The Homecoming is a two-act play written by 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature Harold Pinter in 1964 and first published in 1965. Set in North London, the play has six characters: five men who are related––Max, a retired butcher, and Sam, a chauffeur, who are brothers; and Max's three sons, Teddy, an expatriate American philosophy professor; Lenny, who appears to be a pimp; and Joey, a would-be boxer in training who works in demolition; and one woman, Ruth, Teddy's wife. The play concerns Teddy's and Ruth's "homecoming," which has distinctly-different symbolic and thematic implications. Considering the play while surveying Pinter's career on the occasion of its fortieth-anniversary production at the Cort Theatre, in The New Yorker, the critic John Lahr writes: "'The Homecoming' changed my life. Before the play, I thought words were just vessels of meaning; after it, I saw them as weapons of defense. Before, I thought theatre was about the spoken; after, I understood the eloquence of the unspoken. The position of a chair, the length of a pause, the choice of a gesture, I realized, could convey volumes" ("Demolition Man").