Through December 9
THE HOMECOMING Adam Mickiewicz Center/Torn Space Theatre
By Augustine Warner
As we enter the holiday season, with its family joy and good food and stories of the past, perhaps we might look at a bad family.
That’s what’s on the Torn Space stage with Harold Pinter’s “The Homecoming.”
We don’t know if this is the holiday season, what we do know is Teddy (Talon Powell) has come back to North London to visit his misbegotten family and introduce them to his wife, Ruth (Tracie Lane).
It’s been a long time, six years.
Teddy has been married long enough to have three children and has a rising career as a professor at an American university, with a Ph.D. in philosophy.
He arrives with little notice.
As we learn, he’s from a questionable family background.
Father Max (Jack Hunter) may not be a complete crook but he mixed and did business with bad guys and has no problem with that.
His brother Sam (Stan Klimecko) is a chauffeur and may be gay, referenced constantly by Max.
Lenny (Russell Holt) is one of Teddy’s brothers and supports himself as a pimp.
Joey (Kalub Thompson) is the other brother and an aspiring boxer.
Teddy knew what he was getting into when he returned.
What he doesn’t know is that Ruth will find herself more at home with his family low-lifes and Lenny’s line of work than with her upright husband and father.
Torn Space directors Dan Shanahan and Melissa Meola have revived the stage box for this production.
That’s a wall-less large box center stage, with the framework centering most of the action in the play, using a stairway and a platform in the corner to hold characters central to what’s going on center stage.
It’s really effective.
What isn’t effective is a constant of Torn Space productions, that damn aggravating hum.
In this show, it can interfere with listening to Pinter’s words and others told me the same thing.
It’s overall a fascinating show, as Ruth is sucked into Teddy’s family and its moral values and away from her husband and her children.
That’s the mystery of “The Homecoming,” why does Ruth make that transition to London’s demimonde?
Follow that shift and think about it.
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