Julie Archer and Lee Breuer | Peter and Wendy / 2011

the locked windows

by Douglas Messerli

 

Julie Archer and Lee Breuer (co-creators and writers, based on the novel Peter and Wendy by J. M. Barrie) Peter and Wendy, produced by Mabou Mines at The New Victory Theater, New York / the production I attended was on May 6, 2011.

 

On May 6 I had tickets to see Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia, but when I heard of the short return of Mabou Mines’ Peter and Wendy to The New Victory Theater (running from May 6-22), I could not resist the opportunity to see the play, and joyfully changed my plans.

    In a strange way, although these British-based works are entirely different, there is an odd connection between the two in that they both episodically, often without coherent connections between changes of characters and place, present a kind of Arcadian or pastoral world in which things were seemingly simpler—although the characters in both are faced with complexities that they might not wish to face. 

     In Peter and Wendy those complexities have to do with their childhood vision of reality. But unlike the earlier play and novel, Peter Pan, Barrie’s 1911 Peter and Wendy presents a less sweet and simpler vision of things. It is not simply that Peter, Wendy, her brothers, and the other Lost Boys who make up Peter’s band perceive things as children might, but that they sometimes all too readily have perceived the traumatic and threatening issues of the adults and the society that surrounds them.

 

    In this version, Peter is not just a child who refuses to grow up, but in his kind of wise puppet guise, is a “puppet” to his own childish instance and the longings that go with that. Like a stubborn and undeterred brat, as spoken by the marvelous narrator Karen Kandel, he is, although always fairly charming, at times also a selfish bully of contradictory forces.

     While The New York Times critic saw Kandel’s presentation of these marvelous puppets as too sweet, I saw them quite differently, as forces representing an adamant refusal to join in the Victorian society around them, and, in that sense, they are not at all innocent boys and girls living in a time outside of reality, but slightly terrifying rebels against the transformation of Victorian society in a gentler and more civil society. Peter may offer these timeless children adventure, but those adventures, the battles with the absurd Hook and his gang, are not unlike the ridiculous wars fought through the century. Wendy may be part and party to the fun, but she is wooed away from her home less as an equal adventurer than as a mother to all the boys, a mother who in her nurturing and care for her “children,” has little room to truly discover herself, more indentured than adventured.

    Even Hook, in this version, is less of a free adventurer than he is caught up in the societal whirl, a man who wants to become a figure of style, a class-inspired man of aspirations. The wonderful Croc is a fearful villain less because of his potential to feast on Peter Pan’s boys, than he is a figure caught up in that same society whirl, hilariously presented as a perpetually tangoing beast, unable to free himself from a kind of infatuation with his own tail/tale.

     All of this darkness is reinforced by the Celtic songs composed by Johnny Cunningham and performed by Aidan Brennan, Tola Custy, Steph Geremia, Alan Kelly, Laoise Kelly, Siobhan Miller, and Jay Peck; these songs are not your children-friendly hymns such as “I’m Flying,” “I Gotta Crow,” and “I Won’t Grow Up,” but rather intimate the real roots of J. M. Barrie’s darker Scottish heritage.

    The marvelous puppetry of Basil Twist and Lute Breuer, accompanied by a whole ensemble of marvelous players, supported this slightly fractured- fairytale-feeling about the whole event. It is notable that, when Wendy reports that she and her brothers want to return home, Peter considerably chastises them and, for a few minutes, closes the open windows of their home, barring them from returning while hinting that their parents have not been anxiously awaiting them. In those minutes it becomes apparent that this Peter, unlike the earlier Peter Pan, is not only mischievous, but envious and even revengeful.

     When Wendy returns to the Darlings house, the first thing she does is to pick up all the “toys,” the tokens of the children’s imagination—including the toy soldiers, the lost boys, the stuffed Nana—pouring them back into the chest to keep them out of reach of their insidious influences. A pall overcomes the entire work as we realize that Pan, Tinkerbell, and their opponents are now out there, all alone in space. There is no love, not even, any longer, a sense of adventure!

     Of course he will return to steal away future generations, but in his eternal, darkened childish vision, he will never find the fulfillment of home and hearth. I cried. I wish I’d had a child along with me to observe and share his or her experiences of this profound version of Barrie’s enduring myth.

 

Los Angeles, June 22, 2011

BODYTRAFFIC | performance of September 26, 2019

[d]elusive minds

by Douglas Messerli

 

BODYTRAFFIC, directed by Lillian Rose Barbeito and Tina Finkleman Berkett / performance at The Wallis Bram Goldsmith Theater, September 26, 2019 / I attended this performance with Diana Bing Daves McLaughlin

 

In my 2018 review of the Los Angeles dance company BODYTRAFFIC, this year and next the company-in-residence at The Wallis Bram Goldsmith Theater, I promised, without recalling it, that I would be attending their next performance. Yet so I did. And what a remarkable experience that was last night.

     What stood out in this production of 4 dances, 3 of which were west coast, US, or world premieres, was that this wonderful company headed by Lillian Rose Barbeito and Tina Finkelman Berkett—Berkett also the lead dancer of the company—is the growing maturity of their work, their ability to take on quite seriously narrative work, and their extraordinary abilities as dancers. This company, particularly in the first work of the evening, [d]elusive minds, which is based on the true story of a mental patient suffering from a kind of schizophrenia “where the person becomes convinced that a family member has been replaced by an imposter” (think of Don Siegel’s film The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, wherein nearly everyone has the mental illness described as Capgras Delusion). In this case Santiago kills the wife he deeply loves and continues to write to her from prison for 15 years, believing in his “illusion” that she was still living.

       Choreographed with a marvelously beautiful set by Fernando Hernando Magadan and almost delirious lighting by Peter Lemmens, dancers Berkett and Guzmán Rosado play out the signature movements of this company, almost body-defying shifts of body over body, with hand movements that convey so much of the intensity of the narrative. These dancers move over, around, above, and through one another in a way that seems to almost defy gravity. This dance is so beautifully intense that when the murder actually occurs we almost perceive it as blended into their love. They are not only a couple, performing an intricate pas de deux, in this performance they dance as a constantly shifting “one,” until you can almost comprehend why the mentally-disturbed male might think that the “other” is no longer the woman he loved. She has become him, and the dance conveys their impossibility to separate identities through nearly incomprehensible overlays of legs, arms, and other body parts. No matter how you might want to distance dance from sexuality, in this company’s performances the dancers make it clear, without the sexual winking of someone like the choreographer Matthew Bourne, there is no way to separate the pairs or, in the case of the delightful visit to the beach in Snap, the second of the company’s works, an entire community, from representing an intense sexual interchange. In BODYTRAFFIC, the bodies and their constant mutability is everything.

     Snap is a kind of lark, a visit to the beach but also just a dip into the waters of everyday life by the entire cast of Berkett, Joseph Davis, Haley Heckethorn, Myles Lavallee, Rosando, and Jarma White—some in beach-wear, others in festive costumes, umbrellas allowed, accompanied by the somewhat harsh sounds of Schocke, counterbalanced by the sometimes silly terpsichorean movements by choreographer Micaela Taylor that obviously just represent fun. But again this company’s “just fun” involves serious gymnastic interchanges between company members. The complexity of this was truly amazing, which my theater-going friend, Diana Daves, commented on: “How can they possibly remember all those different movements?” Well, that is one of the wonders of this company. I would be hard-pressed to imagine how any other company might recreate this dance. Let us hope they have recorded it in chorographical language.

   After an intermission, performers Davis and Rosando danced Resolve, who in Wewolf’s choreography, come together, push away, come back, and crawl gradually over and above one another in a relationship that at moments seems about to dissolve before transforming this couple into a kind acknowledged unity that cannot be denied. Isn’t this the story of any intense relationship? Surely is has been mine.

      Of course, A Million Voices, with Peggy Lee’s standards brought everyone to a standing ovation. But, in fact, I realized even by the intermission that this Los Angeles audience was far more sophisticated about dance and that just as in its orchestral and art worlds, this city is now truly quite committed to dance theater. A city with such significant film, food, dance, music, and art—who could ask for anything more, even if I am primarily a literature person? I can only commend The Wallis, the Broad Theater, and now Redcat for their embracement of dancing.

 

Los Angeles, September 27, 2019

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (September 2019)

Eugene O'Neill | A Moon for the Misbegotten / 1975

dancing with a dead man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eugene O’Neill A Moon for the Misbegotten / the production I saw was of the 1973 revival filmed for ABC television, directed by José Quintero (TV film directed with Gordon Rigsby, 1975)

 

As some critics, over the years, have commented, Eugene O’Neill’s last play, a kind of sequel to the then (A Moon for the Misbegotten premiered in 1947) unproduced Long Day’s Journey into Night, is a fragile work that needs a near-perfect cast to bring it to life, reiterated, almost, by the various lengths of the play’s runs.

   The original Broadway production, directed by Carmen Capalbo, despite some first-rate actors in Franchot Tone and Wendy Hiller, lasted only 68 performances, a flop by any definition. Its failure also meant the playwright’s break with the Theatre Guild, who had previously produced a great many of his works.

     The Off-Broadway revival of 1968 by the Circle in the Square Theatre, directed by Theodore Mann and starring Salome Jens as Josie, ran for less than a week.

      The second Broadway revival of this play at the Cort Theatre, directed by David Leveaux, in 1984. Kate Nelligan, as Jocie, was nominated for a Tony, but it ran only for 40 performances, even less that the original production.

      The third revival, directed by Daniel Sullivan in 2000 at the Walter Kerr Theatre, with Cherry Jones as Jocie, lasted a bit longer at 120 performances. Perhaps by that time audiences had grown somewhat more accustomed to O’Neill’s longish monologues, the tough-and-rough language of Jocie and her father, and the long pauses in the rhythm of the play.

     In 2007 there was yet a 4th revival at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre—starring the wonderful Eve Best as Jocie—which lasted for 2 ½ months, after a 112-performance run at London’s Old Vic.

     As dreary as these figures are, however, there was one extremely important exception, revealing the effectiveness of this play.

     In 1973, José Quintero directed three actors with long careers and life-long devotion to O’Neill works: Colleen Dewhust, Jason Robards, Jr.,—who later performed the same character, at a younger age, in the 1962 film version directed by Sidney Lumet.

     For the acting in this production both Dewhurst and Ed Flanders as her father, won Tony awards, as the play when on to run for 314 performances (a solid run for a serious Broadway drama), and is pretty much recognized now by most critics as the definitive production.

     As O’Neill scholar Travis Bogard wrote: “Doomed to failure without superb acting…no subsequent production ever recreated the magic of those 314 performances.”

     That version, after its Broadway run, went on to be performed at Washington D.C.’s The Kennedy Center, where, amazingly, Howard and I saw it also in 1973.

     Yet, I remember little of it, only perceiving it fully in the ABC taping of the same production, which I saw yesterday. The film received 5 Emmy nominations, with Ed Sanders winning the award for Supporting Actor.

     O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten in terms of plot, is hardly complex. The work begins with with the farmer Hogan’s (Flanders) third son, Mike, escaping the hard work and abuse from his father he has had to endure for most of his life to live with his two other brothers. His sister Jocie, abets that escape, even producing the boy with a few dollars she has stolen from her father’s money box.

     She remains in good stead with the now furious father through her bluster, her quick-witted tongue, and a large stick she holds onto so that her father can feel justified for his inability to beat her for her participation in the betrayal.

     Their hardscrabble farm is owned by Jamie, now spoken of as Jim and Jimmy, whose father, the noted actor James Tyrone, Sr. one day inexplicably purchased it. The younger James is a regular visitor to the farm, loving to chat with her father, and secretly in love with Jocie, who also has the reputation of being the nearby town’s whore, a moniker she seems herself to encourage.

     Yet James realizes the lie of that boast, perceiving her (correctly) still as a virgin, and finding her tall, somewhat imposing stature (She describes herself “a cow of a woman”) as a thing of beauty.

    If in the early scenes there is a great deal of coming and going, James paying them a visit to announce that their wealthy, pompous neighbor Steadman Harder will soon be paying them a visit to protest the fact that Hogan’s pigs occasionally escape their pen and slip into Harder’s pristine pond.

      But the major events occur in the second act in a series of non-events surrounding the central two figures. We first glimpse Jocie, attired in her best dress, including socks and shoes—throughout most of the play this Amazon is barefooted—awaiting the would-be lover who is now several hours late.

     Furious, she pulls off her stockings and shoes, as her father finally returns from the same nearby bar where he has gone with James.

     Under the cover of drunkenness, he angrily complains to his daughter that they can no longer trust James, since at the bar their landlord has agreed to the now outrageous price for their worthless farm for $10,000, enough surely that Jim might return to New York and his “Broadway tarts.”

     Still furious for being stood up, and now hearing what she believes as the truth, Jocie plots revenge. If her father will bring James to her, she will drink with him (she is a near teetotaler), getting him drunk before carrying him in her bed, while her father and others he brings with him at daybreak will attest to sexual misconduct, allowing the Hogans to get back the $10,000 which they know he will pay out of guilt.

     Hogan goes off, but James, hours late, finally does finally show up, while Jocie attempts to get him soused. Knowing her as well as he does (he has long perceived the lie of her sexual indiscretions), he refuses to allow her to drink.

     And as they two talk in the moonlight, she gradually uncovers the truth, that the offer from Harder was verbally accepted only so that the next day he can again refuse him, bedeviling the vile, rich neighbor.

     Recognizing his honesty, Jocie nearly swoons over a couple of kisses between the two of them and his frenzied head buried on her lap, as he alternates between coherent banter and almost shrill drunken memories that continue to haunt him.

     Allowing herself to be taken in love, she brings him into her bed, where he quickly, again in his drunken state of mind, attempts to rape her, she running from the room declaring that she is not a “whore.”

     He apologizes but also suggests it may be good that she has seen him like that, his real self who would totally destroy her if they become more romantically entwined.

 

    Finally, he drunkenly mumbles out the terrible story of how, upon his mother’s death and, with her coffin in baggage, during his voyage to her final burial he called each night for a $56 dollar whore with whom he had sex. He was so drunk by the time they reached their destination that he missed his mother’s final funeral.

     Jocie is shocked, but ultimately forgives him, and realizes that he has told her something he had told no other. She allows him to rest on her lap for the rest of night, only awakening him with the sunrise.

     The result is obvious since James is off to New York by the end of the week, probate on the family home finally coming to an end.

      Not only has Jocie realized the truths of his private confession, but accepts it as an unconditional offering of love, while still perceiving that the man whom she loves is actually, like his entire family except Edmond (O’Neill) who is extremely ill ghosts.

      What most fascinates me about this dance with a dead man is Jocie’s—and to a certain extent James’— constant effort to pull and push away from one another while at the very same moment they entice each other back into embrace. It is truly a kind of dance with death punctuated with fearful hope and utter disgust. By the exhausting end of this “dance,” Jocie can hardly walk, so tied up in knots are her legs for holding and protecting him all night.

      But by the daylight, when her father returns, claiming it was all scheme, not for the money, but to bring the two of them together, his daughter has grown strong knowing that once in her life she did possess love, even if it was delivered from the dead of the Tyrone family. She threatens to finally leave her father, but by the end of the play remains with him.

      And it is, ultimately, this alternating sense of love and rejection which makes O’Neill’s work so very brilliant—even if it takes only great actors to achieve it on stage.

 

Los Angeles, June 18, 2020

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance

 

John O'Keefe | Reapers / 2005

what have we reaped?

by Douglas Messerli

 

John O’Keefe Reapers, Odyssey Ensemble Theatre, Los Angeles, July 16, 2005

 

In the program notes for his new play, Reapers, playwright and director John O’Keefe describes the work as a “memory of a fantasy,” “What in Greece was the island, in Iowa is the farm. The farmer is the king, his wife, the queen, his daughter, the princess, and his son, the prince. Joey Beam is the chorus. The storm has already happened. The play is being performed by ghosts.”

 

   Indeed, life down on the farm as presented by O’Keefe has as much in common with the Furies as it does with any Norman Rockwell portrait of a country family at table. For the Fox family, working a hardscrabble plot with nothing to farm but hay, everything has gone rotten before the play begins. Hulda, the mother, is catatonic, a wheelchair bound manikin her son describes as having been stuffed, but who from time to time awakens to terrorize all. Mildred Fox, the matriarch of this Orestesian brood, is a brutalized housewife longing to kill either her husband or her son, it doesn’t seem to matter which. Her daughter Deirdre is a sometimes innocent but more often flirtatious young woman on the prowl. Son Bruce, whose major activities include raping the sleeping daughters of nearby families, nightly dueling with his father, and ultimately killing his best friend, characterizes his behavior as one of “startlement,” an activity which consists mainly of popping out from beneath the bed of a young man, Tom O’Brien, whom the family has obtained from the state juvenile home to help with the three-day endurance test described as reaping. Locked in the basement between long stretches of hard work, Tom is subjected to homoerotic “startlements” by Bruce as well as the love-starved blandishments of Deirdre. The father is the kind of farmer my own Iowa grandfathers were, men who did little but work themselves into death.

     As we observe this loving quintet at their evening chowdown (“dinner” is too polite a word), we witness their simple home-bound pleasures: washing their hands, chewing slices of white bread, and verbally abusing one other. Other than the nightly father-son fights in the barn, temporary escapes—the son’s “running” with his friend Dickie, the daughter’s quick forays into the local town for fresh admirers, the father’s insistent consumption of alcohol, and the mother’s brooding day and night-time visions—are the only possible “pleasures” available to them.

    But there is no escape, obviously, for young Tom. He is their temporary prisoner, and as an outside agent caught in this spinning web of horror, is called upon to witness their unspeakable deeds and unwillingly participate in their disgusting visions and acts. At moments, O’Keefe brilliantly crystallizes the absurd but utterly logical political conclusions of right-wing America: it’s time to stop allowing foreigners to come here and take over our jobs, and to start sending Americans overseas to destroy the foreigners’ homes and cities and take over their jobs, their oil wells, their manufacturing plants.

     The satire of this play, however, is at other times too broad. Religious fervor, racial prejudice, violent political values—the author has perhaps created too many vectors for this wacky, ultra-dysfunctional family to successfully embrace; and the final furor of nature, madness, and personal hate take the play to a mountaintop of hysteria that the wide-eyed audience can merely endure—all belief in and sympathy for its characters having long been erased.

     The “hero” of this fantasy is nature itself, the forces that every farmer knows are at the center of his existence. Like O’Keefe, I grew up in Iowa. Even living in a city, as I did, the constant subject of daily life was the weather—there was never enough rain and there was always too much; it was always too hot, too cold. Every farm family had tales of relatives being killed by or surviving tornadoes.

     The single-man chorus of this play, Joey Beam, poetically conjures up a world of just such forces—clouds that shout, winds that whisper, earth that cries out from its daily abuse. And at the center of the horrible fury of this play are characters desperate themselves to sing out for the joy of living and the praise of nature’s gifts. Deirdre and Tom both sing lovingly at moments in the play, and in one short scene, hidden away in her upstairs bedroom, the two remind one almost of another young couple, George Gibbs and Emily Webb of Our Town, discussing their lives and futures. We quickly realize, however, that, unlike the world facing the Thornton Wilder figures, the couple of this current-day fantasy have no real lives, no real future to embrace.  Tom attempts to describe his family as a “broken” one, with a dead father and a mother who “forgets” him for long stretches in state orphanages and juvenile centers. Deirdre decries his metaphors as mere euphemisms. What is “broken” about a relationship where a mother refuses to retrieve him? The “relationship” is one of hostility, not a “break,” which might suggest a possible mending. For, as she knows from her own insufferable life, there is no longer any hope for love. It may be that, given the “relationships” these would-be dreamers have had to endure, there is no longer even a possibility of hope. As the author describes the changing forces of nature in our real global-warmed world: “Diseases spread, spring arrives earlier, plant and animal range shift, the coral reefs bleach. There are downpours, heavy snowfalls, flooding, droughts and fires.” Let us hope, O’Keefe seems to argue, that we awaken before the Apocalypse arrives. 

 

Los Angeles, August 1, 2005

Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, no. 1 (January-February 2006).

 

 

Eric Overmyer | Dark Rapture / 1996

the fire within

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eric Overmyer Dark Rapture / ACT (American Conservatory) Theater, San Francisco / I sat next to the playwright for this evening production on March 1996.

 

Dark Rapture begins in Southern California with a large nighttime fire not so very different from those arsonist fires I describe in my essay about the LA riots, “Getting Along.” Two men, Ray Gaines and Babcock, meet up in the night to observe, with some exhilaration, flames lighting the sky. Babcock particularly seems to be enjoying the sight and sounds, the popping of the eucalyptus trees:

 

                 BABCOCK: Just sit back ‘n watch it comin’ toward you. Like sheer

                                       fuckin’ inevitabilty. Lurchin’ outa the dark rapture.

 

And both men relate it to their Vietnam war experiences in Cambodia, where they lived for a world of “Catastrope. Chaos.” But we soon discover that what the two men are observing includes Ray’s house, about to be burned to the ground. And ultimately his strange objectivity, his need to “get some distance” on the scene suggests that something is out of quilter.

    In the ACT production much of that drama is stolen from us by having Ray (Richard Synder) begin the work by writing a screenplay concerning the very events which we are observing. And throughout the San Francisco production, as directed by David Petrarca, the events of the play seem often to emanate from the imagination of Ray, an unsuccessful screenwriter, who by play’s end finds a deliciously ironic way of dumping his numerous previous attempts at writing a successful script.

     Nearly everyone in this play is after some version of “The American Dream,” but in the perverse visions of Overmyer’s characters that dream is so polluted even before any search begins that there is no hope of joy or satisfaction. Ray’s wife, Julia (Deirdre Lovely, a role played in the original off-Broadway production by Marisa Tomei), has fled to Cabo San Lucas with her lover Danny (Mark Feuerstein), a brain-dead Hollywood stuntman, where she drinks all day while enjoying what the soaps might describe as “hot and sticky” sex. Julia’s dream is to become a movie producer/sex goddess, and she has illegally procured a “loan,” left safely at home in the hands of Ray, that she hopes will take her to the top.

    But suddenly, Ray has disappeared, perhaps in the fire of the first scene. A body is uncovered in the ashes of his and Julia’s home, which, in scene three, we observe Mafia men Vegas (Rod Gnapp) and Lexington (Matt DeCaro) checking out. Has Ray just disappeared, they query, or conveniently “taken a walk,” his wife’s (actually their) money in hand? So begins a mystery that, in the capable hands of the playwright morphs into a dozen situations, some of them tangential to the main series of stories—such as the murder of Nazim, an American car dealer, by Detroit hitmen Tony and Ron, who kill him simply because his name sounds “Middle Eastern.” From Seattle to Cabo San Lucas, from San Francisco and Santa Barbara to Key West and New Orleans, this apocalyptic story tracks its opportunistic characters, each determined to stop or escape from the others.

     Some figures, such as Babcock, are so shadowy we can hardly tell on which side they stand; others are more like Shakespearian fools—but all are dangerous in that they contain a huge fire within, an anger that threatens to ignite the entire universe. Their greatest pleasure is to destroy, to consume the world about them.

     Having transformed himself into another, a trope that might be applied to several of Dark Rapture’s characters, Ray (now Avila) is finally cornered by Vegas and Lexington with his new girlfriend Renee. Having forced the manager to open the vault wherein lay Ray’s suitcases—presumably filled with Julia’s cash—they drag Julia herself into the room to confront him. A quick thinker, she refuses to recognize him knowing it is the only way to save her own life:

 

                          I’m saying I don’t know who this man is. I’ve never seen him

                          before. My husband is dead. He died in the fire....

 

When they pop the locks from the suitcases, they discover only “spec scripts,” and, after a hilarious whoop of laughter from Julia, they release Ray and Renee. Ray has been reborn, has been allowed a new life. Julia returns to Danny and her dream in Los Angeles, arranging to pay back the mafia “loan.” The last scene reveals Ray in St. Vincent Island with an earlier girlfriend, Max, thrilled by being able to chat with the Prime Minister. But real happiness, it is clear, may still elude them. In a world of such counterfeit and lies there is no reality, and, accordingly, no identifiable self left perhaps to enjoy even the ill-gotten gains.   

     Ray and Max slink off into the night, while another survivor, Babcock (better known as José Marti Chibas Valenzuela), shows up in the same café with Renee, who turns out to be his daughter, he the Popi she has long spoken of, the man who claims he killed Kennedy.

 

Los Angeles, September 8, 2010

Reprinted from USTheater (September 2010).

Suzan-Lori Parks | Father Comes Home from the Wars, Part I, 2 & 3 / 2016

leap of faith

by Douglas Messerli

 

Suzan-Lori Parks Father Comes Home from the Wars, Part I, 2 & 3 / Los Angeles, Mark Taper Forum / the performance I attended the matinee performance on Sunday, April 24, 2016

 

Suzan-Lori Parks’ most recent play, Father Comes Home from the Wars, Part 1, 2 & 3 begins with a huge Kierkegaardian leap of faith. Although slave Hero (Sterling K. Brown) has been previously betrayed by his owner, Colonel (Michael McKean)—he had been told that he would receive his freedom if he cut off the foot of runaway slave Homer (Larry Powell)—he takes a chance in believing that if he follows the Colonel into the Civil War on the Rebel side, he will finally be given his freedom when they return home.

      Others are determined to attempt another escape, particularly given the fact that the Colonel is now leaving. Homer is of two minds, having been so painfully punished for his last attempt, and Penny (presumably a reference to the faithful Penelope) is determined to remain in the one-room shack until her lover, Hero returns from the war.

     So begins a play that in three acts explores the inter-dependency of blacks and whites in a sometimes quite brilliant mini-epic (the play runs for nearly 3 hours) that includes a musical score, also composed by Parks, performed by musician Steven Bargonetti.

     If the first act serves mostly as a disquisition about faith and disbelief, the second act represents the terrors of war itself, where Colonel and his servant Hero, now lost, have caged up a Yankee captain, eager to take him back to the front line with them as protection against retaliation for their having wandered away from the troop. Colonel not only maltreats his new captive, but continues his degradation of Hero, demanding he shine up both their boots, run for wood, and cook their dinner, among many other demands.

     Meanwhile, he taunts the captain, unable to comprehend how he could not want possibly to have his own slave—if only for a day. In a long interchange he insists that the Captain, in return for his freedom, precisely estimate the worth of Hero in dollars and cents. (He paid $800, although all agree that Hero’s worth has perhaps increased some over the years).

      The inability of this self-congratulatory narcissist to comprehend anything about others, reveals just how different is his world from the Yankee soldier’s world, and, perhaps more importantly, just how dependent he is upon Hero and his other six slaves, who have allowed him to rise into modest stature—vainly exaggerated by his placement, from time to time, of a huge white plume into his hat, absurdly reminding us of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

      As the sounds of warfare come closer and Hero reports having seen a large massing of Northern troops along with a smaller grouping of Rebels, the Colonel goes off to check for himself the lay of the land.

     Hero, temporarily releasing the Captain (Josh Wingate), asks him to explain why he wears two blue coats, the second belonging to a private, underneath his slightly larger Captain’s topcoat. At first we might suspect that, a bit like in the book and film Brokeback Mountain, it may represent a sexual friendship with the now-dead private. But we soon discover that Smith himself is the private, who has stolen the dead Captain’s coat just to keep warm, and that, moreover, he is actually a black who is light-skinned enough to “pass.” Yet, the relationship between the black private and the white captain is maintained even in the image of the borrowed coat.

       The fact that the director (Jo Bonney) and the playwright employ a white man to perform this role further drives home one of the works major themes: that the differences between the two races is a thing of the mind rather than anything else. Indeed, Hero throughout shows himself as having more nobility and intelligence than the Colonel might ever achieve. Ordered to follow along after the Colonel with the neck of the new “slave” encircled with a rope, Homer releases Smith and tells him to run, while he stays on to serve, secretly placing the blue coat beneath his rebel one, wherein his connection with the now runaway Northern black man remains throughout the rest of the war.

 

     For all its racial (and sexual) commentary, however, Parks’ play is not only about race; and even the noble Hero, returning from the war without having ever been freed by the Colonel, but carrying with him presents for the others, including the Emancipation Proclamation, is ultimately himself a traitor. Although Penny has bedded with Homer through the years of the war, she has remained “true” in her heart to Hero, who has now renamed himself Ulysses.

      The world Ulysses discovers upon his return, however, is now filled with runaway slaves, fearful of being given away even by those who lovingly put them up for the night. Well should they be, for although Penny has remained true and Hero has protected and loved her, Ulysses finally reveals he has married another woman—apparently in order to have offspring. He does not know that his Penny might herself have produced a child, and is now pregnant with what appears to be Homer’s offspring—which, symbolically of course, makes us have to question whether it is a real or imaginary child.

   

   Throughout both Homer and Penny have stayed on mostly as testimony of their love and admiration for Hero/Ulysses, but given Ulysses’ new unsympathetic guise—he is intent on keeping both Penny and his new wife in the same confines of this one-room cabin—Penny finally turns on him, particularly when, out of jealousy he attempts to murder Homer, whose life she saves. 

     Beyond the metaphoric considerations of these relationships between the creator and created, we have the simple problematic of what, in that creation, the hero has finally become. Over all these years of living so intensely in his love-hate relationship with the Colonel, Ulysses has, in fact, become a man closer to the Colonel than to the others attempting to escape a world from which, with emancipation, they need no longer run from.

      In fact, Parks’ central concern is trying to discern what her men and women really mean by freedom. Ulysses, finally, cannot comprehend his worth without a price upon his head. The others can only imagine it as a somehow better place, even though we know that the hardships they will have face will be, in some cases as bad or even worse than those they have previously suffered in the South. The North to which they plan to run will be as uncomprehending, if not more, than the world from which they have run. If they escape to Chicago, for example, what conditions might generations after them endure?

      In the end—the last act is titled, “The Union of My Confederate Parts—Ulysses stays on in the South, more confederated with the soon to be Black Crow world than perhaps any of the remaining whites. By seeking his freedom through subservience, he has become a endless slave to the brutal past.

      Charles McNaulty, writing in the Los Angeles Times described Parks’ work as involving a great many postmodern riffs; but, in fact, Park’s play—although easily moving between more formal and colloquial language, and containing a highly comic interlude in which Ulysses’ dog Odd-See describes her version of events (a little too cute for my taste)—is a far more old-fashioned modernist work of lost faith, misunderstanding, guilt, and remorse.

     There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, particularly when you are an engaging writer like Parks. But it will be interesting where she takes this epic work in its later parts. Indeed, in these first three sections, there is strangely enough no father nor child as yet to come home to. Parks has described this play as being a testament to her professional military father’s involvement in wars and “rehearsals for war” as she was growing up as a child; perhaps in the later chapters we may see how these Civil War figures prefigured her more radically-conceived contemporary life.

 

Los Angeles, April 25, 2016

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April 2016).