Cocktail Party Fact: This is not the first play to be called (the) Homecoming. It was also the title of a work of Eugene O’Neill, the first play of the trilogy of plays that make up Mourning Becomes Electra.

Here’s The Plot: This creepy tale concerns an old but controlling man named Max, his weak brother, and the two sons who live with him: Lenny, a small time pimp, and Joey, an aspiring boxer. Back to this happy household returns Teddy, a seemingly upright college professor home from America, with his wife Ruth. At first it seems this couple has little in common with the brutish family, but Ruth surprisingly ends up not only being seduced by both brothers, but seducing them back in return. Teddy doesn’t seem to mind. An extremely dark and scathing look at family relations and sexual politics.

Memorable Moments: When Ruth, the seemingly proper faculty wife, meets Lenny, the small-time pimp, for the first time, he tells her stories in which he had brutalized women — so it is equally shocking to him and us when he tries to take the glass she is drinking from her and she turns the table from him:
Lenny: Just give me the glass.
Ruth: No. Lenny: I take it then. Ruth: If you take the glass…I’ll take you.”
Ruth then suggests Lenny lie on the floor and she’ll pour it down his throat, further unsettling poor Lenny and us.

Vital Statistics: Harold Pinter wrote this play in 1965. It opened in New York two years later.

Why See It?: Harold Pinter is the modern dramatist best known for the use of the uncomfortable pause in which sentences hang in the air for what can feel like minutes at a time. As a matter of fact, in the first four pages of The Homecoming the stage direction “pause” appears seventeen times!