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The Sound of Silence
by Marlon Hurt
The Homecoming reviewed February 5, 2005
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For most playwrights, the music of a play is in the words. Harold Pinter, however, has made his indelible mark on our modern theater not only through his use of words—a use that never fails to thrill—but by writing between those words. Or under them. Or around them. He floats them like a melody over the deeper thrum of the unsayable and the unsaid. For Pinter, the rest truly is silence. And the best thing about director Terry Schreiber's current revival of Pinter's The Homecoming at the T. Schreiber Studio is that he makes those silences speak.
One work in a flurry of early masterpieces, The Homecoming is set in the seedy, North London home of a family of men: the stooped but still volatile patriarch Max (Howard Parke); his meeker, younger brother Sam (Fred Tumas); and Max's two sons—the enigmatic, small-time criminal Lenny (Jason Weiss) and aspiring boxer Joey (Eric Percival). Returning to this crude household after a six-year stint teaching philosophy at a university in America is the eldest son, Teddy (Todd Reichart). He brings with him his wife, Ruth (Patty Parker), to meet the family she has never known. But the presence of a female is palpably unbalancing, and as the play advances, the two younger brothers make more and more transparent passes at their sister-in-law—passes to which she is oddly not averse and to which her husband stands curiously aloof.
One of the greatest challenges in presenting Pinter's work is actually a result of his beneficence as an author: rather than hold anybody's hand, he trusts the actor and director to find and illuminate the ocean of space behind the text. Schreiber's uniformly excellent cast makes good on that trust. From Parke's pitiful bluster as Max, to Tumas's drowsy-lidded Sam, to Percival's brutish Joey, each actor brings an unfaltering understanding of his or her character's undercurrents. This is especially true of Weiss's Lenny and Reichart's Teddy. The two stand in perfect counterpoint: Weiss as the casually menacing predator; Reichart as the pleasantly impermeable dud.
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| Eric Percival, Patty Parker & Todd Reichart |
| Photo Credit:Stefan Mreczko |
| Also impressive is Parker's alluring turn as Ruth. Hers is perhaps The Homecoming's most difficult role. Ruth is not so much a woman as she is the embodiment of the power a woman has over men—essentially, the image of the feminine mystique warped by masculine awe and frustration. Yet Parker pulls off this psychological displacement with ease, becoming in the process the unknowable but inexorable lynchpin of the entire play.
Just as rich is Hal Tiné's set design and Andrea Boccanfuso's lighting. They are pulling double duty as a result of The Homecoming's being presented in rotating repertory—a first for the Studio—with another early Pinter play, The Birthday Party. The two designers' combined work nevertheless feels uniquely suited to the specific atmosphere called for by the play. The single, large sitting room is believably lived-in, with its dusty browns and fading carpet. And much like the script itself, Boccanfuso's lighting often leaves a darkness lingering at the production's edges.
The worst I can say is that there were a few minor technical glitches—a record player that failed to start, one or two light cues that went amiss, etc. I have no doubts, though, that they have been corrected, and I would note in support of that expectation the professionalism evident in every other area of the Studio's efforts.
It is said that Peter Hall, who directed The Homecoming's 1965 premiere, held a "dot and pause" rehearsal to school his actors on the different uses of non-speech in Pinter's writing. The three inconspicuous dots of an ellipsis, for instance, mean something different from a beat, which itself is different from the author's legendary "Pinter pause." This attention to the tools of silence is telling, and very appropriate. For, as they say, it is from the silence underlying it that music derives its power. With this in mind, the T. Schreiber Studio's taut production is more than worth a listen.
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TSS Studio
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Category: Comedy
Written by: Harold Pinter
Directed by: Terry Schreiber
Produced by: T. Schrieiber Studio
Opened: February 3, 2005
Closed: March 13, 2005
Running Time: 150 minutes
Theater: TSS Studio
Address: 151 West 26th Street, 7th Floor
New York, NY 10001
Yahoo! Maps Directions
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Tickets: $15.00
Students and seniors: $10
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Creative Team
Written by: Harold Pinter
Directed by: Terry Schreiber
Produced by: T. Schreiber Studios
Light Designer: Andrea Boccanfuso
Set Designer: Hal Tiné
Costume Designer: David Kaley
Fight Director: Jason Weiss
Dialect Coach: Page Clements
Cast
Howard Parke as Max
Jason Weiss as Lenny
Fred Tumas as Sam
Eric Percival as Joey
Todd Reichart as Teddy
Patty Parker as Ruth
Crew
Stage Manager: Daniel Robbins
Technical Director: Ray Harold
Assistant Director: Susan Devine
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