| . | 12/27/2007
The Homecoming
By: Victor Gluck
Raśl Esparza as Lenny and Eve Best as Ruth
(photo credit: Scott Landis)
Dysfunctional family dramas have been in great abundance this season, from A.R. Gurney’s Crazy Mary to Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate to Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County. Now we have the 40th anniversary revival of The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, the 2005 Nobel Prize laureate, to remind us that the British have their share of them too. With a cast led by Ian McShane, best known for his television work in the title role of BBC-TV’s Lovejoy and as Al Swearengen on the HBO series Deadwood, this is the second Broadway revival of Pinter’s 1967 Tony Award winner for Best Play that mixes American and British actors.
The Homecoming is probably Pinter’s most important play after The Caretaker and a seminal work of the 1960’s. Teddy, a professor of philosophy at an American university, and his wife Ruth return to his boyhood home in North London. Although Ruth is British, Teddy’s father Max, a retired butcher, has never met her, and Teddy has not been home in nine years. Teddy’s return to the all-male household of Max, his 63-year-old brother Sam, an unmarried chauffeur, and Teddy’s brothers Lenny, a dapper, small-time pimp, and Joey, a tongue-tied demolition worker and part-time boxer, sends shock waves through this tight-knit community. Ruth, the first woman to enter the house since the death of Max’s wife Jessie, causes a power struggle to ensue. Each man relates to her differently, from the courtly Sam to the brutal Joey. Teddy ineffectually stands by the sidelines.
Peter Hall’s original stage production for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the subsequent film version in 1973 for the American Film Theater with much of the original cast was dark and sinister, emphasizing the menace. Every statement appeared to be a veiled threat as the characters jockeyed for power. Daniel Sullivan’s production 40 years later emphasizes the comic, rather than the sinister. What once seemed a stark tragedy now seems at times to be an uproarious comedy. Back in the sixties, the play appeared to be asking which social class will rule Britain at a time when the political power base was shifting from the aristocratic upper class to the rising working class. Now the play seems to have an anti-American strain, which must have always been there, from the fate of the brothers’ Uncle Sam to Lenny’s scathing comparison of Teddy’s life in America to that of the less well-off British.
Returning to the Broadway stage for the first time in 40 years, McShane as the seventy year old Max is vigorous and vulgar, much like his role on Deadwood. Eve Best follows her memorable Broadway debut last season as Josie in O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten with a Ruth that is enigmatic, rather than mysterious as it has been played previously. No longer does Ruth seem an Earth Mother type as played originally by Vivien Merchant. Raśl Esparza, star of last season’s revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company, is a stylishly articulate Lenny. Seen as Thomas Cromwell in the cable mini-series The Tudors, James Frain makes his Broadway debut as a bemused Teddy, a man of thought, not action. Gareth Saxe plays his diametric opposite as the oafish but physically fit youngest brother. Michael McKean, part of the Christopher Guest-Eugene Levy stock company, plays an elegant, effete Sam.
Eugene Lee’s set for the old house in North London seems to be crumbling as we watch, a perfect metaphor for the decline of the nuclear family. Jeff Goldstein’s costumes run the gamut from Ruth’s slinky dresses to Lenny’s well-tailored suits and Teddy’s casual preppy look. Kenneth Posner has lit the play to suggest lighting from various sources, as well as a family trying to scrimp on the electric bill. Daniel Sullivan’s production proves that Pinter’s The Homecoming works just as well as a black comedy. The cast led by such popular performers as Ian McShane, Raśl Esparza, Eve Best and Michael McKean demonstrates the fragmentation of the modern family, rather than a tightly knit ensemble.
The Homecoming (through April 13)
Cort Theatre, 138 W. 48th Street, in Manhattan
For tickets, call 212-239-6200 or http://www.telecharge.com
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