Blue skies and sunshine in Southern Sonoma County this mid-October were all the encouragement I needed to wheel out the bike and take a leisurely Saturday morning pedal around Petaluma.
En-route to the coffee shop, the Petaluma Market and a pit-stop with one of my favorite friend/merchants, downtown, I pondered on the fact that I'd spent approximately 30 hours on airplanes this past month. Making it home with my groceries on-board the trusty two wheeler, was just the ticket for uncurling a still rather cramped set of legs!
Pondering my recent travels gave me time to revisit a spot of serious good luck in having scored tickets to see British actors Daniel Craig (aka current James Bond), Rachel Weisz (his real life wife) and Rafe Spall (son of actor Timothy Spall) in NYC previews for a limited 14-week run at the Barrymore on Broadway of Harold Pinter's powerful (real life-inspired) love-triangle drama Betrayal.
The play, directed this time around by Mike Nichols, has a rich theatrical and screen history all of its own. Packed to the rafters with lies and deceit, it was no secret upon its initial 1978 release that it was Pinter's re-working and quite blatant exposure of an affair in the 1960s with BBC reporter Joan Bakewell.
Her husband Michael Bakewell became a close friend of the philandering playwright during the course of the supposedly illicit affair and by all accounts, his eventual revelations of knowing about it for years, sent Pinter to pen and paper, more in the processing of his relationship with Michael than with Joan.
The one hour-and-a-half-long, flawless one-act play was one of those rare performances that, after an initial burst of applause, allowed for the audience to comfortably move past the famous names on stage and lose itself in a captivating, reverse chronology of the plot. This is a theater that is intimate enough to smell the cigarettes being smoked on set.
Rachel Weisz, as a convincing Emma, stepped onto Broadway for her stage debut. Brave considering the caliber of her male counterparts. Rafe Spall, who most recently appeared on the big screen as the reporter in Life of Pi, was the most pleasant surprise, almost, but not quite upstaging the other two.
The play set a box office record for its first week on Broadway. It runs through January 5th, 2014.
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