(510) 568-4118

OAKLAND (August 21, 2006) - Eastenders Repertory Company opens its Season 2006- 2007 with PINTERESQUE: The Lover by Harold Pinter and the premiere of short works inspired by Pinter.

PINTERESQUE plays September 13 through October 8 at the Eureka Theatre Company, 215 Jackson Street in San Francisco. Tickets ($15-$25) may be purchased by calling 510.568.4118.

The O.E.D. online dictionary’s entry for Pinteresque: “Of or relating to Harold Pinter; resembling or characteristic of his plays ... Pinter’s plays are typically characterized by implications of threat and strong feeling produced through colloquial language, apparent triviality, and long pauses.” And so the adjective Pinteresque has come into the English language – with its various meanings of suspenseful, menacing, ambiguous, erotic – and you can say that about only a handful of writers – Shakespeare, Shaw, Kafka, Joyce, Brecht. But there’s a lot more to the British playwright and 2005 Nobel Prize winner’s work than the profound pause. Pinter’s body of work now stands at 29 plays, numerous film scripts, poems and essays and he continues to influence countless well-known and aspiring writers, among them Caryl Churchill, Alan Ayckborn, David Hare and Howard Brenton.

Pinter’s off-white comedy The Lover demonstrates Pinteresque qualities in their seminal stages of evolution. First produced as a television play in 1963 with Pinter directing his first wife Vivien Merchant in the female lead role, The Lover was subsequently remounted as a stage play in the fall of that year on a double bill with Pinter’s The Dwarfs. Critics wrote: “ [an] engaging slice of domestic fetishism ... Pinter’s dialogue was as crisp and brittle as a piece of papyrus ... “ Plays and Players; “ ... an optimistic study in marriage between two happy perverts whose perversions fit.” The Observer. The story of a seemingly bourgeois husband and wife who engage in erotic games-playing, The Lover manages to be simultaneously amusing, titillating, suspenseful and oddly disquieting.

Just as Pinter drew upon Beckett to develop his voice as a writer for the stage, in Act II of Eastenders’ PINTERESQUE our new writers exploit a master playwright to develop their unique voices. As part of its ongoing commitment to mentor new playwrights, ERC asked interested company members and up and coming Bay Area playwrights to create work inspired by The Lover, to explore Pinter’s spoken and unspoken language and use of demotic speech and delve into his themes of time, the unknowableness of the truth and the fallibility of personal and collective memory. The Lover reduces drama to the basic elements – a confined space, tension-laden dialogue, economy of movement, gesture and emotion and a minimum of plot – a challenging model for new writers of the theatre!

ERC presents PINTERESQUE in repertory so that audiences may enjoy skilled performers in a variety of roles. The evening features Craig Dickerson and Michaela Greeley in The Lover, and an ensemble of actors fill out the new works’ portion of the evening.

The mission of Eastenders Repertory Company is to provide a collaborative, mentoring environment for theatre artists to produce both original and established works in repertory and to develop educational programs in theatre arts. ERC is dedicated to providing a stimulating environment for theatre artists and high-quality, affordable and accessible theatre for the Bay Area community.

Past Eastenders productions include our prior six annual one-act festivals: 100 YEARS OF SEX-ACTS, ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF POLITICAL THEATRE, EIGHT X TENN, 106 YEARS OF COMEDY, ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF EURO-ONE-ACTS and ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF ONE-ACTS, the spring 2005 world premieres of Charles E. Polly’s A Knight’s Escape and Scott Munson’s WWJD?, Three Hotels by Jon Robin Baitz, the local premieres of Wonder of the World by David Lindsay-Abaire and [sic] by Melissa James Gibson, and TENN in 2002! ( Williams’ The Long Goodbye and new short works inspired by that one-act); the world premiere of Founding Artistic Director Charles E. Polly’s THE TWYLA TRILOGY (Twyla’s Boy, Twyla’s Story and June Bug Music); Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days; and the Bay Area premiere of Tennessee Williams’ Something Cloudy, Something Clear.

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