Friday Happenings

Theater

Before he became a neo-Stalinist and Milošević apologist, Harold Pinter wrote some pretty decent plays. The Birthday Party, his first three act play, is the confusing and hilarious account of the worst birthday ever (if it was a birthday at all) when the repressed returns and the subaltern speaks. Maybe. Performed by the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club. Loeb Experimental Theater, Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle St., Cambridge, 7:30 p.m., through April 11. Free.

Movies

Kiju Yoshida was one of the engines behind the Japanese New Wave, and his greatest movies were made with actress Mariko Okada. The HFA continues its Yoshida retrospective by inviting Yoshida and Okada to discuss The Affair at Akitsu (1962), a melodrama that stands in for the spirit of postwar Japan. Harvard Film Archive, Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge, 7 p.m. $10.

Examined Life joins the most fashionable philosophers in the world in one film, an examination of the role of philosophy in every day life. Featuring Michael Hardt, Slavoj Žižek , Cornel West, and Judith Butler like Super Friends for grad students in literature departments. Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle St. Tickets and showtimes.