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HOME
by David Storey
Directed by Scott Alan Evans
December 2 through 23, 2006
The Beckett Theatre
Theatre Row
410 West 42nd Street, NYC
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| SYNOPSIS |
"Quite frequently one can judge people entirely by their behavior."
HOME by award winning playwright, novelist and rugby player, David Storey, takes place on a sunny day in a picturesque park where two mild-mannered British gentlemen meet. Soon joined by Two amiable women, they discuss their worldly-wise opinions about everything under the British sun, but something not immediately apparent lies behind their jokes, card games and jovial banter. HOME is a beautifully observed and engrossing evening. |
| CAST/CREW |
Cynthia Darlow*+
Kathleen
Cynthia Harris*+
Marjorie
Daryl Bornstein
Sound design
David Macdonald
Original Music
David Toser
Costume design
Mary Louise Geiger
Lighting design
Dawn Dumlop/David Aykens
Production Stage Manager
Jared Ranere
Assistant Director
Mel McCue
Assistant Stage Manager
Joe Trentacosta, Springer Assoicates PR
Press & Publicity
Sol Lieberman, Urbintel, Inc.
Marketing
Cathy Bencivenga
General Manager
Deborah Hecht
Dialect Coach
Stephen Kunken
Production Photographer
*member of Actors' Equity Association
+TACT company member
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| PRESS |
The New York Times
David Storey?s ?Home,? a portrait of four fragile people in a home for the mentally disturbed or... [ read more]
nytheatre.com
The revival of David Storey's Home, now at the Beckett Theatre, is a double launching for The Actors... [ read more]
Wolfentertainmentguide.com
The Actors Company Theatre (TACT) previously did a reading of ?Home,? but now is presenting it as a... [ read more]
Backstage
Two nattily dressed English gentlemen meet in what seems to be a local public park. They are Harry... [ read more]
TheatreMania.com
The simple charms of David Storey's 1970 play Home cannot be denied, and this revival by The Actors... [ read more]
BroadwayWorld.com
To say that nothing really happens in David Storey?s 1970 Tony-nominated play Home, now getting a... [ read more]
Variety
David Storey's "Home" has been in deep storage for 35 years, its revival appeal curbed by the... [ read more]
Performing Arts Insider
The Actors Company Theatre, the finest play-reading group in NY, has just finished a fully-stage... [ read more]
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| DRAMATURGY |
Novelist, poet, and playwright David Storey was born on 13 July 1933 in Wakefield, Yorkshire, the third son of a coal miner. His father was a miner who spent 40 years at the coalface, driven by a dream of propelling his three sons into the world of higher education. Mr. Shaw, the father in Storey?s play In Celebration (1969) tells his sons more or less what Storey?s father told him and his brothers: ?I?ve spent half my life making sure none of you went down that pit.? (At 61, Storey?s father was diagnosed with a lung disease and given six months to live. Storyey recalls, ?I suggested I buy him and my mother a bungalow in Scarborough, which they knew from holidays. I said, it?s only six months, you might as well enjoy it. Twenty-three years later I was still paying the mortgage on that bungalow.? He conveys the news with deadpan disgruntlement. ?His health had been so much improved by the sea air?). At the age of 18, Storey was accepted to study painting at Bloomsbury?s acclaimed Slade School of Art in London. To finance his art education, he signed a 14 year contract with Leeds Rugby League Club as a professional footballer. ?For me, rugby was only a means to an end. It was very good security and enabled me to go to art school and start a new life.? He headed to London without looking back. ?My first night here, I was in the ABC caf? on the Euston Road, eating the cheapest meal, which was baked beans on toast, and thinking ?This is the happiest day of my life?.? He commuted to Leeds for weekend matches for four years.
It was on the train going back and forth to Leeds where Storey began writing. After more than a dozen rejections, his novel This Sporting Life was published by Longmans, Green in 1960 when Storey was 26. The novelist Caryl Phillips, who grew up in Leeds and has written widely on sport, calls it ?the best novel about sport I?ve read.? It won the MacMillan Fiction Award that year and was later adapted as a film directed by Lindsey Anderson and starring Richard Harris. He abandoned his dreams of becoming a painter and began writing full time. Storey?s arrival on the literary scene coincided with the ?second wave? of working-class and regional writers, who followed the Angry Young Men - Stan Barstow, Barry Hines, and John Braine among them. ?Their roots were firmly in the world that I grew up in,? writer Phillips says. ?They explored class tensions with an honesty I seldom saw in books by their southern contemporaries, who didn?t understand how important it was not to go down the pit, or what the difference was between the lounge and the public bar. Storey was to my mind the most sophisticated writer of the group.?
His second novel, Flight into Camden (1960), won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize while his third novel, Radcliffe (1963), won the Somerset Maugham Award. Saville (1976), won the Booker Prize for Fiction. His most recent novel, Thin-Ice Skater was published in 2004.
Storey had quit rugby after four years and began working as a teacher. When he came home one day to find another publishers? rejection slip, he recalls: ?I thought ?Perhaps I?m really a playwright? ? because there?s no description, only dialogue. So I sat down and wrote a play about a schoolteacher cracking up. It only took three days.?
Then it sat on a shelf for seven years. By the time the play, The Restoration of Arnold Middleton, was produced at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in 1967 Storey was a successful novelist. ?The sheer exhilaration of seeing [the play] come alive on stage prompted me to write another five plays in no time at all, feeling that I?d found a whole new venture.?
He had had next to no experience of the theatre, but Lindsay Anderson, who ran the socially conscious Royal Court set about producing the plays, one after another. Anderson, with whom Storey had formed a close working relationship during the filming of This Sporting Life, was to be the director, eventually doing nine Storey plays at the Royal Court and the National Theatre. With Anderson, Storey had ?an almost mystical relationship?, even though their aesthetic approaches were quite different. ?Lindsay always started with a total picture of what he was doing whereas I started with just one line and went on to see what kind of thing accrued to the detail. We worked towards the centre from opposite sides of the ring.?
The nature of the Royal Court was as important to Storey as the character of his familiar director. ?There was a great vitality there. I don?t think I?d been to the theatre more than half a dozen times before that, usually reluctantly, having been dragged by relatives. The theatre in Wakefield was closed most of the time.?
In what is seen as the writers? heyday, a dozen other plays followed: The Contractor (1969), Home (1970) and The Changing Room (1972), all of which won the New York Critics Best Play of the Year Award; In Celebration (1969), which was adapted as a film in 1974 starring Alan Bates; The Farm (1973) and Life Class (1975). All of these plays were first performed at the Royal Court Theatre where Storey served as associate artistic director from 1972-1974. Early Days (1980), The March on Russia (1989), and Stages (1992) all premiered at the Royal National Theatre.
In 1971, at the height of his success, the theatre historian John Russell Taylor wrote that Storey?s plays were ?beautifully shaped... so much so that critics have started bandying the name of Chekhov about?. Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of the Oxford Stage Company, who recently has been remounting Storey?s works, says of the plays that ?they have a theatricality that people love.? For Dromgoole, ?there is no more true inheritor of Chekhov?s gift? (adding that Storey himself would probably regard that opinion as ?complete cock?).
Storey resembles Chekhov in allowing his plays to progress by way of feeling, and being in no hurry to make things happen on stage. As in his novels, the emotion gradually increases until it stifles situations that were themselves deadening. Dromgoole stresses the point that Storey?s plays are tailored for the proscenium arch, ?If you take a Storey play out of the proscenium arch, and try to do it in a studio context, it wobbles.?
Most of Storey?s plays were written in two or three days. In the case of Home ? celebrated for the double-act of John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson ? he wrote two separate versions, equally quickly. When he came to consider them, the one he had thought better seemed dead whereas the version he believed to be a failure came to life. Initially baffled by the play?s abrupt fragmented exchanges, silences and non-sequiturs, the two theatrical knights learned to trust both director and author, and had one of the greatest successes of their later careers.
Home is considered Storey?s simplest and yet most enigmatic play. His ability to take a simple image and make it resonant is clearly demonstrated in this work. Since not much appears to happen externally and exchanges are abrupt fragments, it was immediately compared to Pinter and Beckett at its New York premiere on November 17, 1970 at the Morosco Theater.
Home received Tony nominations for Best Play, Best Direction, Best Actress, and two for Best Actor. The New York Times called Home ?a compassionate and moving play,? with writing ?extraordinarily pungent?Its skill is in capturing spontaneity and freezing it into art.?
TACT
New York City, March 2005 |
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