While Harold Pinter is hardly considered a comic playwright, Simon is absolutely right in saying that a good time will be had by all who see this revival of The Homecoming, whether for the first time or to re-experience its brilliant mix of humor and chillingly sexual and familial power play. To his praises for the cast, Director Daniel Sullivan and his designers, I can only add my own bravo, bravo, bravo! Besides the quitessentially Pinteresque single room setting by Eugene Lee to support the puzzling and disturbing elements threatening the status quo, there's also John Gromada's sound to add to the aura of menace that overarches even the humorous moments.

If you go with friends, half the fun will be in the post-play discussions about just what triggered the dysfunction in this household of men living together but far from happily and lovingly so —or just what makes the lone woman in the play tick. Actually, I liked the ambuigity and surreal turn the second act takes so did not feel l any sense of letdown. After all, Pinter himself said in a 1971 interview that he couldn't sum up any of his plays and that he could describe none of them, except to say "That is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did." And as fellow playwright David Hare said about Pinter's style: ". . . over his work and over his person hovers a sort of leonine, predatory spirit which is all the more powerful for being held under in a rigid discipline of form, or in a black suit. The essence of his singular appeal is that you sit down to every play he writes in certain expectation of the unexpected. In sum, this tribute from one writer to another — you never know what the hell's coming next."

It was interesting to see The Homecoming just a day after catching another revival of dysfunctional family play, Christopher Marlowe's Edward the Second (review ). While Marlowe wrote fine blank verse, he did not rely on words alone but made generous use of knives, guns and hot pokers to settle disagreements. So Rick Sordelet who's credited as fight director in both these plays, has his work cut out for him in Edward but less so in The Homecoming for the only weapons used here, as in any Pinter play, are words. Martin Eslin in The People Wound best sums up the power of those words which have added the term Pinteresque to our lexicon: "Every syllable, every inflection, the succession of long and short sounds, words and sentences, is calculated to nicety. And precisely the repetitiousness, the discontinuity, the circularity of ordinary vernacular speech are here used as formal elements with which the poet can compose his linguistic ballet."

Since Simon has summed up the reasons why The Homecoming is yet another welcome addition to a season dominated by interesting straight plays, I'll just some additional background information.

I suppose every Pinter fan has a favorite, but The Homecoming is widely considered to be his best and, along with Betrayal, his most popular. While it was written early on in his career, he'd already turned out a dozen others, including The Birthday Party and The Dumb Waiter in 1957 and The Caretaker, 1959. The Pinter canon now includes 29 plays, not counting a variety of sketches and radio works. Since his cross-over to film in 1963 he has chalked up credits for over twenty screenplays. He has also been quite active politically, and a number of his plays reflect these concerns, particularly in the human rights area and in 2005 his career was capped with a Nobel Prize for Literature.

While writing and directing are primary in the Pinter scheme of things, Pinter continues to act in the occasional film (Uncle Benny in The Tailor of Panama (2001), Vivian Bearing's father in Wit (2001) and as Sir Thomas Betram in Mansfield Park (1999).

Peter Hall's British production of The Homecoming was re-staged at the Music Box Theatre where it ran for 324 performances . A 1991 revival at the Roundabout, was directed by Gordon Edelstein and played 49 performances.

For a more complete biography of Pinter and links to other of his plays we've reviewed (including two revivals of The Homecoming), see our Harold Pinter Backgrounder.