WEASEL WORDS.(Harold Pinter )(Eugene O'Neill)

"The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories," the photographer Diane Arbus wrote. Her words came back to me as I watched the drama of identity taking shape in a fascinating Harold Pinter double bill (well directed by Neil Pepe, at the Atlantic Theatre Company), which brings together his first play, "The Room" (1957), and "Celebration" (1999). The winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Literature, Pinter, as a playwright, a screenwriter, a director, and a mentor, has had an enormous influence on the theatrical landscape of his time. He began his career as an actor, and, even at the outset, with comparatively crude command, he turned his actor's understanding of subtext into a metaphysic. "The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear," he said. "It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its place." He added, "One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness."

Pinter claims to know only so much about his characters, who arrive as images from his unconscious; his ignorance of their history is matched by the characters' own vagueness about themselves. "The Room," for instance, opens with a woman called Rose (Mary Beth Peil) padding around a bed-sitter, serving tea to a resolutely unresponsive man named Bert (Thomas Jay Ryan). "It's very cold out, I can tell you," Rose announces. "It's murder." Later, she adds, "This is a good room. You've got a chance in a place like this. I look after you, don't I, Bert?" Bert doesn't answer. Who are these people? Where do they come from? What do they really want? Is what they say true? Every person who subsequently crosses the threshold calls into question Rose's domestic daydreams about the room and about herself. In this surreal nightmare, things feel real and turn out to be otherwise. When a blind black man, Riley (the excellent Earle Hyman), arrives unexpectedly, we discover that Rose also answers to the name Sal, though whether or not she and Riley have had a relationship remains unclear. At the finale, Bert kicks Riley senseless. "Can't see," Rose says, clutching her eyes. "I can't see." Her blindness plays both as a response to the weight of the unknown and as a refusal to know. In this jejune and portentous one-act, Pinter stumbled on a psychological truth that he continued to explore brilliantly for half a century: mankind's passion for ignorance.

Blindness, as Pinter has dramatized it over the years, is something internal. The habit of not seeing is for his characters a sort of narrative device, an evasion of self-awareness that allows them to sustain their stories of themselves; the very syntax of their speech carries them ever farther from a real understanding of their own emotions. "Celebration," which takes place at two adjacent banquettes of an elegant restaurant, makes the point with hilarious panache. Here language is the main character, used in deft counterpoint to the unmooring silence at the heart of each speaker. With mockery, weasel words, tall tales, the syncopation of repetition, and, of course, a carapace of pauses, the characters perform a sensational exercise in denial.

At one table, a smarmy banker, Russell (the droll Brennan Brown), and Suki (Kate Blumberg), his eager but long-in-the-tooth companion, buttress their emptiness with the slap and tickle of seductive swagger:

RUSSELL: All right. Tell me. Do you think I have a nice character? . . ., SUKI: Yes, the thing is you haven't really got any character at all, have you? As such. Au fond. But I wouldn't worry about it. . . . I don't have any character either. I'm just a reed. I'm just a reed in the wind. Aren't I? You know I am. I'm just a reed in the wind., RUSSELL: You're a whore., SUKI: A whore in the wind.

At the other table, an East End wide boy, Lambert (the superb Patrick Breen), and his wife, Julie (Betsy Aidem), are loudly celebrating their toxic marriage, with Julie's sister, Prue (Carolyn McCormick), and her husband, Matt (Thomas Jay Ryan), who is Lambert's brother. Pinter has ...