Atlantic Theater Company has announced a two week extension for its Harold Pinter double bill of Celebration and The Room. The production, directed by Neil Pepe, is now scheduled to run through January 21.
Pinter's most recent Celebration and first play The Room complement each other in this rarely staged double-bill. Celebration opens on a wedding anniversary in an ultra-trendy restaurant, with three successful couples jockeying for the upper hand. The play features Betsy Aidem, Kate Blumberg, Patrick Breen, Brennan Brown, Phillip Goodwin, Carolyn McCormick, David Pittu, Thomas Jay Ryan and Christa Scott-Reed. The Room descends into a nightmare world of insecurity and uncertainty in a shabby one-room London flat. The Room features Blumberg, Earle Hyman, Peter Maloney, Mary Beth Peil, Pittu and Thomas Jay Ryan.
Celebration and The Room opened to mostly positive reviews on December 5. In his Broadway.com Review, Edward Karam wrote: "Pairing Harold Pinter's first play with Celebration, his most recent The Room, gives a splendid and unexpectedly timely opportunity to see the evolution of an important playwright, who just won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature… Though the actors play it well under Neil Pepe's direction, The Room is irritatingly nebulous and sometimes clunky… Celebration, set in a tony restaurant, is the more polished work."