As if Harold Pinter's plays weren't confusing enough. Now the Drama department has gone and gender-bent one of them.
In "The Homecoming," now playing at the Helms Theatre, director Gweneth West pulls the old switcheroo on two characters in a previously all-male enclave: Max becomes Maxie, and while Lenny is still Lenny, it's short for Lenora, not Leonard.
These are loaded changes, particularly in a play about a family of men disrupted by the return of its oldest son - and, more disturbingly, his wife. The family has been scarred by past sexual indiscretions, and only Teddy (Ben Schenkkan), the visiting son, seems to have emerged intact, having earned his Ph.D. and emigrated from England to America. The rest are caught in stasis, with two grown children living at home, but, when provoked, they can carry on the legacy of sexual abuse.
Except in this case, it's sometimes homosexual abuse. In this tweaked production, an offshoot of the family's unspoken sexual legacy is that it now treats female bisexuality with casual acceptance. Lenny (Melinda Hardy) describes her liaisons with women as if there were nothing unusual about them. But this isn't before Ruth (Aran Cravey), Teddy's wife, clues into Lenny's sexuality, and in an extraordinary power play depicted with chilling proficiency by Cravey, uses flirtation to stop Lenny's verbal assault.
What a strange "Homecoming" this is. But the gender-bending, though obviously a stretch in parts, never becomes too off-putting because the play is deliberately off-putting. Watching a Pinter play is an experience of maddening intensity - intense because it appears to be building toward an emotionally charged revelation, and maddening because that revelation never quite occurs.
And this production gets definitively that clammy feeling of impending dread, Pinter's uncommon ability to keep you riveted even as you're asking: What the hell is going on? He is manipulative in the best sense: He pushes your emotional buttons, but never the ones you expect.
Pinter achieves this through a brilliant, extreme stylization of language, in which the crucial detail that could clarify matters always goes unsaid. Instead of talking to one another, his characters talk around or at one another. And when one batters another with questions, an answer never comes: The words of the question are enough to inflict serious damage. They fire verbal SCUD missiles, not worrying too much about whether they connect or not.
What makes "The Homecoming" one of his strongest works, and a quality that this production brings out particularly well, is the overwhelming sense of menace. These are not happy people. Their familial bonds are undeniably strong, but they have absolutely no reservations about inflicting grave emotional damage on one another. In fact, they do so as a matter of course, almost as if they can't help it. This makes for a harrowing, and occasionally very funny, piece of drama.
Describing the plot is difficult, because very little of substance happens, but by the end the family has moved from the merely dysfunctional to the truly monstrous. A tense, elliptical opening scene establishes the tenuous emotional territory navigated by Maxie (Kimberly G. Morris), the elderly patriarch-turned-matriarch, her brother Sam (Tim Van Dyck), and her grown children, Lenny and Joey (Marcus Kagler). All four remain in the decaying confines of the family home in North London.
The strongest two characters, the ones with the most proficiency in extended rounds of verbal volleying, are the two women. Hardy and Morris anchor the cast, manipulating the spoken word with blistering efficiency. Contempt drips from Maxie's every line, culminating in a terrifying assault on Teddy's wife. And Hardy plays Lenny with seductive ferocity and scathing intelligence.
The two men remain in the background - though the easy self-confidence of Joey, an aspiring boxer, becomes important later, he lacks the verbal skill of his mother and sister. And Sam bears Maxie's most extreme disgust. A familiar Pinter figure, Sam possesses depths of knowledge about the other characters but is powerless to influence them. Van Dyck plays the role with sympathy and humor: His lilting, slightly quavering voice suggests a man trying to retain scraps of dignity in the face of constant humiliation.
Schenkkan imbues Teddy with an opaque stoicism appropriate to the role, and Cravey's Ruth is the most unnerving character, icy and calculating. Faced with wilting abuse that numbs her husband, she turns it to her advantage.
A core issue is Teddy's inability to respond to, or even acknowledge, his family's assaults of his wife. West adroitly stages Teddy's alienation by placing Teddy at various corners of the stage, his back to his family members, as he refuses to take part their overtures toward his spouse. West's direction maximizes the impact of the three-sided Helms stage and the placement of the audience above the action. We become wrenchingly aware of the dangerously confined space in which they interact.
Whether male or female, the characters in "The Homecoming" are cold, cruel, relentless. Deducing their motives requires a careful examination of subtext, but watching their hatred unfold is immediately gripping. Even as they baffle you, they make you shudder.
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