In Marin Theatre’s ‘Betrayal,’ a Love Affair Has No Pulse

Characters don’t have to be likable. But it would be nice if they had a pulse.

In Marin Theatre’s “Betrayal,” Harold Pinter’s three-hander about a wife cheating with her husband’s best friend, they sometimes do. But just as often actors strip intention, subtext and humanity from their delivery. Lines are just sounds, the script an atonal score of arbitrary emphases, thudding pauses and strident inflections.

It doesn’t help that the show, told in reverse chronological order can look on the page like a lot of aimless, circular small talk. When Jerry (Tasso Feldman) and Emma (Liz Sklar) meet at a pub in the first scene of the show, which opened Tuesday, Oct. 27, versions of “How are you?” get asked and reasked so often the question becomes a punchline. The awkward fitfulness ought to make sense for their situation: They’re ex-lovers, meeting for the first time in a long time, and they don’t know what to say. But under the direction of Carey Perloff, dialogue from a Nobel laureate looks amateurish. 

One deadly blow comes when Emma finally reveals what led her to want to meet: After many years, she and her husband have just had it all out during an all-night talk the previous evening, and their marriage is over. But the way Sklar drops that bomb, it’s as if it occurs to Emma only as she’s speaking that her life changed the night before. Till then, her demeanor — a haze of blankness, bland cheer and mild prickly interest — gave no clue.

Pinter fans might protest that many of his characters are supposed to be mysterious, that his genius lies in how he distilled a broad postwar sense of menace into compact scenarios where the worst part isn’t people’s cruelty; it’s the serene lack of explanation for it. 

Instead of menace, though, Perloff gives the first scene its second deadly blow: sentimentality. Out of nowhere, sad piano tinkles in, and at first it’s not clear if the characters can hear it or only we can. Then, to underscore a memory, an outline drawing of Jerry tossing a little girl into the air gets projected onto the walls. 

It’s Harold Pinter as a Hallmark movie.

The juice of “Betrayal” is all about who knows what and when. Characters lord their secret knowledge over each other, laying traps to force out the truth or just sadistically enjoy watching a liar contort to maintain a facade. Pinter balances the love triangle perfectly. Everyone, at some point, is both duper and duped.

The mind games and revenge lead to some effective moments. When Emma’s husband Robert (Charlie Semine) bids Jerry to reckon with how little he knows, Feldman’s one word concurrence is of a man shedding all his worldly pretensions and realizing he’s just a sad clown staring at the abyss. 

A moment later, Robert avers that, even after everything’s in the open, he and Jerry still like each other. But a line superficially about friendship sounds like a threat. He’s standing behind his seated cuckold, in the perfect position to kill. 

But in other exchanges, the performers speak as if they’ve underlined every single word in their scripts, and the show sags like an overloaded trunk. In still others, it’s like their only motivation is to wait for a scene partner’s line to be over so it’s their turn to speak in a game of verbal seesaw. 

In the most unbelievable moment of all, after Robert rants about how awful it would be if his wife killed the vibe by sitting in on his macho squash game, Emma lets him play with her hair and kiss her before she breaks away and then leans on his shoulder. Stage directions dictate the bulk of that, but in this show, it looks like Emma forgot about what just happened. 

You’re probably better off forgetting this one, too.