The Homecoming @ Mary-Arrchie

The Players

A cast was comprised of actors with a wide & wild range of skill sets.

We had promising middlemen, amateurs, & all-stars.

 

Michaela Petro as Ruth

As the only female in the cast she used her face as an instrument

with heavy-lidded eyes, slight/silent smirks,

& reactions loaded with subtext.

[also, as the only female, why weren't her costumes impeccable?] 

She intertwined her character's role as an

observer, active participant, & outsider seamlessly.

She was all-star calliber.

Vance Smith as Lenny

This is an actor who understands how to translate Pinter's text.

Heightened is the word that comes to mind.

He screamed the lines that required it, he lurked, dropped hints, dropped loaded statements, dropped bombs,

& infused the production with a very necessary energy.

Dereck Garner as Joey 

Luke Hatton as Teddy

Their performance quality was strikingly similar,

 considering their starkly different roles.

They were cast in appropriate parts for their physicality & skill sets.

And they gave decent first impressions that blossomed in the second act.

Their presences provided a degree of

equilibrium in an play of polarized acting skill-sets.

Jack McCabe as Sam

I wanted to like him more than I did.

The part wasn't the most relevant, his acting wasn't the most fine-tuned,

but there were some

chord-striking & heart-breaking moments

his sub-par performance.

Richard Cotovsky as Max

His performance as the father was overall lacking.

The moments of explosive violence barely detonated,

his minimal attempts at an accent were more distracting than anything,

& he lacked chemistry with the rest of the cast.  

However, those complaints are surface-level.

The real problem was the play revolved around

his actions,

his history,

and the person of his character.

With an anchor playing the captain,
a show's ship can only sail so far.

And in this case, so far was only so good.