PINTER PLAY REVERBERATES ON STAGE
The Grotesque,
the Surreal, & the Everyday
By Carol Benet
artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area theater
Weeks starting March 17, 2011
Vol.
13, No. 78
The
Homecoming by
Harold Pinter is much more realistic than stage works by Sartre and
Beckett,
who present universal situations with almost a mythic resonance, as in Waiting
for Godot, for example. Pinter,
on the other hand, mixes the grotesque and
a bit of surreal with
an everyday, humdrum drama. What could
be more mundane than a married son visiting his childhood home in North
London,
his two brothers and father?
When
playwright Pinter won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005,
the world was surprised. Yes, he followed in the footsteps of two other
Nobel
laureates, Jean-Paul Sartre (1964) and Samuel Beckett (1969), who also
wrote
plays about low life figures and the meaningless world into which they
could
not fit. But there seemed to be
something different, something almost too realistic about Pinter. There
is even an
adjective, Pinteresque, to describe it.
The American
Conservatory Theater’s (A.C.T.) current production
of Pinter’s The Homecoming and the
next show starting April 7, Sartre’s No
Exit , offer a rare paring of two of the three Nobelists and a
chance to
compare their differences. Now all we
need is a Beckett production for a complete tour of these 20th-century
Himalayas of drama.
Pinter starts
his play with the father (Max by Jack Willis)
shuffling around, scolding and talking almost non-stop about almost
nothing. He is addressing a well-dressed
son (Teddy by Andrew Polk) who is reading the newspaper and not
listening to
the tirade about nothing. In comes
the
youngest son Joey (Adam O’Byrne) who is very fit and energetic, but not
too
smart. Uncle Sam (Kenneth Welsh), a
chauffeur to the rich, tells anecdotes of his work, but leaves some
hints as to
a secret about Max and his former wife when they were passengers in the
back
seat of his cab. Except for this sexy factoid, the family dynamics here
seem
almost boring.
Boring until
the third son Teddy (Anthony Fusco) comes for a
visit with his wife Ruth (René Augesen).
Teddy is a professor of philosophy and his wife is a sultry
tease in the
midst of the five men. Not only are
large philosophical questions brought up, but everything happening and
said now
takes on a double-entendre. At this point we enter the theater of the
absurd.
When the brothers start plotting out what they will all do now that
Ruth is in
their lives (Teddy becomes a pimp, by the way), we enter a strange
world.
The Homecoming is a
two-act, one-intermission production with a terrific direction by Carey
Perloff, the artistic director of A.C.T., who can make crackling drama
out of
mere pauses and gestures.
When she is in charge, she never skimps on the
technical staff: sets (Daniel
Ostling),
lighting (Alexander V. Nichols), fight direction (Jonathan Rider) and
costumes
(Alex Jaeger). Even the unnamed dialect
coach has been at work on the English accents, perfections that are
often
lacking at A.C.T.
Pinter’s is a
classic play destined to stay in the repertoire of all
theater companies of serious ambition; it never ages.
Harold Pinter’s The
Homecoming is at American
Conservatory Theater, San Francisco. For info:
(415) 749-2228 or go online.
#
© Carol Benet 2011
Carol Benet is a regular theater reviewer for artssf.com.
These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never
weakly)focus
on theater, dance and new musical creativity in performance, with
forays
into recordings by local artists, and a few departures into books (by
authors
of the region)as well.
#
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