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 continue his degradation of Hero,
demanding he shine up both their boots, run for wood, and cooks 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 top coat. 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, her 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
