The Homecoming
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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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