The Dumb Waiter

When Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature a few weeks ago, it highlighted in a way how he has lately been better known for his politics than his prose. Although it’s easy for one’s art to be overshadowed when one makes front-page news for likening George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler and calling Tony Blair a “deluded idiot,” while one’s theater reviews are buried in the entertainment section. But Pinter’s early works, written in the late 1950s and 1960s, hinted at the rabble-rousing that was to come. Plays like 1957’s The Dumb Waiter explored the dark incidence of oppression and earned Pinter’s work the ominous-sounding label “comedy of menace.” In honor of his Nobel, members of Actors’ Equity are reviving this one-act starring two bickering assassins, in which Pinter was following in the tradition of Beckett–and also setting the stage for scores of imitators to come. 105 First St. N., Minneapolis; 612-730-5951