About the Play:

Other Places is a collection of one-act plays by Nobel prize-winner Harold Pinter. Successfully produced in both London and New York, this tremendous triple bill of one-acts finds the author at the top of his powers.

The first portion of the triple bill, Victoria Station, is a brilliantly funny yet eerily chilling dialogue between a bewildered taxi driver (who may have gone mad) and the exasperated dispatcher who is trying, without success, to direct him to a waiting fare. The driver, who says he has fallen in love with the passenger who is asleep (or perhaps dead) on his back seat, doesn't seem to know his own location, much less that of Victoria Station. (Cast: 2 male)

The second part of the program offers a choice: either Family Voices (which was used in the London production) or One For The Road (which was presented in New York). Groups producing Other Places are free to use either combination of plays. (Or, if they wish, all four plays on one program.)

Family Voices is a series of parallel monologues between a mother and son in the form of letters probably written but never mailed, in which the facade of a happy family gradually disintegrates into a cauldron of recrimination. (Cast: 1 female, 2 male)

One For The Road, a powerful statement about the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments, finds an unctuous and "civilized" interrogator humiliating the doomed members of a family who have become enemies of the state. (Cast: 1 female, 2 male, 1 boy.)

The final play, A Kind Of Alaska, is a masterly study of a middle-aged woman waking up from a coma induced by sleeping sickness after thirty years have passed. In her mind she is still sixteen, and her attempts to fathom the changed world into which she reemerges are not only poignant and emotionally charged but, in the end, devastatingly brilliant theatre as well. (Cast: 2 female, 1 male)

Other Places was first produced in 1982 at The National Theatre in London. The American premiere was in 1984 at the Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) in New York City.

What people say:

"…the writing does indeed have the same spare eloquence and that depth-charge laconic quality we associate with Pinter." — New York Post

"He was never less obscure than here, or more profoundly eloquent about the fragile joy of being alive." — Daily Telegraph (London)

"…an extraordinary evening that shows Pinter's gift for pinning down the dream-like oddity of all waking existence." — The Guardian (UK)

"…little gems of human isolation." — The Standard (London)

About the Playwright:

Harold Pinter (1930-2008) was an English playwright, screenwriter, actor, theatre director, poet, and Nobel laureate. He wrote 29 plays including The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming, and Betrayal, 15 dramatic sketches, 21 screenplays, as well as books of poetry and fiction, and directed 27 theatre productions. He continued to act under his own name, on stage and screen. His genius was recognized within his lifetime as a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005 (the highest honour available to any writer in the world), the Companion of Honour for services to Literature, the Legion D'Honneur, the European Theatre Prize, the Laurence Olivier Award and the Moliere D'Honneur for lifetime achievement. In 1999 he was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature, in addition to 18 other honorary degrees.