Whether or not there’s a real lover, or whether all of this is an elaborate fantasy is beside the point. For Harold Pinter, it may all be the same thing.

The Lover by Harold Pinter. Directed by Shana Gozansky. Scenic and Light Design by Luke Sutherland. Sound Design by Ed Young; Costume Design. Staged by the Bridge Repertory Theater at the Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA, through March 17.

By Tim Jackson

McCaela Donovan as Sarah and Joe Short as Richard in a scene from the Bridge Repertory Theater’s staging of “The Lover.”

The Bridge Repertory Theater is providing theatergoers with a great chance to see The Lover, one of Harold Pinter’s lesser-known and crazier short plays. This is the company’s premier production, yet its members treat the script with a surprisingly casual, though compelling, aplomb. Olivia D’Ambrosia is the troupe’s “producing artist”; the actors are “founding artistic associates.” A strong ensemble chemistry shines through the production. Shana Gozansky directs with a sharp eye for Pinter’s sly theatrical rhythms, evoking its humor, language, and rituals. She uses a simple but effective set to move the actors around like chess pieces as they dive headlong into his or her character’s erotic fantasies and sexual peccadilloes.

As the audience enters the theater, we see a couple seated upright in sleep-masks. The actors, McCaela Donovan as Sarah and Joe Short as Richard, each occupy an alcove, as if to emphasize his or her isolated dream life. The lights go down, the masks come off, and the play begins.

Richard: Is your lover coming today?
Sarah: Mmmm
Richard: What time?
Sarah: Three
Richard: Will you be going out . . . or staying in?
Sarah: Oh. I think we’ll stay in.

We’re immediately thrust into the odd, mechanical speech and uncertain realities generated by Pinter. Sarah and Richard continue their cloying politeness, toying with one another’s sexual fantasies. Whether or not there’s a real lover, or whether all of this is an elaborate fantasy is beside the point. For Pinter, it may all be the same thing. His satiric targets are habit, boredom, bourgeois privilege, and hypocrisy. A quick and waggish appearance by John the milkman (Juan Rodriguez), delivering the cream (!), suggests the nature of these affairs. They are tawdry, tacky, but somehow very necessary.

McCaela Donovan plays a woman of many faces in the Bridge Repertory Theater’s production of “The Lover.”

Written in 1962, The Lover has the tinny cadences and antic absurdities of Eugène Ionesco. The script is fast-moving, confusing, and hysterical, to the point of becoming, at times, cartoonish. Yet the language is vintage Pinter. In fact, this wacky comedy of manners feels like an early sketch for dramatist’s later, more realistic and fully developed study of adultery, Betrayal (produced by the Huntington Theatre Company late last year. Fuse review) The combative false dignity, constrained anger, sexual game-playing and repressed jealousies (even certain lines), will resurface 16 years later.

The actors sink their teeth into the language and milk the silences. Joe Short’s Richard is efficacious and businesslike in his daily activities and dress, but he is panting (inwardly) to explode. The boredom of the routine energizes his erotic compulsion. The Kinks song parody “Well Respected Man” comes to mind:

And he plays at stocks and shares,
And he goes to the regatta,
And he adores the girl next door,
Cause he’s dying to get at her,
But his mother knows the best about
The matrimonial stakes.

During this period the “Profumo Affair” was about to surface. That was the huge British scandal in 1963 involving the British Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, and a 21-year-old call girl named Christine Keeler. Richard has that same frustrated, middle-class yearning for the sexual freedom that the sixties were about to provide, matched with the deep-seated fear he would be left out. The production hints at this cultural hysteria by smartly playing music of the era but not pushing the parallels too obviously. The yen for sexuality variety (heightened by the kinky thrills of deception) is, after all, a timeless and universal problem. Hello, Eliot Spitzer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Edwards, Bill Clinton, et al.

The biggest surprise of the evening is the young actress McCaela Donovan as Sarah. Coming from musical theater, she brings to the role a natural physicality as well as a voice with a strong range. Her face is nimbly expressive. She can be blank, beautiful, angry, curious, or defensive in a moment, catching the tricky and sudden shifts of the play, absolutely committed to each small moment in her character’s wildly vacillating shifts of mood. Her chameleonic portrait of “love/lust” is a major reason that the play remains convincing on a human level, despite all of its preposterous antics.

Tim Jackson was an assistant professor of Digital Film and Video for 20 years. His music career in Boston began in the 1970s and includes some 20 groups, recordings, national and international tours, and contributions to film soundtracks. He studied theater and English as an undergraduate, and has also has worked helter skelter as an actor and member of SAG and AFTRA since the 1980s. He has directed three feature documentaries: Chaos and Order: Making American Theater about the American Repertory Theater; Radical Jesters, which profiles the practices of 11 interventionist artists and agit-prop performance groups; When Things Go Wrong: The Robin Lane Story, and the short film The American Gurner. He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics. You can read more of his work on his blog.