Theater Review : ‘Home’ Is a State of Mind, and Old Globe Understands It Well

David Storey once told an interviewer that critics did a disservice to his play “Home” when they interpreted the title to mean a nuthouse. In fact, it’s more a pensioner’s place of retirement, with a hint of punitive incarceration, but Storey’s point is that his home is a state of mind. It’s the little bit of earth left to us at the end of the day.

Originally Storey described his main characters as in their 40s, but since John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson famously played them somewhat older in the original 1970 Royal Court production (and later on Broadway), Jack and Harry are usually portrayed as in their 70s, which suits the play’s elegiac mood. The Old Globe Theatre’s new production, starring Donald Burton and Jonathan McMurtry, hits that mood beautifully, loses it to tedium and then regains it in a particularly gracious finish.

As in the work of Samuel Beckett, tedium is a relative term here. Jack (Burton) and Harry (McMurtry) talk of a life so mundane and conventional that they never have to finish a thought, if in fact they have any. When Jack says, “Oh, yes . . . . What’s life worth . . . ,” Harry responds with, “Oh, yes.” In a short time we understand that their vague musings are in fact a tacit agreement to avoid any painful thought, particularly of the mortality that is so achingly at hand.

The entry of two less-refined women, Marjorie (Anne Gee Byrd) and Kathleen (Katherine McGrath), disrupt the men’s polite veneer, and soon the men can’t stop the tears from flowing, although their language remains steadfastly non-specific. The women have a more intimate knowledge of life’s ugliness, gained partially from their harsher financial circumstances (they look one step up from bag ladies). But where the men are given to sudden bursts of tears, the women tend to interrupt with gales of giggles, usually because they insist on finding some adolescent sexual innuendo in every sentence the men utter. For what the women know, Storey seems to suggest, laughter is a better defense.

The second and even harsher interruption into the men’s cocoon is Alfred, a lobotomized ex-boxer who seems to be under employ to move what pitifully little furniture there is around the grounds. Soon Jack and Harry are shaken into more tears, still holding faithfully and resolutely onto the only lifeboat they know--that is, the remarkably pliable generic language that Storey has invented for them.

Greg Lucas’ necessarily minimal set (a distressed table and chairs) sits on a floor of mossy blue-green and brown, the color of oxidized metal, which nicely suggests a dying lawn. Kent Dorsey’s lighting casts an autumnal shade on the nondescript stone steps that surround the action.

Burton and McMurtry, the Laurel and Hardy of the piece, establish a lovely rapport, sometimes hale and hearty, other times laced with maliciousness. As Jack, the slightly more colorful fellow, Burton is wonderfully funny and subtle, particularly in his British egocentrism. He holds the theory that there is physical evidence to suggest that the Vale of Evesham, where his old aunt resided, may actually have been the original Eden.

As the women, Byrd and McGrath are both technically good, although their presence somehow reduces the play’s energy rather than elevates it. Leo Stewart’s Alfred is a lumbering, simian moron. Although I don’t know how an actor might play a lobotomized ex-boxer with any subtlety, this performance seems over the top.

Otherwise, Craig Noel’s direction is sound and sensitive to the story’s tiny, shifting moods. Storey finely walks the line between the mundane and the tragic--the line his characters and his audience spend most of their time trying to avoid.

Kathleen reminds the men of this line when she asks Harry, “Where you going when you leave here?” Although he can only respond with “Well . . . I . . . er,” Harry is clearly thrown by this jarring question, and he weeps unassumingly. Later, when Alfred enters to remove the chairs and asks, “You finished?,” his question prompts more tears. Jack and Harry are left standing to contemplate the sea, the church and the end of the day. Jack muses somewhat mysteriously: “Once over. Never again,” and we know what he means. At that point, so late in the day, the audience, too, might find itself in a quiet vale of tears.

* “Home,” Cassius Carter Centre Stage, Old Globe Theatre, Simon Edison Centre for the Performing Arts, San Diego, Tuesday-Sunday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, Sunday matinees, 2 p.m. Ends Oct. 23. $20-$34. (619) 239-2255. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.

Donald Burton: Jack

Anne Gee Byrd: Marjorie

Katherine McGrath: Kathleen

Jonathan McMurtry: Harry

Leo Stewart: Alfred

An Old Globe Theatre production. By David Storey. Directed by Craig Noel. Sets by Greg Lucas. Lights by Kent Dorsey. Costumes by David C. Woolard. Sound by Jeff Ladman. Vocal/dialect coach Claudia Hill. Stage manager Raul Moncada.