Helen Hunt and Robert Sean Leonard Photo by Joan Marcus

Although the set design is credited to Neil Patel, the stunning look of the play is a true collaboration with lighting designer Xavier Pierce and projection designer Rasean Davonté Johnson. While the set consumes the whole of the stage, Patel partially obscures sections of it with floor-to-ceiling flats covered in scrim material. These flats slide into the wings, as needed, to denote shifts in the action, but Pierce's lighting subtly maintains just a bit of the audience's attention on the literally and conceptually overlapping spaces. For example, the bedroom set remains up-center for all but one scene between Emma and Robert, but it is rarely fully obscured and thus hangs over all the characters' interactions.

During scene and costume changes, Johnson projects grainy blue snow onto the scrims, as well as flickering photo and video montages suggesting the the main characters in old times that were (or at least seemed) happier, a wistful yet deliberately manufactured feeling that is also well-supported by the sound design and composition by Michael Bodeen and Rob Milburn.

In the scenes themselves, handwritten time and place markers as well as projections of lighting fixtures and architectural elements offer hints that the characters have physically changed locations, even as a single table serves as a furnishing in a pub, Jerry's home, then Emma and Robert's, then the flat where Emma and Jerry conduct their affair and so on. Taken together, set, lighting and projections serve up much of the critical subtext about sameness and vicious cycles.

Linda Roethke's costumes function in a similar way. The looks that Jerry and Robert sport change little throughout. Through tucking or untucking a shirt, adding or removing a jacket, and so on, Roethke conveys passion, anxiety, youth, jaded detachment, and more, and by contrasting Robert's dark turtlenecks with Jerry's French blue button-downs, she conveys just enough distinction between the character of the two men. Emma's looks serve both to mark the different years as the play moves backward and to communicate the roles she chooses to play both for herself and for the two men in her life at various points in time.

For as well-planned and executed as the staging is, though, the direction and the cast's feel for the material is not always quite as solid. As Jerry, Robert Sean Leonard is the most consistently in tune with both his character and Pinter's language. As the end of the play wraps around to the beginning of Jerry and Emma's affair, there's satisfaction at the way Leonard has threaded all through his performance both youthful passion and thoughtless, masculine disregard for anything other than the self.

As Robert, Ian Barford has the highest highs and the most moments of cutting brilliance. He and Leonard are outstanding in their first scene together, and Barford's feel for Pinter's brand of comedy is exhilarating. Yet neither the scene between Robert and Emma in Venice where Robert learns of the affair, nor the tense lunch he shares with Jerry not long after hits quite right. In both, his agitation and barely suppressed violence ramp up early and there's little room for emotional movement in them.

As Emma, Helen Hunt chooses such cool detachment that the character is difficult to get a feel for. Certainly there is some blame to lay at Pinter's feet here, as there is not a tremendous amount on the page for the actor to work with. She certainly manages glimmers of warmth and intimacy opposite Leonard, and she seeds the performance with things to discover as one's mind gradually unravels the timeline. It seems clear that there is an excellent performance lying just beneath the surface, but the overall direction hasn't succeeded well enough to allow the audience complete or consistent access to it.

Betrayal has been extended through March 30, 2025, at the Goodman Theatre, Albert Theatre, 170 North Dearborn, Chicago IL. For tickets and information, please visit GoodmanTheatre.org or call 312-443-3800.