Mr. McAnuff himself and Michael Roth wrote the beguiling music, which evokes various strains in 1960s and ’70s rock, most notably the Beatles of the “Sgt. Pepper” era. Mr. Roth leads the eight-piece band that slides onstage and off at regular intervals, with Ben Carlson’s dryly funny Feste handling most of the lead-singer chores capably.  Debra Hanson’s costumes generally play along with Mr. McAnuff’s tour through the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But Ms. Hanson dresses the ladies of Olivia’s court in dainty 18th-century frocks with bustles, while Malvolio (Tom Rooney, dour but a trifle bland) wears a plain black suit that could be off the rack from Men’s Wearhouse, making his sudden appearance in those yellow hose and cross garters a bit bewildering.  Mr. Dennehy’s Sir Toby enters golfing (naturally, he cheats), and other characters are seen playing baseball and tennis. In fact, everyone onstage is so busy playing music and sports that the game of lovemaking, so central to the plot, almost comes to seem an afterthought. Mike Shara’s silky Orsino and Sara Topham’s imperious Olivia make distinctive impressions, but Andrea Runge, in the central role of Viola, sometimes seems to get lost in the shuffle.  Mr. Dennehy and Mr. Ouimette have a frisky, funny rapport that brings a spark of energy to all their scenes. Sporting giant mutton-chop sideburns that make him look like a stock Gilbert and Sullivan character, Mr. Dennehy’s Sir Toby takes sly pleasure in egging on his addled friend to greater feats of foolishness. Mr. Ouimette, with a beseeching or befuddled look in his huge eyes, is sublime as the duped Andrew. His cowering duel with Viola, in disguise as Cesario, is the comic highlight of the evening.  Mr. Ouimette, a veteran Canadian actor who has appeared in 18 Stratford seasons, is also excellent in “The Homecoming,” playing Sam, the mousy chauffeur brother of Mr. Dennehy’s malevolent Max, the widower who presides over his festering all-male household with grinning malice.  Fuming and fussing in his armchair throne, Mr. Dennehy’s Max asserts his will with bullying taunts that do not entirely mask the desperation underneath. His smooth-talking son Lenny, played with quiet menace by Aaron Krohn, parries his father’s thrusts with offhand viciousness that keeps the old man’s anger constantly on the boil. Max gets more satisfaction from the cowed reactions of Sam, while Ian Lake’s Joey, Max’s thick-headed, would-be boxer son, seems oblivious to the fog of masculine rivalry in the room.  Ms. Tarver, who directed Mr. Dennehy in Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” at Stratford in a 2008 double bill with O’Neill’s “Hughie,” keeps a sure hand on the balance between seething hostility and absurd comedy in Pinter’s writing. Although the famous pauses and silences are often used to stoke the sense of barely repressed violence, they also help to punctuate the mad humor in the dialogue. The actors bring dexterous ease to the hairpin turns from geniality to bile within a single speech, as when Mr. Dennehy’s Max says, in tones of fond nostalgia, that his wife “wasn’t such a bad woman,” only to complete the thought by adding, “even though it made me sick just to look at her rotten stinking face.”  The poisonous equilibrium of this peculiar homestead is destabilized when Max’s eldest son, Teddy (a prim Mr. Shara), brings his wife, Ruth, home to meet the family. Cara Ricketts (a wily Maria in “Twelfth Night”) imbues this mysterious character with a spellbinding air of quiet self-possession. Ruth’s apparent surrender to the increasingly aggressive sexual advances of Lenny, not to mention Max and Lenny’s plans to “put her on the game,” remains as startling as ever; as preposterous as their casual brutality is, it is her remote acquiescence that truly unsettles.  Ms. Ricketts exudes a composed sexual allure suggesting that it is Ruth’s assurance of her power over the men — and their unspoken awareness of it — that draws them on to ever more grotesque efforts to control and demean her.  As grim as the events in “The Homecoming” are, Ms. Tarver’s production draws forth the almost antic comedy in the play’s final moments, as Lenny and Max’s casual discussion of the logistics of Ruth’s life of prostitution is interrupted by Sam’s shocking outburst and sudden collapse.  Mr. Dennehy’s Max registers this dramatic development with hilarious sangfroid. “A corpse? A corpse on my floor?” he complains, standing over his apparently dead brother with a look of irritable disgust.  Almost as funny is Teddy’s reaction. He has just heard his wife coolly agreeing to a life of indentured servitude, but he’s more put out by the inconvenience of Sam’s indisposition. “I was going to ask him to drive me to London Airport,” Mr. Shara’s Teddy says with disappointment.  The scene is Pinter at his most astoundingly subversive: the cruelty and irrationality of human behavior pushed to such absurd extremes that our only release from its grotesque implications is the defense — or is it the complicity? — of helpless laughter.  A version of this article appears in print on September 3, 2011, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Brian Dennehy as a Troublemaker, Times Two. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Brian Dennehy is appearing in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” and Harold Pinter’s “Homecoming” at this summer’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival.