THE HOMECOMING
Teddy, a British philosophy professor at an American university, returns one night, after a six-year absence, to the dreary North London house he was born and raised in. He brings his wife Ruth to meet the family: his widowed 70-year-old dad Max, his prissy bachelor uncle Sam, and his younger brothers Lenny and Joey. It is a coarse, brutish family of men, seething with mutual contempt, fierce discontent, pathetic pretensions, and the potential for quick and frightening violence. They at once despise and depend on women, and eventually, with Ruth’s passive but deliberate acquiescence, they take possession of Ruth as their shared mother-wife-whore–a decadent Wendy to their degenerate Lost Boys–while Ted aloofly returns to the U.S.
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Steppenwolf’s production is deficient in key areas. One problem is the limitations of the theater’s stage: for instance, the spooky, looming stairway Pinter envisioned is reduced to a few steps and a landing by the auditorium’s low ceiling, and the wonderful scene in which Ruth and Joey, locked in an icily passionate embrace, roll off the living-room couch loses much of its weird humor because the stage is too small for them to roll very far and too low for most of the audience to see the action. Beyond technical problems, though, Perry’s detailed direction focuses on the trees but misses the forest: it lacks the pervasive mood of menace and suspense necessary to register the subconscious impact of a dream as well as the conscious impact of a story. There’s no danger here, no real surprise.
