"Caretaker" on Broadway By JACQUES LE SOURD THE JOURNAL NEWS (Original publication: November 10, 2003) The works of British playwright Harold Pinter depend on a tone of menace. You don't know what's going on moment to moment, but you do know it doesn't bode well for anybody onstage. Bring a playful, expansive and jolly actor like Patrick Stewart into the mix, and you're going to let a lot of tension out of that tone. It's a real loss, but on the other hand, the famous bald actor from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" is going to be a lot of people's main reason for seeing the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of "The Caretaker," which opened last night at the American Airlines Theatre. For Stewart fans, there's plenty of shtick from the man who played all the parts in Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" for many crowd-pleasing seasons. As Davies, Stewart still looks like Ebenezer Scrooge, his body in a perpetual crouch, wearing filthy-looking long underwear or a coat with a piece of string for a belt, and grotesque-looking sandals. He speaks most of his lines in a mock-serious growl, and many of them are greeted by hearty laughs from the audience. Hearty laughter is not the usual response to Pinter. This play, which now seems overlong at three full acts and eight scenes, brought Pinter to Broadway in 1961. The successful production, which must have been a dazzler, starred Donald Pleasance, Alan Bates and Robert Shaw. A 1986 revival at Circle in the Square, directed by John Malkovich, starred Gary Sinise, Jeff Perry and Alan Wilder. The mysterious plot involves two brothers who shelter a homeless man in a seedy room filled with bric-a-brac. Over the three acts their relationships shift, but the play never settles on a clear meaning. Anyone looking for neat resolutions will be disappointed. The play will remind you of the direct link from Pinter to our home-grown David Mamet, who wrote plays in the same monosyllabic style with abstract meanings, most notably "American Buffalo." This production, carefully directed by David Jones, does boast an actor who tries to inject menace as quickly as Stewart drains it out: Aidan Gillen, best known here as the star of the original British version of TV's "Queer as Folk." He plays Mick, the younger and more powerful of the two brothers (played by Bates and Sinise in the previous stagings). Mick opens the play with a very long silence that seems to contain all of the usual Pinter "pauses" at once. There are no pauses in the rest of the play. Gillen's movements are jagged and dangerous, involving hair-trigger responses that are meant to jolt Davies but wind up unnerving us. (At one point, he reaches into the pocket of his black leather jacket for what we're sure is a gun and pulls out ... a salt shaker.) He is silent for long stretches, then launches into dizzying hyperverbal riffs. His face is full of alarming tics and changes in emotional weather. What is frightening is that Gillen still seems to be in character . read: scary . during the curtain calls. The older brother, Aston (Kyle MacLachlan, known for "Blue Velvet" and "Sex and the City") is a subdued character who, we learn late in Act 2, was the unwilling victim of electroshock therapy. It has left him a ruined man. It is Aston who invites the homeless Davies into his room and suffers the consequences. Sensing Aston's weakness, Davies becomes more assertive and tries to ally himself with Mick. But he quickly learns that the alliance can go only so far, and he retreats. Stewart seems so self-possessed, however, that we never fear that he won't land on his . or somebody's . feet. The title is derived from the fact that both brothers absurdly offer Davies a job as "caretaker" of the ramshackle house in which he is living, only to quickly withdraw the offer. John Lee Beatty has turned out a beautiful junkyard jumble of a set (a concept that would be borrowed for "American Buffalo"). Jane Greenwood has designed nearly comical, very apt costumes for the three men. And Peter Kaczorowski has created moody lighting for this room in hell. Jones ("Taking Sides") directs a visually balanced production that serves every part of the playhouse. (It's a gift that is surprisingly rare with modern directors, who tend to skew productions to one side or the other.) But this is a pretty warm-and-fuzzy "Caretaker," thanks to its warm-and-fuzzy box-office star. Click here to read the original article. [Link may/may not be active]