The Community Theatre Spring Performances

Other Places
(Collection of Three Plays)
Family Voices - Victoria Station - A Kind of Alaska
by Harold Pinter

Other Voices by Harold Pinter, written in the early Eighties, marks a time in Pinter’s work where he assertively explores the struggle and difficulty of defining our selves, our lives, and our relationships, especially under the need and penumbra of truth. Pinter himself, after writing these plays, did not write again for a number of years. Other Voices consist of three short plays: Victoria Station, Family Voices, and A Kind of Alaska. All of these plays probe landscape familiar to Pinter, how memory and story arrange and disarrange our lives, how truth and reality, though clad in iron, is fragile at best, how identity suffuses with the past and the future and becomes territory to be fought for in the moment, and how language can still knock language sideways. In each play the characters are dispossessed, and at a distance from others, the world, and themselves, In Victoria Station a dispatcher’s simple request to a cab driver becomes an adventure in communication, meaning, and inference, a battle to make sense of the world. In Family Voices a mother, father and son attempt to span their emotional and physical distance by writing to each other, only to never get or read each other’s letters, leaving each one to imagine or re-imagine their relationships to one another, and redefine family in a way that best suits the needs of the day. A Kind of Alaska is based on Oliver Sacks Awakenings. It is the story of a woman who has been asleep with encephalitis lethargica, or sleeping sickness, for 21 years, and the first thirty minutes of her life after finally “waking up”. While “asleep” she was still conscious of her surroundings, but without motion, speech, hope or will. Her eruption into waking life reveals the tenuous nature of reality, as she works to come to terms with all the places she has been and all the places she hasn’t been in the last two decades. As more often than not with Pinter the action of the plays are simple, what makes them so magnificent and thrilling are all the aspects under each persons surface that compels them, often without explanation, to do the things they do. Along with Pinter’s amazing use of language, his masterfully detailed sense of story, and his trenchant understanding of human nature, these three short plays compile some of his strongest and most fascinating work.

Dates:	May 8th, 9th, 10th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 22nd, 23rd, 24th, 29th, 30th, 31st. All at 8pm.
Location:	Youngstown Cultural Arts Center
	4408 Delridge Way SW Seattle, WA 98106 206.935.2999
After Show Discussion:	May 10th and May 31st

Buy tickets at Brown Paper Tickets