The Theatregoer The Homecoming

At the Loeb, March 4-7 and 10-13

PINTER is a master of the language, no doubt about it. His lines operate on many levels-the one which the actors understand, the one the audience understands, and the one that only Pinter himself understands. When Max, the aged, mad and offensive old man in The Homecoming, berates his oldest son for bringing his wife into the house, saying, "I've never had a whore under this roof before, ever since your mother died," only Pinter knows how right he is.

Ruth is a whore, although the audience doesn't know it yet. The true import of Pinter's words, like the pronouncements of Cassandra, are never quite clear until the scene has been fully played out. The joke is on the actors, but also on the audience, for the broad one-liners always turn out to have a deeper meaning. This is the essence of Pinter: the audience snickers and chuckles its way through the play, only to realize at the end, that it was not funny, not at all.

The Homecoming is a brutal play. Pinter forces you to laugh at a group of people who are so miserable, so maladjusted, so sick, that they are grotesquely funny, Max, the retired butcher, is an ugly old lecher who retaliates for the abuse heaped on him by his wealthy pimp of a son by browbeating his wimpy brother, a sixty-three-year-old chauffeur. Into the mixture comes Teddy, Max's oldest son, a professor at an American university, who seems at first to be the only normal member of the family. But Teddy lets his wife go whoring with both his brothers, and collapses into an impotent pile of ashes as he watches her make love to them. As he packs up and goes back to America, leaving her to begin a new career as a professional floozy, every shred of hope for some sanity in the play goes with him.

THE DRAMATIC energy of The Homecoming comes from sheer hatred the characters feel for each other, tied loosely together by a sketchy plot. The play demands much of the actors to keep it alive, to perpetuate the tension necessary to make it survive. The Harvard Dramatic Club's production starts at a low key, failing to generate enough tension for the first ten minutes or so, but gradually works its way up to a brilliant intensity. Michael Smith as Max comes on weak, as if feeling out the terrain, but grows into his part after a while, gradually beginning to talk to his son instead of to the audience. Likewise, John Gilpin, as the son, Lenny, warms up slowly, but finally works into character.

The Loeb production of The Homecoming is a fine piece of work, despite its slow start. With the exception of Teddy, each of the actors has his role down. Only Ron Mallis, as the cuckolded Ph. D. has problems, unable to shake off a pre-occupation with precise diction until well into the second act. Susan Yakutis as his wife does a valiant job of keeping up their dialogue in the first act, but he seems not to understand quite what is going on. By the second act, though, he has joined the group, has become as mad as the rest, and seems to be finally cued in.

The direction of The Homecoming is exceptionally good. David Keyser has gotten his actors into character, their accents polished and their presence refined. He has a solid idea of how The Homecoming should be played, communicating Pinter's basic idea summed up in Max's advice to his third son, the would-be boxer: "What you've got to do is defend yourself, then you've got to learn how to attack ... once you've learned those two things, you can go straight to the top."