Homeward Bound

Novelist Margaret Atwood writes: "Homeward Bound is a play that pulls the term 'comedy of manners' inside out... [it] is a comedy of manners, but with a difference, comedies of manners used to be about love, but this is the late twentieth century, and Homeward Bound is a comedy of manners about death. The machine that winds it up and keeps it going is simple, though outrageous: Bonnie and Glen, two acutely square and respectable parents, have thrown a family dinner for their two adult children and their respective mates, to announce—as it turns out—that Glen is dying of an incurable disease and intends to kill himself...The travel brochures which Bonnie are examining in the opening scene gather a much darker connotation by the closing one..." However, the intention of the evening orbits as each person's immediate concern surfaces: their daughter is pregnant (who is the father?), their son-in-law has kidnaped the children (or has he?), and her son's lover arrives to set matters straight (if he can). Atwood adds, "Elliott Hayes has fashioned a brisk, intricate, deranging and tightly strung play...[his] art is a funhouse mirror, and what we see in it are fragments of ourselves, distorted, grotesque even, but recognizable."