Thursday, July 23, 2020

235, THE HOMECOMING. From my (unpublished) ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW YORK STAGE, 1970-1975

Tony Tanner, Danny Sewell, Norman Barrs, (front) Eric Berry, Lawrence Keith, Janice Rule
THE HOMECOMING [Dramatic Revival] A: Harold Pinter; D: Jerry Adler; S/L: Dahl Delu; P: Joel W. Schenker; T: Bijou Theatre (OB); 5/18/71-6/13/71 (32)

Mixed reviews greeted this Pinter masterpiece of sexual and familial tension in its first New York revival since the outstanding Royal Shakespeare Company production, directed by Peter Hall, opened in New York in 1967, only a few years earlier. Director Jerry Adler had served that presentation as production manager, leading several critics to note the similarities between the RSC version and his.

Lee Silver said he thought the play a vacuum at heart, but considered it “tautly staged, splendidly performed.” Richard Watts, Jr., applauded it as “forcefully revived,” while Jack Kroll considered it acceptable but inferior to the earlier staging. Martin Gottfried, however, said it was an “excellent revival . . . , one so lucid that you can look through its glassiness to see each layer of impulse, feeling and story in the play.” However, a few, like Walter Kerr, felt the result was too literal, thus robbing the work of its deliberate ambiguity.

Least enthused were critics Edith Oliver and John Simon. The former rated the production as “tame,” while the latter, an avowed anti-Pinterite, averred that the play “does not make sense,” it is too imbued with “the latent homosexuality” he saw in much of the playwright’s work, and rebuked this mounting as “one part carbon copy of Peter Hall’s, one part old gags, and two parts deadly stasis.”

The company included Eric Berry as Max, Tony Tanner as Lenny, Norman Barrs as Sam, Lawrence Keith as Teddy, Janice Rule as Ruth, and Danny Sewell as Joey. Sewell was good enough to receive an OBIE for Distinguished Performance.