Page One

Daily Planet Correspondent 

Berkeley’s Aurora Theater opened a strong production Thursday of English playwright Harold Pinter’s bizarre and appalling, through oddly dated 1965 play “The Homecoming” – the story of a very shocking and dysfunctional family reunion. 

In “The Homecoming,” a comfortable working class family of four men living near London have their small, spiteful, bickering routines upset when a long-estranged brother Teddy (James Carpenter) shows up unexpectedly at the house after years of absence, bringing his wife Ruth (Rebecca Dines) whom the others didn’t know existed. 

The men go crazy over the fact that there is suddenly a woman in the house. They assault the serene, Sphinx-like Ruth with bawdy insults and propositions. Things advance down a taboo-breaking sexual road. 

Playwright Pinter’s people live in an ambiguous, contradictory and disjointed world. It’s not always clear who’s doing what to whom. 

Even individual personalities in “The Homecoming” are hard to pin down, since characters sometimes undergo unexpected reversals of behavior that make their motivations unclear. 

Using dialogue that is filled with vague but portentous innuendo, the tone of “The Homecoming” is a mix of comedy and drama. Sometimes the characters are funny. Sometimes they are threatening. 

One of the keys to understanding playwright Pinter, who is also an actor, is to appreciate the extent to which he is an actor’s playwright. 

When Pinter’s writing expresses non-sequiturs, or big jumps in tone, emotion or subject matter, he relies very much on the performance choices of actors to provide continuity. 

Similarly, when a Pinter character contradicts himself, it’s up to the actor to create something emotionally that allows the performance to make sense. 

At its best, this synergy between playwright and actor creates a wonderful and mysterious effect, and a unique kind of theatrical language. 

There is a lot of this wonderful Pinteresque theatrical language in the current Aurora production. Tom Ross’ wise direction keeps things moving, and there are some very good performances. 

James Carpenter is fascinating as the moist-eyed, long-suffering, fearful, returning prodigal Terry. This character inflates and deflates depending on how the primal battle is going that he’s fighting with his father, his brothers and his wife. 

Rebecca Dines is extraordinary as mystery wife Ruth. Cautious, alert, wary, aware, sexually unraveled, she is the hub around which much of the play’s activity moves.  

Jonathan Rhys Williams is good as the sometimes unctuous, sometimes brittle brother Lenny, a vicious psychotic misogynistic gangster. Chad Fisk is appropriately punchy as boxer son Joey. 

A wonderful foil to all the testosterone posturing, Chris Ayles plays mild, sweet-hearted chauffeur Sam, uncle to the three boys. 

Julian López-Morillas’s angry, violent patriarch Max, who refers to his sons as “bitches,” might have been a little more threatening and a little less blustering.  

As the taboo-breaking family sexual story heats up in “The Homecoming,” the play pulls its conflict and mystery increasingly from the repressed sexual energy of the puritan middle class world of 1965 when the play was written. 

But that puritan world doesn’t exist today the way it did 35 years ago. So the play’s sexual tension seems diluted. It has lost some of its punch. Pinter’s long final propositioning scene seems to go on too long. 

Nonetheless, this story of pathological gender imbalance in the family psyche is a classic of English theater, and the current Aurora production is a great opportunity to experience the play. 

“The Homecoming,” presented by Aurora Theater, plays Wednesday through Sunday, through May 7, at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. For tickets and information, call 510-843-4822.