Arts and Culture

Review: Coming Home

By Nathanael Johnson on Thursday, Jan 21, 5:57pm
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A miner's job is to extract minerals from the earth. A play's business is to extract feeling from an audience. Some feelings are easier to get at than others. Laughter is pretty abundant and close to the surface. Indignation is a bit deeper. Then there are trace elements like wonder and joy, which are more difficult to refine. Most difficult of all is the pain of compassion. If an audience sees that the play is trying to inflict this pain on them--if it makes false steps, if it is clumsy in appealing to their sympathy--they'll shy away. It must tease out the emotion so gently that the audience never suspects until too late, and by then they will be grateful for the wound.


Coming Home, at the Berkeley Rep, mines for the purest form of pain. There is no visible means of extraction in this production, no false steps. It's the story of a young woman (Veronica) bringing her son home to rural South Africa after a failed bid to become a singer in the city of Cape Town. Once there she is reunited with her childhood friend, the simple-minded Alfred. It's a small play: there are only four characters, one set, one unvering line of narrative. But the characters are so overflowing with color and life that scene changes would only be a distraction. At one point, Veronica half-heartedly sings Alfred a few bars of a song she has made up about him. "And so on," she says dismissively after the chorus. Alfred (Thomas Silcott) whoops with glee, shakes his hands over his head, spins in a circle, then leaps up, jackknifing in the air. Finally he stops and with perfectly timed superfluity says, "I like it!"

This play managed to extract some pain from me, the grateful tenderness that comes with human solidarity. To make an audience care, really care, about a few characters summoned for a few hours out of the ether by stagecraft is a remarkable thing.