Review: Homecoming 1972 (Chicago Dramatists)

By Chicagotheaterbeat @chitheaterbeat

  
  
Homecoming 1972 

Written by Robert Koon
Directed by Kimberly Senior 
at Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago (map)
thru June 23  |  tickets: $15-$32   |  more info
  
Check for half-price tickets  
  
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A home you don’t want to go back to anymore

     

  

Chicago Dramatists presents

  

Homecoming 1972

Review by John Olson

Memorial Day weekend is a great time to consider the effects of war on the living veterans as well as those who have fallen. The rates of depression and suicide among our soldiers returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan make this an especially resonant topic today. Robert Koon’s new play receiving its world premiere production by Chicago Dramatists explores this in the context of a vet recently returned to his small hometown in northern Minnesota. He gives us a realistic-feeling picture of the vet – played with great emotion and nuance by Matt Holzfeind - and even goes the extra mile to explore small town life as well the lasting effects of war on its surviving soldiers. Sadly, though the playwright offers some striking images, he doesn’t provide enough new insight into either of those topics to make this a fully satisfying play.

His central character, Frank, is a 28-year-old vet who entered the Army after dropping out of college. He’s been back home for a few months but after a welcome home celebration from his family, he’s largely retreated from them.  Estranged from his brother Joe (Brett Schneider), Frank communicates only with his sister-in-law and former high school classmate Maria (Greta Honold), who seems more concerned about him than Joe does.  Frank is difficult to like and to be with.  He shuns most attempts at connection, as when he fails to show up at a Sunday dinner with Joe and Maria, or refuses Maria’s suggestion that he attend the high school homecoming game or take part in its ceremonies honoring the local veterans. He’s moody and prone to emotional outbursts, dependent on pain pills for an injury he sustained in Southeast Asia and struggles to have a relationship with the lonely waitress Darla (Molly Glynn) who works the night shift at a diner. He hints that he killed people in Vietnam and implies that it was those acts of inhumanity that are isolating him from society.  Frank’s brother Joe has a night shift as a State Trooper, and often stops in to the diner while Darla is working. There, he crosses paths with a recent college graduate whom the script simply calls “The Kid” (Julian Hester). The Kid is about to embark on an all-night drive to visit his girlfriend in Peoria and who will figure more importantly into the action later in the ninety-minute play.

The five characters are all intensely lonely. Joe and Darla work the night shift, but Frank’s a night owl as well because he has trouble sleeping. Maria is working as a substitute teacher so she and Joe are on opposite timetables and have little opportunity to spend time together. This unnamed small town seems a dead-end for all of them. Maria’s idea is to get out before she gets much older (she’s 28), but Joe is content to stay in not just community, but the same house in which he’s lived his whole life. Darla and Frank seem unable to even visualize any other options. That their routines are based in the wee hours aptly underscores their isolation – and it amplifies the feeling of loneliness in small towns, where there may not be a whole lot of company even during the daytime. Director Kimberly Senior gives the piece a Springsteenian/Mellencamp-esque tone in its rough-edge picture of small-town life.  Visually, its realistic roll-on set pieces by Jack Magaw and the dark lighting of Mac Vaughey suggest the feel of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” painting.

And there’s the problem: In the way Homecoming ’72 gives a portrait of these five lost souls at one point in time, it communicates more like a song or a painting than a play. There’s so little forward motion or arc, and it’s hard to stay with the characters of this almost relentlessly sad play. While Holzfeind gives individuality and depth to a rather stock character, Koon doesn’t tell us enough about Frank. The backstory he does provide doesn’t give us a sense of Frank’s potential before joining the Army and hence we don’t know what good may have been lost in this man due to his dehumanization at having to kill.  There’s even less backstory on Joe, Maria and Darla. Did they have promise that was somehow lost through circumstances or bad choices? Should we have empathy for them or just pity?  Is there a lesson we can learn? None of that’s clear, and the three actors in these roles are less successful than Holzfeind in suggesting subtext. Then there is “The Kid.”  The purpose of this character is confoundingly unclear. In the first scene he seems to have some sinister secret which is never made completely known, and then later he hits on Maria despite being told she’s married and the fact that has a girlfriend. Finally, it seems that his purpose in the play is to be as a counterpoint and foil to Frank – an example of the young men who avoided the draft through college deferments or the luck of a high draft lottery number (The Kid has both). Despite all that, Julian Hester gives the production’s most watchable performance in the role, giving him the immaturity and hedonism one might expect from 22-year-old just months out of college. In Hester’s hands, The Kid is a believable and sometimes amusing little cad, even if the character Koon wrote seems to have wandered in from another story.

Homecoming 1972 does have individual moments that carry great weight – like when Darla tells Frank of her daughter living in the Twin Cities. She explains that she doesn’t know exactly what the 18-year-old is doing there – if she’s living on the streets or leading a nice life like that of Mary Tyler Moore’s Mary Richards TV character. She says her greatest fear is that the daughter is working as an all-night waitress just like she is.  There’s also a great insight when Frank says that he can handle the abuse strangers were giving to returning Vietnam vets, but that his agony comes from the sense of isolation he feels for having been forced to kill.  But these are only moments, and they are too few in a play that doesn’t engage us in a journey. Without giving us sufficient insight into the paths that brought the characters to this point, or giving us any hope for their futures, it’s simply an intensely sad play in which it’s difficult to remain engaged.

  

Rating: ★★½

  

  

Homecoming 1972 continues through June 23rd at Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago (map), with performances Thursdays-Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays 3pm.  Tickets are $32 (Thursdays: students are $15), and are available by phone (312-633-0630) or online through their website (check for half-price tickets at Goldstar.com). More information at ChicagoDramatists.org.  (Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission)

Photos by Jeff Pines

     

artists

cast

Greta Honold (Maria), Matt Holzfeind (Frank), Julian Hester (The Kid), Molly Glynn (Darla: May 16 – June 9), Megan Kohl (Darla: June 13 – 23), Brett Schneider (Joe).

behind the scenes

Kimberly Senior (director), Jack Magaw (scenic design), Mac Vaughey (lighting design), Samantha C. Jones (costume design), Christopher Kriz (sound design), Mikey Moran (asst. sound design), Chris Rickett (flight choreography), Jennifer J. Thusing (stage manager),  Becky Mock (production manager), Jarrod Bainter (tech director), Lukas Brashe-Fons (dramaturg), Jeff Pines (photos)

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