Sex, Lies and Harold Pinter

A Visiting Production at the Odyssey Theatre

Before a word is spoken, Joel Daavid’s set for Party Time has already done a good bit of Pinter’s work. As the audience enters the theatre, the cast is discovered mid-party — cocktails in hand, laughter bouncing off polished wood paneling, leather furniture and Persian rugs arranged beneath tall windows that suggest old money at comfortable rest. Then you notice the angles. Walls and windows built many degrees off true; a geometry that quietly insists that something is askew in this privileged world. It’s an elegant piece of design for an elegant piece of theatre — and it sets the stakes for an uneven but ultimately rewarding evening.

Party Time is the trickier of the two one-acts on offer. Written at the tail end of Pinter’s explicitly political period — the cycle that includes the ferocious One for the Road and Mountain Language — it is constructed like a long, dark joke. The setup is the whole play: brittle party chatter, studied evasions, the gathering dread of whatever is happening just beyond those canted windows. The punchline comes late and should land like a thunderclap. The challenge is pure accumulation — tension must be wound tighter and tighter until the final moment releases it all at once.

Director Jack Heller’s pacing here is too stately for the mechanism to fully engage. The cast, too, wrestles visibly with Pinter’s language, which is a minefield dressed as small talk. The result is a party that registers as merely uncomfortable, and when the climactic turn arrives, it is not with a bang but with a whimper. The evening’s first act is handsome and intelligent — it simply needs to be wound more tightly.

What a turnaround, then, with The Lover.

Pinter is on home territory here — the layered domestic battlefield of Betrayal and Old Times — and the production rises to meet him. Sarah and Richard are a prosperous married couple who have arrived at a civilized arrangement: each freely acknowledges the other’s extramarital proclivities. It is the kind of sophisticated design for living that sounds like liberation until Pinter begins, with characteristic patience, to dismantle it.

Susan Priver and Ron Bottitta acquit themselves very well as this particular husband and wife. They find the easy intimacy of a long marriage and the trickier undercurrents running beneath it, and Heller’s brisker pacing here lets the modernist music in Pinter’s language breathe and swing. You hear the rhythms working. The silences earn their keep.

What elevates the production beyond a well-executed chamber piece is the genuine excavation Priver, Bottitta and Heller bring to the material’s deeper registers. On the surface, Sarah and Richard are a portrait of indolent upper-class leisure — people with the time and insulation to aestheticize their own moral arrangements while the world outside goes about its business. But Pinter is never only where he appears to be. The Lover becomes, in this production’s best moments, a meditation on class and its permissions, on the slow drift of personal morality when consequences remain theoretical, on the stubborn difficulty of honest communication even between two people who share a bed and a life. The actors dig for those levels and find them, which transforms a clever Pinter conceit into something with genuine weight.

Sex, Lies and Harold Pinter is a mixed evening in the way that serious theatrical ambition sometimes produces mixed evenings — one play that falls a step short of its own intentions and another that fully delivers. The Odyssey has always been Los Angeles’s home for exactly this kind of rigorous, uncompromising work, and Heller’s production, imperfections and all, is worth an evening of your attention.

Cast, Creative and Ticket Information:

The creative team for Sex, Lies and Harold Pinter includes scenic designer Joel Daavid, lighting designer Gavan Wyrick, sound designer Chrisropher Moscatiello, costume designer Shon LeBlanc and properties designer Sofia Alejandra Gonzalez. The stage manager is Valeria Ruuva, and the evening is produced by Brian Foyster and Christina Hart.

Party Time stars: John Coady,  Larry Eisenberg, Michelle Ghatan, Brenda James,  Isaac W. Jay, Paul Marius, Michelle McGregor, Christopher Louis Parker and Mouchette Van Helsdingen. The Lover stars Ron Bottitta & Susan Priver.

Sex, Lies and Harold Pinter opened March 20, 2026 and plays Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 3pm through April 26 at the Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles. Tickets are $35. Visit OdysseyTheatre.com or call (310) 477-2055 ext. 2.