“Hilarious…Pinter's comedy of manners [is a] play on love and sex and relationships in upper-middle-class London is full of evasive small talk. The Pinteresque pauses and silences are fluently incorporated into the dialogue. Julie Rowe gives a magnificently nuanced portrayal of a smart, sophisticated woman as victim in a velvet-lined rut. Designer Scott Cooper outdid himself in his elaborate set for Betrayal, which is suffused in Joseph P. Oshry's melancholy blue lighting and Philip Glass' repetitive, unsettling music.”
-St. Petersburg Times

"Betrayal is an exquisite play, brilliantly simple in form and courageous in its search for a poetry that turns banality into melancholy beauty."
-Newsweek

American Stage Theatre Company continues its 29th and final historic season in its current building with Harold Pinter's drama about marriage, Betrayal, running May 28 thru June 22. "Pay What You Can Nights" are scheduled for Tuesday, June 3 and 10 at 7:30 p.m.

A critical and popular success on both sides of the Atlantic (winner in New York of the Drama Critics Circle Award as best foreign play and in London of the West End Award as best play of the season) Betrayal is a must see hit. Dealing with the "eternal triangle"-wife, husband and the wife's lover-the playwright, with his customary inventiveness and subtlety, brings new insights to this timeless theme.

The play begins in the present, with the meeting of Emma and Jerry, whose adulterous affair of seven years ended two years earlier. Emma's marriage to Robert, Jerry's best friend, is now breaking up, and she needs someone to talk to. Their reminiscences reveal that Robert knew of their affair all along and, to Jerry's dismay, regarded it with total nonchalance.

Thereafter, in a series of contiguous scenes, the play moves backward in time, from the end of the Emma-Jerry affair to its beginning, throwing into relief the little lies and oblique remarks that, in this time-reverse, reveal more than direct statements, or overt actions, ever could.

Please call the American Stage Box Office at (727) 823-PLAY (7529) or