Unwelcome 'Homecoming' for Pinter's wrath

JULIA TIERNAN/YH Like on 'Springer', these two will soon be at each others' throats.

In The Homecoming, celebrated playwright Harold Pinter presents a sadistic, sluttish, sub-bestial collection of working-class Londoners whom we have no reason to care about--except that their cruel, erotic, and debased antics are interesting to watch. Is this an ugly sentiment? It is, but I suspect that it's more benign than whatever reptilian impulses motivated Pinter to create such a putrid piece of work. With great craftsmanship, he banishes the slightest traces of sentimentality from his script, prevents us from feeling even a touch of sympathy for his characters, and keeps at bay anything that might explain why the plot unfolds into the extraordinarily depraved situation that fills the play's second half.

Like Howard Stern and Jerry Springer, Pinter furnishes us with a group of unlucky, common, and commonly freakish people to whose tawdry problems we eagerly give our attention. But whereas Stern and Springer are, like all successful people in show business, populist in their sensibilities and unpretentiously forthright about their desires to entertain and make money, Pinter is high-brow and evasive about what he's trying to do with his work. He provokes us, titillates us and tempts our voyeurism, but we never know why. What, if anything, does Pinter's play encourage us to learn? Or, what does Pinter know about the potential naïveté of trying to learn something from a play that we don't? These questions lead to a more basic one: why would a talented group of college students want to put on The Homecoming?

This is a very talented bunch. Ian Robertson, DC '01, convincingly plays Max, a 70-year-old retired butcher who maintains an uneasy tyranny over the rest of the family. With his stooped-over shuffle, tired, unfocused eyes, and inexhaustible bitterness, he is a pathetic and defeated figure. Set designer and make-up artist Annie Lapin, DC '01, has expertly given Robertson a bald spot, painted the walls of Nick Chapel a water-stained yellow, and found filthy carpets to help create the play's picture of an aging man in a decrepit Northern London house.

Robertson's well-supplied with lines that would make him a big hit on the Springer show. Referring to his dead wife, he says, "Even though it made me sick just to look at her rotten stinking face, she wasn't such a bad bitch." Later, he even gets in a jab about his "three bastard sons," and comments to his daughter-in-law Ruth (Lisa Limor Rabie, BK '01), "Don't talk to me about the pains of child birth--I suffered the pain, I've still got the pangs."

Surrounding Max are his three younger sons. There's 30-year-old Lenny, played by the superb James Waldinger, BR '01. He's a natty dresser in his salmon-colored shirt and narrow tie, and he's endowed with the quickest wit of his family. Of the three brothers he is most aware of his family's viciousness, but he's also the one who seems most ready to participate in it and promote it. Early in the play, Lenny and his father insult each other, slip into a discussion about a newspaper advertisement, and switch back to insults. Their dialogue culminates with the two of them threatening to kill each other; these lines are spoken in tones that are chilling both in their sincerity and their conveyance of a sense that such vows are a routine part of the pair's daily life.

Even without many lines, Bill Marino,
TC '01, does a good job with his posture and facial expressions to flesh out the character of the youngest brother, Joey. He's a large, muscular man who works as a wrecker by day and a boxer in the evening. In the presence of his family, he adopts an affecting position of sullen docility until the play takes two wildly improbable turns. First, this strapping young man allows himself to be floored by a single punch from his ancient, hobbled father. Later, Joey rolls around on the living room floor in an extended sex scene as his entire family sits around, chatting and bickering as usual. Teddy (Matthew Wrather, CC '02), the eldest brother, enters the play late in the first half, making a surprise visit to his family, whom he hasn't seen in six years.

As Teddy's wife, Rabie does an extraordinary job in the play's most demanding part. At first, Ruth appears as a shy, middle-class woman taken aback by the meanness of her husband's childhood home. Quickly her reserve transforms into voracious promiscuity, a bizarre willingness to betray her husband, and an even more bizarre readiness to let herself be whored by Max and Lenny. Rabie is skillful in her early portrayal of Ruth's seeming primness, and in her later presentation of heartless sexuality.

Pinter intentionally provides no motives for Ruth's behavior. His narrative has a lot in common with a porn film storyline: a domestic scene is interrupted by an unexpected visitor, who, much to the delight of the males in the house, suddenly wants nothing more than to hitch up her dress, ogle her, and make out. It's the stuff of good daytime TV. The Homecoming's cast is good at what it does. But is it worth doing in The Homecoming?

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