HOMECOMING PLAYERS

The web site for The Homecoming Players features the Greek poet Cavafy’s poem “Ithaka” — which holds the key to this homegrown theater company, just three years old this coming February.

“Your arrival there is what you are destined for,” the poem promises. And literally coming home to Ithaca, after a decades-long odyssey, is what motivated the company’s co-founders.

Rachel Hockett (artistic director) and Arthur Bicknell (literary manager) were good friends long ago at Ithaca High School, where they were both active in theater. Life took them down different paths, flung them clear across the country, and they only reconnected some 40 years later — on Facebook, of course.

Egging each other on to attend their class of ’69 high school reunion, they returned in 2009 and subsequently acknowledged Ithaca’s siren call — it was time to come home, for good.

“This is the sort of thing you do in your 20s and 30s,” Bicknell said of his choice to leave his job as a senior publicist at Merriam Webster in Massachusetts in order to follow his first love: theater. As a young man he’d acted and had success as a playwright, then, in 1983, a phenomenal failure with the now-legendary production of his “Moose Murders” on Broadway. (His upcoming book about the debacle will coincide with a New York revival this January.)

Hockett, who’d studied acting and directing, had founded an off-Broadway theater company in New York in the late ’70s (ironically, she and Bicknell were living in New York at the same time and never knew it) and had continued directing in California. But she left Berkeley to return to Ithaca, their fantastical project, and the family home she’d grown up in.

The two friends now share their theatrical dreams as well as the house. “‘Housemate’ sounds so mundane, so aprons and apple pies,” Bicknell said. “It doesn’t express our emotional connection.”

“We like to think of ourselves as ‘significant otters,’” Hockett added playfully.

Homecoming Players launched officially in May of last year with a concert reading of Bicknell’s 1980 play, “My Great Dead Sister.” Their next project was a one-night-only reading this month of “8,” Dustin Lance Black’s reenactment of the federal trial, based on court records, in which California’s Proposition 8 — which eliminated rights of same-sex couples to marry — was judged unconstitutional.

The fundraising event brought together actors from every major theater group in Ithaca. “I’m thrilled about this,” Hockett said. “Our mission is to collaborate with the local community of theater artists — we really feel that art is better when you work with others rather than compete with them.They were delighted to participate in the recent Wolf’s Mouth Collective productions, Bicknell performing and Hockett directing.

“Though we’re absolutely a work in progress as a company, we’re anchored in this idea of the intersection of social justice in the arts,” said Hockett, whose activist site, The Equality Mantra, promotes marriage equality. “A play can get you to think about issues in a whole new way.”

Three Homecoming Players events are scheduled for this season – beginning with a one-act play contest (submissions up to Nov. 15) to encourage new local work and emphasize social justice themes, the three winning scripts to be produced at CSMA in February.

Next May brings a staged reading, directed by Susannah Berryman, of “In the Car with Blossom and Len” by Ithaca College alumna Joni Fritz (of “Girl’s Room”) — a funny and heartbreaking play about taking care of elderly parents.

And in mid-August, the two friends tackle Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” directed by Ross Haarstad. “We’ve been waiting all our lives to do George and Martha,” Bicknell said, “and we’re doing it because we can — move over, Colleen Dewhurst and Ben Gazzara.”