s one of the few moments that registers as real in an otherwise schematic and overdetermined evening.