An outsider’s arrival upsets the delicate balance that has until now preserved the status quo inside a vipers’ nest of a family home in Harold Pinter’s 20th-century classic The Homecoming, the provocative latest from City Garage.

It doesn’t take more than a few seconds for us to figure out that the people we’ll be spending the next couple of hours with aren’t particularly nice folk.

Elderly patriarch Max (Troy Dunn) has only to request a pair of scissors from his 30ish, possibly-a-pimp middle son Lenny (Adam Langsam) for the latter to snap back with a decidedly disrespectful “Why don’t you shut up, you daft prat?”

Or for Max to launch into a scathing assessment of Lenny’s late mother (“It made me sick just to look at her rotten stinking face”) or for Lenny to respond with an equally nasty “Plug it, will you, you stupid sod.”

Then again, you too would probably lose patience with Max’s nonstop prattle about his pre-retirement days as a butcher, or the jams he used to get into with a childhood mate, or the hours he has spent at the local racecourse, reminiscences Max is as likely as not to punctuate with threats to clout Lenny with his walking stick.

Lenny does seem to get along better with his dad’s younger brother (and fellow housemate), taxi driver-turned-private chauffeur Sam (David E. Frank), though the same can’t be said about Max, who calls the still single Sam a “paralyzed prick” when he’s not needling him about what people then euphemized as “confirmed bachelorhood.”

Completing Max’s live-together family is loutish, not-too-smart youngest son Joey (Carey Cannata), who works in demolition by day while training nightly for what he hopes will be a career as a pro boxer, as if that’s likely to happen anytime soon.

 No, indeed, these are not very nice people at all, but at least they’ve achieved a kind of equilibrium in their daily lives that permits a not-so-peaceful coexistence, one that’s about to be shattered when oldest son/eldest brother, U.S.-based philosophy professor Teddy (Taylor Lee Marr), shows up late one night at the family home accompanied by his curvaceous, raven-haired wife Ruth (Angela Beyer).

 It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that Ruth, clad in the clingiest of skin-tight dresses and lips painted shamelessly scarlet, will soon be rocking the status quo, though I for one could hardly have predicted the particular brand of mischief she has in mind.

In the years since The Homecoming took Swinging Sixties London (and later Broadway) by storm, much has been written about who symbolizes what, and how, and why, discussions of which I’ll leave to Pinter scholars.

What I can say is that as directed to laceratingly sharp effect by Frédérique Michel and performed by a cast of seasoned City Garage vets and a couple of talented newbies, The Homecoming adds up to a whole lot of fun-and-games of the vicious, venomous sort.

Rarely has there been a nastier family patriarch than Dunn’s Max, and it’s great fun to see how he keeps the always dependable Frank’s Sam under his thumb.

Equally terrific are Marr’s cowed and cuckolded Teddy, Langsam’s brutal, conniving Lenny, and Cannata’s coarse, not terribly clever Joey.

 Still, this is City Garage stealth weapon Beyer’s show all the way, whether tantalizing the boys with tales of her adventures as a “model for bodies,” or tempting them with crossed and uncrossed legs that could give Basic Instinct’s Catherine Tramell lessons in seduction, or breaking her marriage vows in full view of them all.

Last but not least, set, lighting, and audio designer Charles A. Duncombe and costume designer Josephine Poinsot give The Homecoming a distinctive City Garage crimson-and-black look and a jazzy ‘60s-style musical underscoring.

Ralph Radebaugh is assistant director.

I’ve seen several productions of Harold Pinter’s reverse-chronology Betrayal, however The Homecoming marks my introduction to one of the groundbreaking classics that made his name synonymous with cutting-edge theater in the 1950s and ‘60s.

Though I couldn’t begin to tell you what all of these family shenanigans are supposed to symbolize, that didn’t stop me from having a blast watching this clan explode.

City Garage, 2525 Michigan Ave. Building T1, Santa Monica. Through June 15. Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00. Sundays at 4:00.
www.citygarage.org

–Steven Stanley
May 11, 2025
Photos: Paul M. Rubenstein

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Tags: City Garage, Harold Pinter, Los Angeles Theater Review