THE HOMECOMING Reviewed
THE HOMECOMING
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle
Award winning director Joyce Henderson, a resident of staid and stately Alameda, seems to thrive on risk, the daring, the provocative and successfully pushing the theatrical envelope.
MS Henderson is a part of a bay area theatrical tree grafted, via Jean Shelton, and clearly traceable to the immortal Russian actor, theatre director and acting teacher: Konstantin Stanislavsky.
It was Konstantin Stanislavsky who created the revolutionary Method Acting which was practiced by Stella Adler, Anthony Quinn, Gregory Peck, Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe.
MS Henderson and her fledgling theater company, while surviving two nascent years on a shoe string budget—nay, a dental floss budget—have knocked down 13 San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critic Circle nominations and garnered four awards.
Currently MS Henderson and the Off Broadway West Theatre Company are presenting THE HOMECOMING by Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter.
When THE HOMECOMING opened on Broadway in 1967, not only did it startle and disturb urbane New York audiences, it also, perhaps incongruously yet justifiably, received four Tony Awards.
As most critics agree, the play is rife with Pinter's trademark ambiguity; it is enigmatic as well as cryptic and fuels countless hours of critical debate by all who see it performed.
To its controversial credit, THE HOMECOMING blends issues of sex and violence in a vividly realistic yet aesthetically stylized presentation.
As Tolstoy correctly observed: "Happy families are all alike; yet every unhappy family is unhappy in its own unique way."
Imagine if you will a house filled with four men: the father: Max, Max's brother: Sam, and Max's ne'er-do-well well sons: Joey and Lenny.
Jessie: Max's wife, also the mother of Joey, Lenny and Teddy, and sister-in-law to Sam, is missing: presumed dead.
Life for this highly dysfunctional family has readjusted around the suppurating hole left by Jessie's inexplicable departure.
When the third brother: Teddy and his wife: Ruth, make a late-night, unannounced visit, both are drawn into the family's fetid broth.
As previously stated, Pinter loves to torment us with ambiguity and doubt, and to goad us dead-end leads and Delphic, cryptic signals.
Never satisfying the audience's appetite for unequivocal facts means that the play indefinitely expands to fill the broad margins of speculation, conjecture and hypothesis.
Teddy claims to be a professor of Philosophy but every sophomoric question posed by his quasi-educated brother, Lenny, seems to be beyond Teddy's purview.
Teddy proudly states that he and Ruth have had three children; yet rather than affirm Teddy's claim, Ruth seems to enter into a fugue or funk at the very mention of their children.
Joey is training to be a professional boxer yet he lacks two essential skills: defense and offense.
Ruth, initially reluctant to remain over night at Teddy's homestead, ultimately takes charge of the household as the grand memsahib or fem Pooh-Bah.
The play is without borders—as the French would say: Sans Frontières: it is Pinteresque: like life, it is haunted by an unspecified menace: perhaps inevitability of death: oblivion.
Graham Cowley is the tent pole that keeps this apsidistra flying: MR Cowley's Max is surely to earn him a best actor nomination for the 2009 season.
Sylvia Kratins, as the mysterious Ruth, is superb as she slowly unfurls her character; tantlizing the audience every inch of the way.
The show is riveting: it is a dark, noir, comedy filled with unsentimental familial cruelty that seems to resonate with the audience.
The play has won numerous awards around the world; the director has won numerous awards around the bay, THE HOMECOMING is a confluence of great talent, unconvential creativity and unfettered imagination: it should not be missed.
For tickets to an entertaining, funny and slightly disturbing evening, surf on over to www.offbroadwaywest.org or 800-838-3006 or 510-835-4205.
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