Family Reunion, The

The first production of a three-week Royal Shakespeare Company residency at the Brooklyn Academy of Music is T.S. Eliot’s The Family Reunion.
Written in 1939, The story takes a decidedly dark look at home and hearth. The physical setting is cozy enough ? a birthday gathering at the Monchensey clan’s manor house in northern England ? but beneath the upper-crust façade lurks a nameless dread. The eldest son, Lord Harry, is returning to the fold for the celebration of his mother’s birthday. But all is not right. Harry is seriously disturbed, haunted actually, by guilt over the circumstances of his wife’s untimely death. He’s convinced that he pushed her to her death from an ocean liner and is being pursued, Orestes-like, by Furies. Clearly, this is no simple drawing-room murder mystery. Things get increasingly convoluted and mythic as an agonized Harry learns the truth about the Family Secret, a.k.a. Curse.