| Several months back, a colleague handed me a copy of the British journal The New Internationalist . The issue would interest me, she said, because it included a special section on U.S. prisons and because Harold Pinter had written an essay for it. (She knew I had long admired Pinter's plays.) I read the Pinter essay, finding to my surprise that it mentioned the stun belt and the restraint chair , two subjects I had reported on for The Progressive I wrote Pinter, requesting a couple of hours for an interview. He promptly agreed. I first checked out a copy of The Caretaker from the library years ago, on the advice of a writing teacher. When I finished with that one, I returned and checked out all the Pinter plays on the shelves. I read them over the next few weeks, pausing to gasp at a particular music I soon realized was Pinter's ownsimultaneously lyrical, hard-assed, implicitly brutal, and rhythmically dead-on. His twenty-nine plays, which include The Birthday Party The Caretaker The Homecoming Betrayal Party Time , and One for the Road , have inspired the adjective "Pinteresque," which the | |
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