"The Homecoming" is a Brilliant Madhouse

Tolstoy once said, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Nobel prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter seems to have taken this as a personal challenge, and he made "The Homecoming", often regarded as his finest work, into a caustic, horrifying, and hilarious examination of Britain's Most Dysfunctional Family.

"The Homecoming" is showing [url=http://www.gremlin-theatre.org/" target="_new" class="navigation]The Gremlin Theatre[/url] weekends in Februay, through the 21st. This is an ambitious play that requires nimble direction and spot-on acting from any troupe--the lines, many of which are shocking (even today from a piece written in the 1960s), would fall down dead with the wrong delivery. But the troupe, led by Gabe Angieri as the patriarch Max, is, well, incredible. Director Matt Sciple deserves kudos for bringing everything together to create a charged night at the theater. It's the best theater I've seen in five years.

The story is simple: Teddy (David Tufford) has come home to his family's flat in London, with his wife, Ruth (Katherine Kupiecki), who has never met any of them. And what a family! There are five men here--Teddy, the eldest son, an oaf of a man who considers his clan a bit beneath him; ; Max (Gabe Angieri), the bellowing, frustrated father whose cane is less a walking aid and more a weapon (not to mention its Freudian turn); the creepy middle brother Lenny (Charles Hubbell); Joey (Ian Miller), the youngest child, seemingly innocent but as loathsome as the rest; and the stoic Sam (Jim Pounds), Max's brother, a driver who takes great pride in his chauffering, and who has his own skeletons in a his dingy closet.

It's very difficult to reveal the plot twists here without giving too much away, except to say that the story takes a surprising turn to the... sexual. This is very disturbing stuff, of old resentments twisting and turning like so many worms in each character's skull, and with each new revelation Pinter surprises us, not only with something shocking, but with his black, black humor. In this age of Quentin Tarantino, etc., it seems surprising that one could be as stunned as I was by the events going on this little stage.

Every actor stands out, brilliantly: Mr. Angieri anchors this strong case with a father who is one of the most loathsome creatures I've seen, but never makes him a caricature. He shouts and bellows and wields his cane like a cudgel, but this is a subtle performance, not simply an act of yelling in lieu of character. His old man is desperate to show his boys he's still the man of the house, and where they scheme and talk in normal voices, all but ignoring him, Angireri's Max must yell--or at least thinks he must yell--in order to be heard. The man is cruel, clearly suffers from dementia, but manages, somehow, to be a character we still relate to.

This is pretty incredible considering what you end up witnessing. Pinter did a great job of giving us these six... creatures and making them not a freak-show for us to witness, but, rather, extreme examples of the disfunctions of every family.

Go see "The Homecoming". You will laugh, you will cringe, and, in the course of enjoying this maybe, just maybe, you'll come home with that sickening feeling that what you've witnessed hits a bit close to home.