This show ceased its run, after considerable critical acclaim but not particularly strong box office, last month at the Cort Theater on 48th Street. With not just writing but research required to create and post the “This Day in History” features, I have not had the time to review this show, nor a few others that I’ve seen over the last few months.
For the new few days, then, I’ll put the “This Day in History” feature on a short hiatus as I catch up with these performances. After all, the chance to post reviews was one of this blog’s original reasons for being, so I might as well honor that intention. Once that is complete, I’ll try to slip in theater reviews one at a time, as an occasional break from the “This Day in History” posts.
The performance I saw of The Homecoming was on the first Sunday in March, comparatively late in its run. I thought I might not have the opportunity to see it again, and was curious to see what it was like.
Shortly after seeing this performance, I rented a DVD of the 1974 production from the American Film Theatre. Its standout cast -- Ian Holm, Michael Jayston, Cyril Cusack, Paul Rogers and Pinter's first wife, Vivien Merchant—along with director Peter Hall should have made this superior, especially given that most of the cast were reprising their roles in the original London production. Instead, the film came off as much more static—and nowhere near as fun—as this year’s Broadway production.
The Homecoming is an essential part of the trend in '60s theater toward absurdist, dark comedy-dramas, with others in this genre including Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee and Entertaining Mr. Sloane by Joe Orton. As you're watching these works, you have to take the basic situations as given; otherwise, there's no way you'll be able to accept their denouements.
In The Homecoming, for instance, you have to accept, to start with, that Teddy, the son who leaves this North London home of treacherous family relations, will: a) enter academe in the U.S.; b) never write his father or two brothers that he has gotten married; and c) drop in on his family with no prior warning.
Once you acquiesce to all of this, it's easy to fall under the spell of the play. Because it is consistently cryptic and surprising, the actors have a wealth of rich materials on hand.
The setting is the living room of an old home, and the set is so furnished—but it's hardly necessary—you know that everything is claustrophobic. (When middle brother Lenny yells in the middle of the night, everyone is bound to wake up.)
The famous "Pinteresque pauses" were all here. But what is equally remarkable about the dialogue are the continuing reverberations between the lines. They remind me of how James Joyce, according to legend, rubbed his hands together and said, "This should keep the professors busy for the next 100 years!"
Though The Homecoming is certainly set among low-lives (Lennie is a pimp; Joey, a boxer who’s taken one too many punches to the noggin), there's lots here for "the professors." For instance, how does Lennie manage to ask Teddy, a philosophy professor, a series of questions that are seemingly beyond Lennie's ken? When Max, the crusty family patriarch, says his late wife Jessie taught their sons "everything they know about morality," is he being falsely sentimental or ironically accurate (i.e., she's taught them nothing about morality)?
Sometimes the text is deeply ambiguous about this point. When Max bursts out, upon seeing Teddy's wife Ruth, that there "hasn't been a whore in this house since she [Teddy's mother] died," does that mean that Jessie, too, was a whore?
After the show, at least a dozen people crowded outside the theater to read Ben Brantley's published review from the New York Times. I think there was something more to this than simply wanting somebody important to confirm their opinions; I think they also wanted to know what the show was about.
The traditional treatment of the play—and this production hewed to this line pretty well—underscores its menace. Lennie walks slowly around Eve to get to a glass on the stand; later, she gasps when she hears him behind her.
From the moment Eve asserts her sexuality, however, the tables turn. By the end of the play, she is a cool bargainer as he gets her to enter his business (prostitution).
The original Pinter production, which premiered over 40 years ago, was as much a milestone in its way as John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. But Pinter's play advances the "kitchen sink" realism treatment of the class system to satiric levels undreamed of by Osborne.
Significantly, Acts I and II conclude with Max begging for affection (in the first place, for a "cuddle"; in the second act, for a kiss) but it all feels like a dangerous embrace. Director Daniel Sullivan has nice visual touches here--for instance, the second act begins, after all the menace of the first act, with all the male actors contentedly smoking cigars as if they were peace pipes. But, even after the air literally is cleared, the meaning of words remains slippery.
This was much funnier than I anticipated. But the comedy sprang less from one–liners or from slapstick than from non-sequiturs. (E.g., after Ruth has her big speech about moving her leg, Max breaks the silence of the suddenly smitten men with, “Well, it’s time to go to the gym.”). Or, better yet, the lowlife Lenny begins peppering his academic brother Teddy with questions such as, “Do you detect a certain logical incoherence in the central affirmations of Christian theism?”
For Pinter, words are constantly being interpreted, tested, and challenged, as in this sequence:
Lenny to brother Joey, emerging from the bedroom after two hours with Ruth: “How’d you get on?”
Joey: “Not bad.”
Lenny: “What do you mean? (pause) What do you mean?”
Joey: “Not bad.”
Lenny: “I want to know what you mean – by not bad.”
The question most normal observers will have is why Teddy offers no resistance as the sexual gamesmanship begins in earnest. The one, somewhat cryptic clue is his speech before the mid-act blackout in Act II, when he discusses why he doesn’t send the family his work. Sending his work, he tells them, “might do you good…have a look at them…see how certain people can view…things…how certain people can maintain…intellectual equilibrium. You’re just objects. You just…move about. I can observe. I can see what you do. It’s the same as I do. But you’re lost in it. You won’t get me being…I won’t be lost in it.”
The end of the play, in which Ruth negotiates her terms—not just monetary but, implicitly, sexual—of her relationship with the men in the house has overtones of a satire on capitalism. (Ruth: “All aspects of the agreement and employment would have to be clarified to assure mutual satisfaction before we finalized the contract.”) And yet, oddly enough, her oddly endearing career of punch-drunk Joey seems like a Pieta moment – the Madonna and the Whore have become one.
Ian MacShane probably seemed like a natural for the vicious patriarch Max after his Al Swearingen stint in Deadwood. His role here was different, with braggadocio alternating between violence and vulnerability, yet he pulled it off (though he seemed less at home with vulnerability—unlike Paul Rogers in the American Film Theatre production, he uses his walking stick less as a concession to age than as a lethal weapon, brandishing it and, finally, striking out at Joey and Sam in an attempt to reassert control over his household). His character’s profession—butcher—is weighted with symbolic meaning.
In the pivotal role of Ruth, Eve Best’s cool, mysterious sexuality required as much physical awareness as precise line readings. In her first major scene with Raul Esparza as Lennie, for instance, the two engaged in a sexual thrust-and-parry not immediately evident in the text. She held perfectly still as he approached her to take her glass. After a faceoff over the glass (Ruth: “If you take the glass…I’ll take you”), she leaned over a chair to pick up her things, teasing him by taking an extra long time to do so.
Compared with his role as querulous bachelor Bobby in Stephen Sondheim’s Company last year, Raul Esparza was almost completely unrecognizable as Lenny. With his hair slicked back, leaner body, and quick way of lashing out, he appeared positively reptilian, and his voice would swing constantly between harshness and hysteria. Not only the sleaziest, he was easily the most menacing male in the house.
For years my impression of Michael McKean was formed indelibly by his role on Laverne and Shirley. The more I see him on film and onstage, however, the more he impresses me with his range. He showed unexpected talent as a song-and-dance man in The Pajama Game, and here he was excellent as a chauffeur a mite too fussy and proud of his work as a chauffeur, but still the picture of wounded dignity as he fends off one insult and physical attack after another from his brother Max.
James Frain had the most inexplicable role of the terrific ensemble as Teddy. With his faintly amused smile and cool, appraising gaze, he demonstrated why this philosophy professor was unequal to the battle of wills he faced: first, to persuade Ruth to come home, then to prevent her from falling into the hands of his brother.
At every turn, Pinter surprises us with lacerating laughter. Forty years after its original production rocked the theater world, director Daniel Sullivan showed that the play had lost little if any of its capacity to mystify, challenge, provoke, and strip audiences of all their cherished certitudes.
For the new few days, then, I’ll put the “This Day in History” feature on a short hiatus as I catch up with these performances. After all, the chance to post reviews was one of this blog’s original reasons for being, so I might as well honor that intention. Once that is complete, I’ll try to slip in theater reviews one at a time, as an occasional break from the “This Day in History” posts.
The performance I saw of The Homecoming was on the first Sunday in March, comparatively late in its run. I thought I might not have the opportunity to see it again, and was curious to see what it was like.
Shortly after seeing this performance, I rented a DVD of the 1974 production from the American Film Theatre. Its standout cast -- Ian Holm, Michael Jayston, Cyril Cusack, Paul Rogers and Pinter's first wife, Vivien Merchant—along with director Peter Hall should have made this superior, especially given that most of the cast were reprising their roles in the original London production. Instead, the film came off as much more static—and nowhere near as fun—as this year’s Broadway production.
The Homecoming is an essential part of the trend in '60s theater toward absurdist, dark comedy-dramas, with others in this genre including Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee and Entertaining Mr. Sloane by Joe Orton. As you're watching these works, you have to take the basic situations as given; otherwise, there's no way you'll be able to accept their denouements.
In The Homecoming, for instance, you have to accept, to start with, that Teddy, the son who leaves this North London home of treacherous family relations, will: a) enter academe in the U.S.; b) never write his father or two brothers that he has gotten married; and c) drop in on his family with no prior warning.
Once you acquiesce to all of this, it's easy to fall under the spell of the play. Because it is consistently cryptic and surprising, the actors have a wealth of rich materials on hand.
The setting is the living room of an old home, and the set is so furnished—but it's hardly necessary—you know that everything is claustrophobic. (When middle brother Lenny yells in the middle of the night, everyone is bound to wake up.)
The famous "Pinteresque pauses" were all here. But what is equally remarkable about the dialogue are the continuing reverberations between the lines. They remind me of how James Joyce, according to legend, rubbed his hands together and said, "This should keep the professors busy for the next 100 years!"
Though The Homecoming is certainly set among low-lives (Lennie is a pimp; Joey, a boxer who’s taken one too many punches to the noggin), there's lots here for "the professors." For instance, how does Lennie manage to ask Teddy, a philosophy professor, a series of questions that are seemingly beyond Lennie's ken? When Max, the crusty family patriarch, says his late wife Jessie taught their sons "everything they know about morality," is he being falsely sentimental or ironically accurate (i.e., she's taught them nothing about morality)?
Sometimes the text is deeply ambiguous about this point. When Max bursts out, upon seeing Teddy's wife Ruth, that there "hasn't been a whore in this house since she [Teddy's mother] died," does that mean that Jessie, too, was a whore?
After the show, at least a dozen people crowded outside the theater to read Ben Brantley's published review from the New York Times. I think there was something more to this than simply wanting somebody important to confirm their opinions; I think they also wanted to know what the show was about.
The traditional treatment of the play—and this production hewed to this line pretty well—underscores its menace. Lennie walks slowly around Eve to get to a glass on the stand; later, she gasps when she hears him behind her.
From the moment Eve asserts her sexuality, however, the tables turn. By the end of the play, she is a cool bargainer as he gets her to enter his business (prostitution).
The original Pinter production, which premiered over 40 years ago, was as much a milestone in its way as John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. But Pinter's play advances the "kitchen sink" realism treatment of the class system to satiric levels undreamed of by Osborne.
Significantly, Acts I and II conclude with Max begging for affection (in the first place, for a "cuddle"; in the second act, for a kiss) but it all feels like a dangerous embrace. Director Daniel Sullivan has nice visual touches here--for instance, the second act begins, after all the menace of the first act, with all the male actors contentedly smoking cigars as if they were peace pipes. But, even after the air literally is cleared, the meaning of words remains slippery.
This was much funnier than I anticipated. But the comedy sprang less from one–liners or from slapstick than from non-sequiturs. (E.g., after Ruth has her big speech about moving her leg, Max breaks the silence of the suddenly smitten men with, “Well, it’s time to go to the gym.”). Or, better yet, the lowlife Lenny begins peppering his academic brother Teddy with questions such as, “Do you detect a certain logical incoherence in the central affirmations of Christian theism?”
For Pinter, words are constantly being interpreted, tested, and challenged, as in this sequence:
Lenny to brother Joey, emerging from the bedroom after two hours with Ruth: “How’d you get on?”
Joey: “Not bad.”
Lenny: “What do you mean? (pause) What do you mean?”
Joey: “Not bad.”
Lenny: “I want to know what you mean – by not bad.”
The question most normal observers will have is why Teddy offers no resistance as the sexual gamesmanship begins in earnest. The one, somewhat cryptic clue is his speech before the mid-act blackout in Act II, when he discusses why he doesn’t send the family his work. Sending his work, he tells them, “might do you good…have a look at them…see how certain people can view…things…how certain people can maintain…intellectual equilibrium. You’re just objects. You just…move about. I can observe. I can see what you do. It’s the same as I do. But you’re lost in it. You won’t get me being…I won’t be lost in it.”
The end of the play, in which Ruth negotiates her terms—not just monetary but, implicitly, sexual—of her relationship with the men in the house has overtones of a satire on capitalism. (Ruth: “All aspects of the agreement and employment would have to be clarified to assure mutual satisfaction before we finalized the contract.”) And yet, oddly enough, her oddly endearing career of punch-drunk Joey seems like a Pieta moment – the Madonna and the Whore have become one.
Ian MacShane probably seemed like a natural for the vicious patriarch Max after his Al Swearingen stint in Deadwood. His role here was different, with braggadocio alternating between violence and vulnerability, yet he pulled it off (though he seemed less at home with vulnerability—unlike Paul Rogers in the American Film Theatre production, he uses his walking stick less as a concession to age than as a lethal weapon, brandishing it and, finally, striking out at Joey and Sam in an attempt to reassert control over his household). His character’s profession—butcher—is weighted with symbolic meaning.
In the pivotal role of Ruth, Eve Best’s cool, mysterious sexuality required as much physical awareness as precise line readings. In her first major scene with Raul Esparza as Lennie, for instance, the two engaged in a sexual thrust-and-parry not immediately evident in the text. She held perfectly still as he approached her to take her glass. After a faceoff over the glass (Ruth: “If you take the glass…I’ll take you”), she leaned over a chair to pick up her things, teasing him by taking an extra long time to do so.
Compared with his role as querulous bachelor Bobby in Stephen Sondheim’s Company last year, Raul Esparza was almost completely unrecognizable as Lenny. With his hair slicked back, leaner body, and quick way of lashing out, he appeared positively reptilian, and his voice would swing constantly between harshness and hysteria. Not only the sleaziest, he was easily the most menacing male in the house.
For years my impression of Michael McKean was formed indelibly by his role on Laverne and Shirley. The more I see him on film and onstage, however, the more he impresses me with his range. He showed unexpected talent as a song-and-dance man in The Pajama Game, and here he was excellent as a chauffeur a mite too fussy and proud of his work as a chauffeur, but still the picture of wounded dignity as he fends off one insult and physical attack after another from his brother Max.
James Frain had the most inexplicable role of the terrific ensemble as Teddy. With his faintly amused smile and cool, appraising gaze, he demonstrated why this philosophy professor was unequal to the battle of wills he faced: first, to persuade Ruth to come home, then to prevent her from falling into the hands of his brother.
At every turn, Pinter surprises us with lacerating laughter. Forty years after its original production rocked the theater world, director Daniel Sullivan showed that the play had lost little if any of its capacity to mystify, challenge, provoke, and strip audiences of all their cherished certitudes.
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