Elliot Goes

THE PLAY’S THE THING

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.

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 band. Carrie Hegdahl as Ruth and Jason Cannon as Lenny in the City Players’ production of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming. Photo courtesy City Players.

The Homecoming is loaded with issues of family, class, sex, sexuality, power, and stage, unlit, staring out the window, holding the manhood, and its unsettling power exists clock up to his ear. We get a long look at this because the playwright offers few, if any, revelamini-scene, and as it’s one of the only private tions. Just as the play disallows a summing-up, moments any of the characters has, its meaning so do the characters. What kind of pimp, you ask —or rather its hint at meaning—resonates. The from the audience, uses the phrase je ne sais second involves Max, the aging father. Sitting in quoi? What kind of father moves from bitter to his designated chair—one of Teddy’s first midbeaming and back to bitter so quickly? What night lines, to Ruth: “That’s my father’s chair”— kind of young man like Joey, who seems mostly Max hold his cane horizontally, across each of sweet, describes with pride what was probably a the chair’s arms, up close to his chest. As he rape? The answer is: this kind. And it’s a simple grills the world (“It’s funny you never got maranswer because the actors—particularly those ried,” he sneers to his brother), the supportive playing Max and Sam (Paul Rogers and John cane takes the image of a protective bar—someNormington, respectively)—handle the characthing that holds him in and to which he holds, ters’ contradictions with such skill. The effect is on some sort of end-of-life amusement ride that that throughout the play and well after it’s over, never leaves the living room. By the end of this we’re left not nodding, but wondering. challenging, troubling play—the brothers and

Despite the power of much of the dialogue— father surrounding Ruth, Teddy departed—the from long stories to decades-buried questions— father’s lost his cane, his chair. He crawls. what I remember most from this City Players pro—Stephen Schenkenberg duction are two visual moments, one very much staged, the other more tucked away. The first City Players’ next production is The occurs when Lenny, having told Teddy of his Underpants by Carl Sternheim and adapted by sleeping troubles—“Something keeps waking Steve Martin; it opens their new season me up. Some kind of tick”—appears alone on October 10. www.cityplayers.org

by Bosco (with illustration help from Jessica Gluckman)