Harold Pinter's "The Homecoming" is a deceptively difficult piece.

It initially looks harmless enough at Kennedy Theatre, where designer David Gerke has built a mildly dilapidated and bland parlor set, angling in the walls and ceiling to direct focus and reduce the cavernous size of the main stage.

But what follows is a disturbing version of a domestic melodrama where the parlor becomes a battleground for power and sex and what is claimed to be true must be vigorously doubted.

The aging Max (Ian Falconer) is a retired butcher and his brother Sam (Daniel D. Randerson) drives a cab. With them live Max's two unmarried adult sons — Joey (Bronzen Hahn), a construction worker training as a boxer, and Lenny (Tommy Barron), who plays the horses and hints at other shady interests.

Into this all-male household comes the eldest son Teddy (Ryan Wuestewald) and his wife, Ruth (Jillian Blakkan-Strauss), who has never met the family.

The characters are Pinter's pieces in a seamy chess game, where insult and innuendo are followed by unsavory acting out. The home-boys smell a weakness in Ruth's past and maneuver to cut her away from Teddy and into their own pack. She seems interested and Teddy (Are they really married with a young family of their own?) is nervously ambivalent. Much of the resulting tension comes from the actors' delivery.

Director Glenn Cannon starts the action with a literal bang. A drawer slams shut an instant before the lights come up. The closing of the front door becomes a jolting exclamation point, while other commonplace noises are variously used to punctuate the dialogue.

Speeches — often degrading and insulting — are delivered blandly and uncolorized, but with steely and unnerving calculated emphasis. Pauses are powerful, indicating something significant has just occurred — or is about to.

Within that context, the revival at the University of Hawai'i is filled with uniformly excellent performances. Falconer's Max is appropriately overbearing and rigid — and his "Kiss me!" closes the play like a desperate thunderclap. Randerson's Sam is pathetic without being cloying. The sons display robotic intensity, while Blakkan-Strauss fills Ruth with unfeeling contradictions.

This is not an easy play to like, but one that has earned respect since its opening in 1965. Its Broadway run earned both the Tony and Critics Circle awards for best play.

Director's notes verify that it's not intended as literal depiction, but to pass on the "feel of life" as "one flow of stinking pus after another."

Accordingly, see the play for its value as a literary and dramatic signpost, but come emotionally forearmed.