WWofP Stunned by Harold Pinter’s “The Homecoming.” Audience Throws Gasping Woman into the Street.
Sunday, February 10th, 2008Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming is the kind of play for which you would do well to
prepare yourself. This is no fluff ball diversion for the brain-dead like David Mamet’s November, nor a multi-generational tragicomedy with a pill-popping Mama stumbling down the staircase like playwright Tracy Letts’ August: Osage Country. You shouldn’t just ride in from out of town on the Long Island Railroad or Metro North thinking you are going have an evening of light entertainment on Broadway that will make for charming, intelligent, cocktail party-speak in the “burbs.” No, not with this play. Know what you are getting yourself into: The Homecoming is a lethal, haunting drama about familial one-upmanship, seduction, lust and betrayal.
“Let me outta here!”
That’s what Rose, played by long-legged Eve Best, should be screaming at the top of her lungs in this revival of Pinter’s 1965 play at The Cort Theater. Rose is the wife of one of three grown brothers played by James Frain, Raul Esparza, and Gareth Saxe. As the play begins, she’s just being introduced for the first time, after eight years of marriage, to her in-laws—a creepy bunch that would make the hairs on the back of the neck of any woman stand up. The father, played by Ian McShane, should have put at least two of his miserable whelps in a burlap bag, dropped them into the nearest river, and then, if there were any justice in this life at all, fallen in after them.
