September 3, 1992
Glasgow, Scotland

Reality of ideas The Home Show Pieces at Citizens' 3

By Dorothy Mcmillan

American David Greenspan's four short pieces for three actors, three rooms and a back yard, begins as a slight, naturalistic portrait of a gay Jewish playwright trying to masturbate away the pains of unrequited love, repeatedly interrupted by the telephone which signals in turn his Aunt Ruth, anxious for family attendance at Passover, an easily bored friend, a nuisance call and a wrong number.

He makes it in the end but it is an unsatisfying climax. Not so the rest of the play, for out of this familiar material emerges a self-consciously intellectual exploration of the inextricability of art and life, of love and guilt, of family ties and hatreds, of the possibility at last of the transcendence of differences of age, religion, and gender. By interrogating its own processes and challenging the audience the play thrusts out of the studio theatre into the larger world.

Yet this sounds too solemn for what in Matthew Lloyd's direction and the versatile playing of Henry Ian Cusick, Michael Matus and Siobhan Stanley is very funny about self-deception, self-doubt, and self-love. An actress and actor while impugning the veracity of a script, reveal its applicabilty to the muddle of their own lives.

The playwright tries out his interview responses as he sits on the stool, the secret place where many of us massage our egos. The last piece takes place in the kitchen and using transvestism to unsettle our responses, asks us to believe in the reality of ideas -- if we believe in the stew in the pot, even though there is nothing actual there, then we might also be able to believe in Aunt Ruth's vision of everyone "living together under one big tent".