Word: moms
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...portrait of the British spy--Guy Burgess, retired to Moscow--as a displaced person, isolated from his best friends and instincts. Chris Boyce (Timothy Hutton) feels isolated too, trapped in America; but here Schlesinger dares not flirt with political or visual subtlety. Everyone is an oaf but our lad. Mom (Joyce Van Patten) is dithery, and Dad (Pat Hingle) scares the falcon, and Chris' girlfriend (Lori Singer) is one big vacant California erogenous zone. His treason is pinned on mid-America, not so much for the evil of its ways as for the banality of its style. Affluence is flatulence...
...these the Cleavers or the Bunkers, this family of four preparing for an ordinary Thanksgiving in 1973? There's Dad (Carroll O'Connor), screwing himself into his easy chair, deflecting harsh words and harder responsibilities. Mom (Frances Sternhagen) is patrolling the house in her robe and bunny snood, calling "Wakey uppy! Wakey uppy!" in the tinny cascades of Texas motherhood. Sis (Linda Cook) is chatting on the phone with her boyfriend and threatening to "devote my entire life to crisis counseling for the holiday-impaired. My mother can be the poster child." And young Jeremy (Christopher Fields), just back from...
...mentions it, but this funny and harrowing play takes place in a Dallas suburb on the tenth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination. The coincidence of dates sends Home Front aloft toward political metaphor. Dad may be every "reasonable" statesman who led the U.S. deeper into Viet Nam; Mom and Sis could be every uncommitted American woman, worried sick about her boy or her beau, but hoping against all evidence for the best. And Jeremy may not be kidding when he says that in Viet Nam "I died." Alive or dead, he is the twisted ghost of every Camelot...
...guilty secret than, in his sister's words, "a terminal jerk"; and Dad must expose himself as a paranoiac patriarch whose home is his castle, moated by ignorance. For the two hours preceding this pirouette into psychodrama, Home Front is fiercely sympathetic to all of its characters. Beneath Mom's lyrical ditsiness and Dad's clumsy evasions are two frightened people who care, beyond words, for their son. But because Jeremy's rage is beyond their comprehension, they can only stand by, then stand firm, as the boy plays out his nightmare...
...milder Archie Bunker) or Fields (in a part that cries out for an actor with the implosive intensity of a Sean Penn) to commandeer the spotlight. But Home Front is Sternhagen's show, allowing her to nail down, with an increasingly desperate comic urgency, the suburban matriarch. This mom will not be accused of screaming at her children: "I was using my loud voice." Instead she will display a compulsion for propriety at all costs. "Let's not talk about it any more," she exclaims. "It's a holiday!" And on holiday, Sternhagen's trill ascends to a wail...