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Pinter’s parlor
The Homecoming shines in Wellfleet
BY IRIS FANGER

The Homecoming
By Harold Pinter. Directed by Elinor Renfield. Set by Dan Joy. Costumes by Mary Jo Horner. Lighting by Christopher Ostrom. Sound by J. Hagenbuckle. With James Doerr, Robert Kropf, Dafydd Rees, Leo Kittay, Jeff Zinn, and Kim Dooley. At Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater through June 22.


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CLOSE ENCOUNTER: James Doerr and Dafydd Rees pay as much attention to body language as to Pinter's lines.


Harold Pinter’s evocative The Homecoming vibrates on many levels, especially in the expert production now on the boards at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater. The vibrations start with the play’s allusion to the " kitchen-sink " school of British realism that upset theatrical conventions just after World War II. Rather than turning out the parlor dramas that had populated West End stages, the young playwrights featured the frustrations of the common man in revolt against England’s prevailing social hierarchy.

In The Homecoming, whose 1965 London premiere was followed by a 1967 Broadway production that won the Tony for Best Play, Pinter seems to be writing about a British family of working-class blokes who make their way by mirroring the life of the jungle. The womanless household he depicts is ruled by Max, a retired butcher who shares the flat with his chauffeur brother, Sam, and two of Max’s sons: Lenny, a businessman with barely suppressed tendencies toward violence, and Joey, a subhuman clunk who works in demolition by day and spends his evenings training to become a prizefighter.

The play takes its title and its central action from the return of Max’s third son, Teddy, who has left behind his unsavory gene pool. A PhD-toting academic with a job teaching at an American university, Teddy has come home to introduce his wife, Ruth, to the family. The work takes on Biblical allusions, referring to both the New Testament parable of the Prodigal Son and the Old Testament story of Ruth, albeit in perverted fashion.

Although the dialogue sounds ordinary, Pinter undercuts decorum by having his characters speak the subtext — thoughts that are generally hidden under the veneer of manners. And an air of mystery derives from our having no history for these persons. Although we’re given the barest essentials, we never understand exactly what they want (it’s surely not affection or respect) or why they are so dependent on one another. Pinter’s language is simple but coded; the characters are able to understand the progression of the plot, but the audience gets few clues.

Elinor Renfield has directed a mesmerizing production in the cramped quarters of the shack on the dunes that serves as playhouse for Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater. The viewers are so close to the actors that they could be guests in the scruffy living room designed by Dan Joy and lighted in dim tones by Christopher Ostrom. The actors pay as much attention to body language as to Pinter’s lines, adding yet another layer of communication to be deciphered through their gestures and locked glances.

James Doerr’s Max dominates the family in a fascinating mix of charm and menace, as if he were the dictator of an isolated island. Doerr is a master of innuendo, conveying one meaning while hinting at the opposite. Robert Kropf’s Lenny could use a dose of Ritalin to keep his antics under control; Dafydd Rees’s Sam makes the most of the Pinteresque reliance on pregnant pauses and silences to express his feelings. Jeff Zinn, who is also WHAT’s producing artistic director, plays Teddy as a nerd, hiding his emotions — and his reasons for coming back home — behind thick glasses and an unctuous manner. Leo Kittay’s Joey, dressed in those old-fashioned sleeveless undershirts to show off his pecs, prowls the stage as if he had been let out of a cage.

If there’s a problem, it’s in Kim Dooley’s performance as the enigmatic Ruth. Regardless of whether Ruth is victim or predator, whore or maligned woman, Dooley is too reticent at the beginning and comes on too strong at the end as the guest who takes charge of the household. And in a strange reversal of stage practice, she’s almost too good-looking for the role, which takes on greater power when a plain woman is cast as Ruth.

The shock value of Pinter’s play has not lessened in the 35 years since its American premiere. If anything, these characters, in their indifference to common morality and to what might be preached as " family values, " seem all the more frightening because they’ve become familiar. Clearly we have learned little about the land mines that stud family patterns as time has moved on.

Issue Date: June 6-13, 2002
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