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THE P L AY ’ S THE T H I N G The Homecoming By Harold Pinter Performed by the City Players May 9-25 Directed by William Whitaker Meet the family. There’s Max, the aging, capwearing, cane-using father ("Stop calling me Dad") who gripes and snipes from his official living room chair. There’s Uncle Sam, the chipper chauffeur whose job-ingrained courteousness finds no match in this home. There’s son Lenny, the thick, woman-popping pimp apparently struggling with life’s larger questions ("Do you detect a certain logical incoherence in the central affirmations of Christian theism?"). There’s son Joey, a thick-necked boxer-in-training who wears the expression of a clueless caveman who’s just smelled something nice. And son Teddy, the long-away philosophy professor who’s returning to north London from America with his confidence bemused, his condescension in reserve, and his wife (Ruth) of six years, whom no one’s met, on his arm. (She’s not quite on his arm, actually. And who knows if she’s really his wife.) The Homecoming begins with familiar familial hostility (think of a crusty-humored sitcom, then pull the laugh track), the men tugging down the others’ lives. But with Teddy and Ruth’s introduction—the couple enter in the morning, then talk like strangers—the hostility gives way to sexual creepiness. The family’s other men, long used to their lives of rugged desperation, are forced, literally overnight, to deal with this woman—this pretty, odd, mysterious woman who wears dresses, philosophizes about the crossing of her legs, and enunciates like she’s speaking the language for the first time.
by Bosco (with illustration help from Jessica Gluckman)
www.mentalsewage.net
Elliot Goes
So how do these other men deal? With a kind of sick tenderness and with schemes. But are they to be blamed entirely? After all, Ruth is game for some Act I flirting with Lenny, then opens Act II serving each of the men tea (in a compelling interpretative add-on to the published script): slowly, silently, cup by cup, reaching down to the coffee table, legs straight, rear raised, offering all a long look. They take it and, as they say in some circles, it’s on. There’s dancing, there’s cuddling, and way more, none of it involving the man with the matching wedding Carrie Hegdahl as Ruth and Jason Cannon as Lenny in the City Players’ production of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming. Photo band. courtesy City Players. The Homecoming is loaded with stage, unlit, staring out the window, holding the issues of family, class, sex, sexuality, power, and clock up to his ear. We get a long look at this manhood, and its unsettling power exists mini-scene, and as it’s one of the only private because the playwright offers few, if any, revelamoments any of the characters has, its meaning tions. Just as the play disallows a summing-up, —or rather its hint at meaning—resonates. The so do the characters. What kind of pimp, you ask second involves Max, the aging father. Sitting in from the audience, uses the phrase je ne sais his designated chair—one of Teddy’s first midquoi? What kind of father moves from bitter to night lines, to Ruth: “That’s my father’s chair”— beaming and back to bitter so quickly? What Max hold his cane horizontally, across each of kind of young man like Joey, who seems mostly the chair’s arms, up close to his chest. As he sweet, describes with pride what was probably a grills the world (“It’s funny you never got marrape? The answer is: this kind. And it’s a simple ried,” he sneers to his brother), the supportive answer because the actors—particularly those cane takes the image of a protective bar—someplaying Max and Sam (Paul Rogers and John thing that holds him in and to which he holds, Normington, respectively)—handle the characon some sort of end-of-life amusement ride that ters’ contradictions with such skill. The effect is never leaves the living room. By the end of this that throughout the play and well after it’s over, challenging, troubling play—the brothers and we’re left not nodding, but wondering. father surrounding Ruth, Teddy departed—the Despite the power of much of the dialogue— father’s lost his cane, his chair. He crawls. from long stories to decades-buried questions— —Stephen Schenkenberg what I remember most from this City Players production are two visual moments, one very much City Players’ next production is The staged, the other more tucked away. The first Underpants by Carl Sternheim and adapted by occurs when Lenny, having told Teddy of his Steve Martin; it opens their new season sleeping troubles—“Something keeps waking October 10. www.cityplayers.org me up. Some kind of tick”—appears alone on
It’s the beginning of summer, and we’re first to hit the pool.
As ferrets are heat-intolerant, we Once our fur gets the slightest bit hot, have a lot of experience in staying cool. it’s cannonball time. Bombs away!
