Bonnie Monte is both a gifted director and the Artistic Director of Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey. When she steps up to the helm, there is definitely a freshening wind blowing something wonderful and disturbing our way. Monte brings us the ultimate pre-Halloween giftie - Harold Pinter's "No Man's Land."
When we join the action, we are already in a well-appointed drawing room somewhere in England. The shelves are filled with books and the venerable and aging scion of the house has invited a less well-to-do fellow writer home for a nightcap. Sherman Howard plays Spooner, the less financially successful of the two. Spooner's scuffed and worn shoes, his mismatched sport coat, and stained khaki pants cry out for a hot shower and a good night in a proper bed for their owner. His passion is poetry and his calling, as he sees it, is as a mentor for the young men and women who would follow him in the craft. Hirst, the lord of the manor, is a successful essayist who is fired by Spooner's rhetoric-sufficiently at least to invite Spooner to the manor house for a dram.

In the course of the evening, the voluble Spooner could talk the leg off a table. The saturnine Hirst is brilliantly understated, as limned by Edward Genest-his first act Hirst is an oil painting of a man-scarcely responding to Spooner's terrier-esque nipping at conversation. But then, a drowning evening takes a lively, and an ugly, turn.

First the pugnacious Foster enters. Derek Wilson plays him with a razor's edge and a keen sense of whimsy. We don't know whether he's had too much to drink or if he's about to lash out and-quite seriously-kill someone, likely Spooner. Joining Foster shortly is Briggs, the menacing and quite funny foil and companion and, perhaps, life partner of Foster. These two gentlemen are the personal body guards and Men Friday for Hirst and perhaps, hmmm, something a bit more.

Pinter's genius is that Spooner and Hirst each have speeches that echo aspects of the author himself. Hirst is much more loquacious in Act II and holds forth on a variety of subjects. Several times, there is the strong feeling of having walked in medias res into someone else's life, where you play a part, but have only the dimmest of recollections how and why you are there. One lively section has Briggs holding forth on how he met Foster and it's the most gnarly bit of fluffy fun, with echoes of the love child of Monty Python and theatre of the absurd.
I left the theatre pondering how one's drunken maunderings can nearly end up in a dirt nap, and experiencing vicariously the delicious frisson of freedom from physical and mental bondage and baggage. Yet still, there remains a miasmatic aura of absurd menace. This is a thoroughly enjoyable play whose lingering notes of leather, rich fall berries and the dust of old romance will remain with you into the wicked fall.

Tickets are available at www.shakespearenj.org or by calling the box office at 973/408-5600. Playing through August 29, this is a dark and disturbing treat to enjoy while the days retain their length and the nights, some warmth.