Staying Alive in a Haze of Memories
Home (2005)
The New York Times
Neil Genzlinger
March 14, 2005
In a sublime script-in-hand staging, the Actors Company Theater is making an excellent case for a full-scale revisiting of "Home," a gently unsettling play by David Storey that was seen on Broadway in 1970 and hasn't been seen much since.
The play as written is a subtle, genteel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," the "Home" of the title being one for the mentally disturbed. But by letting the lead characters be on the gray side - the script calls for them simply to be "middle age" - the Actors Company creates a portrait that will also look familiar to all those baby boomers who are now watching elderly parents lose their faculties.
Harry (Larry Keith) and Jack (Simon Jones), two dignified-looking fellows, meet at an outdoor table and proceed to talk about this and that and nothing at all for most of the first act, but it gradually becomes clear that this is no cafe and that the two men are living in a haze of real and imagined memories.
Mr. Keith and Mr. Jones, in roles performed on Broadway by John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, pair beautifully. Each slowly builds a distinct character in this foggy universe, no small feat given that the script consists largely of sentence fragments, with nothing resembling a traditional character-establishing monologue in sight. Later, Cynthia Harris and Cynthia Darlow, two other residents of the home, manage the same trick.
The four of them fall into a sad, noble sort of double date, struggling to create something resembling their fractured memories of the normal world. It is a painful thing to watch, but in "Home," as in life, no matter how bad off you are, there is always someone with even bigger troubles. Here it's Alfred, a crazed hulk nicely played by Ron McClary, who intrudes on the foursome. He has apparently been lobotomized, and he makes the others look fully functional.
By any standard storytelling measure, precisely nothing happens in the course of "Home" - except to the audience, which can't help but walk out deeply touched and somewhat unnerved.