It’s Pinter: Work It Out

Productions as taut and fine as “The Homecoming,” now at the intimate Unicorn Theatre in Stockbridge, MA, don’t come often enough to our area. A masterpiece of Nobel Prize-winner Harold Pinter’s early years, the play presents family warfare and sexual tension to cover over deep-seated darkness that, in part, lies within most of us.

Pinter isn’t easy for audiences or actors. Never explicit, he piles on layers of brilliant language — terse and quiet, or jolting outbursts of non sequiturs  — and pauses that seem full of sound. You know, the ones in which you are thinking what more you want to say rather than saying it out loud, the famous Pinter pauses. You may wonder what it means, but Pinter will not help you: he means what he writes, no more and no less. Enigma is central to his brilliance.

There is an unnerving familiarity in the rundown, shabby North London household of Max (Rocco Sisto), who lives with his brother, Sam (John Rothman), and two grown sons, Lenny (Joey Collins) and Joey (Rylan Morsbach). They snarl and clash daily in repeated patterns of domestic argument: why is the dishwashing so loud, who sits in the most comfortable chair, who ate the last evening snack, whose memory of the family past is truest. 

Into the all-male world of thrust and parry comes the oldest son, Teddy (David Barlow), who arrives in the middle of the night with his wife, Ruth (Tara Franklin), for a four-day visit. Teddy, who is a professor of philosophy in the United States has been away for six years. The family has not heard from him, nor do they know he married Ruth, also from North London, and has three sons.

The battle for supremacy between family members resulting from Ruth’s presence, egged on by Ruth’s taunts and seductive power, is not only a battle of territoriality but a struggle for supremacy between the men and Ruth. Mysterious, a cross between a Madonna and a whore, Ruth dredges up suppressed memories of the family’s dead matriarch that lead to the play’s final secret and unsettling ending.

Director Eric Hill has worked wonders with an excellent cast, whose accents are mostly right on and whose pauses are fraught with meaning and menace. Sisto’s Max is a malevolent mix of cajoling and threatening, so slimy you want to wipe yourself off after his outbursts. Collins plays Lenny with bravura petulance and an airy disregard for the horrors of his life as murderer and pimp. His soaring monologues are great arias of the circuitous illogic that informs his life. Rothman’s Sam, keeper of the family’s darkest secret, is class obsessed as the chauffeur who drives important people. “They ask for me,” he proclaims to Max’s immediate putdown. And Rylan Morsbach is fine as the youngest son, a would-be boxer whose interest in shadow punching is matched by his response to Ruth’s seductive moves. Finally there are Teddy and Ruth. 

Between the two lies the greatest enigma in the play. Barlow gives Teddy a quiet disdain for his family and an acceptance — or is it relief — at Ruth’s refusal to return to America. She is guarded, calculating, amused by the men’s behavior and contemptuous of it, too. She conveys her feminine power with little smiles and the crossing of one stockinged leg over the other. And when she says “Goodbye, Eddie,” to the departing Teddy, you know she has already forgotten him.

Reid Thompson’s once-presentable living room, with its punched-through opening to the entry hall and down-at-heel furnishings, is spot-on. David Murin’s costumes and Solomon Weisbard’s lighting are near perfect. But it is Hill who has brought this marvelous production together. It will be the highlight of fall theater in the Berkshires.

“The Homecoming” plays in Berkshire Theatre Group’s Unicorn Theatre in Stockbridge, MA, through Oct. 25. Call 413-997-4444 or go to www.berkshiretheatregroup.org for tickets.