Scena Theatre presents...

The New World Order and other plays

by Harold Pinter
directed by Robert McNamara

One for the Road is a violent,disturbing, enthralling short play in which an interrogator in an unnnamed totalitarian state torments in turn a tortured prisoner, his wife, and child. In Mountain Language we see langauge as a weapon used to literally kill a people. The oppressed are forbidden to speak the "mountain language" by an occupying military force. In short vignettes Pinter once again displays his virtuosity in portraying terror and its consequences. In the third and final playlet, The New World Order, Pinter (who wrote the play in reaction to the invasion of Iraq during the First Gulf War) ironically and powerfully shows us two state torturer as they go about their daily grind, preparing to torture a bound and gagged prisoner in order to keep "the world clean for democracy."

Dates: June 8 through July 9, Thurday – Saturday at 7.30pm, Sunday at 3pm (see full schedule).

PWYC previews: Saturday, June 3 at 7.30pm; Sunday, June 4, at 3pm.

Venue: Warehouse Theater, 1021 7th Street NW, Washington DC

Ticket prices: $25 - $32 ($5 discount to students and seniors)

Box office: Click here to buy tickets online or call 703-6847990

Artistic Team: Robert McNamara (Playwright, Director), AJ Guban (Set Design), Marianne Meadows (Lighting Design), Jennifer Tardiff (Costume Design), David Crandall (Sound Design)

Cast: Leslie Cohen, David Bryan Jackson, Kathryn Cocroft, Michael McDonnell, Lee Ordman, Stephanie Roswell, Sam Zarcone and Conor Aiken

Since his first play The Room, Harold Pinter has continued to turn out an impressive body of work not only for the theatre but also for films and television. His first major success came in 1960, when The Caretaker received both the Evening Standard Drama Award for best play of the year, and the Page 1 Award of the Newspaper Guild of New York in 1967. The Homecoming won the Drama Critics's Circle Award on Broadway. Pinter is the author of such modern classics as The Birthday Party, No Man's Land and Betrayal. In 1996, he was given the Laurence Olivier Award for a lifetime's achievement in theater. In 2004, Pinter received the Wilfrid Owen Prize in poetry, “specifically for his collection of poetry entitled WAR, published in 2003.” In October 2005, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, as someone "who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms".