The Homecoming  

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The Homecoming is a two-act award-winning play written in 1964 by Nobel laureate, Harold Pinter. First published in 1965, the original Broadway production won the 1967 Tony Award for Best Play and its 40th-anniversary Broadway production at the Cort Theatre was nominated for a 2008 Tony Award for "Best Revival of a Play".

Set in North London, the play has six characters: five men who are related––Max, a retired butcher, and Sam, a chauffeur, who are brothers; and Max's three sons, Teddy, an expatriate American philosophy professor; Lenny, who appears to be a pimp; and Joey, a would-be boxer in training who works in demolition; and one woman, Ruth, Teddy's wife. The play concerns Teddy's and Ruth's "homecoming," which has distinctly-different symbolic and thematic implications. Considering the play while surveying Pinter's career on the occasion of its fortieth-anniversary production at the Cort Theatre, in The New Yorker, the critic John Lahr writes: "'The Homecoming' changed my life. Before the play, I thought words were just vessels of meaning; after it, I saw them as weapons of defense. Before, I thought theatre was about the spoken; after, I understood the eloquence of the unspoken. The position of a chair, the length of a pause, the choice of a gesture, I realized, could convey volumes" ("Demolition Man").

Characters

MAX, a man of seventy
LENNY, a man in his early thirties
SAM, a man of sixty-three
JOEY, a man in his middle twenties
TEDDY, a man in his middle thirties
RUTH, a woman in her early thirties




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "The Homecoming" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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