We consider ourselves intelligent people. We went to a good college, majored in English, read a lot of plays in our day. We even did some theater, and know our prosceniums from our three-quarter-rounds, and we've seen our fair share, on- and Off-Broadway and on the Left Coast. But sometimes we see productions we ought to like that just puzzle us, and we think, 'Well that's okay. Good theater should provoke emotions, surprise us, even confuse us at times. Confusion is good.' But walking out of The Homecoming at A.C.T., a play by Harold Pinter that's considered one of the playwright's best, we knew that the play had done all of those things but still left us wanting somehow. At its dark, emotionally distant, absurdist best The Homecoming is hardly the kind of play to leave an audience warm and enraptured by the end. But still, we were wanting, and we're going to try to put our finger on that want right now.

The play was directed by Carey Perloff, Artistic Director of the company and occasional punching bag of the New York TImes. For some familiar with A.C.T. over a number of years, this may be all one needs to know to want to avoid this production. Perloff is, at her heart, an academic lover of the theater — one who treasures its history, and believes in the avant garde, though perhaps feels bound by her organization and subscriber base never to get too wacky. The successful and exciting staging of Berthold Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle last year could hardly be called staid, with its collapsing sets and actors playing instruments — but it was executed by British director John Doyle, not an A.C.T. insider. Last year's Phèdre on the other hand, directed by Perloff, was a confusing choice on many levels — promising, perhaps, for scholars of theater, but abysmally executed, stiffly acted, and hardly the type of thing the gray-haired subscriber base was going to stay awake for.