From Love Nests to Desire Surveillance

By MAUREEN DOWD, NYT

I ASKED Mike Nichols, the director of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” on Broadway, why love triangles have such a mythic hold on the imagination.

“We’re born in a triangle,” he said about parents and a newborn. “That’s the most important one, the triangle that determines who we are, the one that affects the other triangles that you get into in your life. It’s all about that first triangle, what it gives you and what it takes away from you.”

The affair in “Betrayal” takes place from 1968 to 1975, but it feels like a quaint, distant world.

Robert, a publisher, discovers that his wife, Emma, is having an affair with his best friend, Jerry, a literary agent, when he recognizes Jerry’s handwriting on a letter addressed to Emma at the American Express office in Venice.

But maybe that world isn’t so quaint.

(More here.)