ART director celebrates simplicity in Pinter's complex 'Birthday Party'

CAMBRIDGE -- The basement rehearsal space of the American Repertory Theatre is crammed with ugly furniture: overstuffed sofas, doilied armchairs, and an extra table or three.

It's just what JoAnne Akalaitis wants for her production of "The Birthday Party" by Harold Pinter, which opens tomorrow. Designed by Paul Steinberg, the set in its final form will shoehorn all this stuff into "a very brilliant and violent painting treatment of a nauseous room," Akalaitis says. She's looking for an effect that's at once real and surreal, filled with genuine artifacts of 1950s Britain but nightmarish in its excess.

That mix is central to her vision of the play, one of Pinter's earliest and one that provoked horrified, furious reviews when it opened in 1958. It closed in a week -- then went on to become an acknowledged classic of 20th-century theater.

"I'm trying to make it very pure and very simple," says Akalaitis, who's best known as a founder of New York's avant-garde Mabou Mines theater and as the director of several controversial productions of Samuel Beckett's work. "The play itself is so complicated. The lines are not necessarily sequential or motivated; it is naturalistic speech but not realistic physically. People are doing ordinary things -- they're having breakfast or at a birthday party -- but there's something lurking beneath the surface."

"It's basically a rhythmic formal structure with psychological language," Akalaitis says. And, for all the brilliance of Pinter's language, what she finds most interesting -- and challenging -- is his famous and very specific use of pauses, interruptions, and silence.

"The whole use of pauses and silence is really, really hard," she says. "It makes you think, `What is a pause? Do things stop?' Of course they don't. Are the silences filled? How are they filled?"

Pauses fill this conversation, too. After one, she says, "In a funny way, Beckett is easier." Another pause. "It's just so much clearer."

Which gives you an idea of just how opaque Pinter can be. But Akalaitis professes herself knocked out by his work -- as she was years ago, when she saw the first US production of "The Birthday Party," in San Francisco, and then saw it again at Lincoln Center and again, in Pinter's own production, in London.

"I was astonished by it. I was stunned. I sat and I couldn't breathe," she says. "A play that is so funny and so dark. Dark. Deep, deep dark."

Despite those earlier encounters, Akalaitis says she didn't really know Pinter's work until she started working on this production.

"One of the great joys of theater is the opportunity to do research about someone you don't know a lot about," she says. And in delving into Pinter, she's found much she didn't know, especially about his relationship to one of her own theater gods, Beckett.

She now counts Pinter, Beckett, and Jean Genet as "the greatest playwrights of the 20th century."

Why?

"The invention of new forms," she says, without stopping. "To invent a new language in theater is a magnificent thing. Shakespeare, Moliere, Euripides . . . they did it. They invented a new language. Beckett, Pinter, Genet invented a new way of working for actors and directors: the idea that behavior is not psychologically motivated. We count on that, and they just pulled that out from under us. There is nothing that you can count on. It's terrifying. But it makes for great theater."

For this production, Akalaitis was happy to fulfill the ART's request that she use several of its regulars. Thomas Derrah, Karen MacDonald, Remo Airaldi, and Will LeBow have shared a stage many times before, and Akalaitis finds that useful. "The actors know how to work together; they have their own problem-solving methods," she says.

She is also filling the production with music -- lots of it, written by Bruce Odland. "It's all kinds of things: what we call `scary music,' idiotic accordion, some Hawaiian. . . . It's quite present. It's not transition music; it's a score."

The music is important to her, she says, and not just in itself. "What music does is it suggests things you can put in the play," Akalaitis says -- and, often, they're things you wouldn't have arrived at by thinking it through. "I sort of believe that theater is a deep, Jungian event, where the deep, unconscious impulses of the actors collide with those of the audience."

She pauses. "That's the kind of theater that I'm interested in." Pause. "The theater you can't explain."

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.