Lucy
Komisar
| "Father Comes Home From the Wars"
Whatever playwright Susan-Lori Parks turns her hand to is bound to be surprising and memorable. Her latest work, the first of three parts, is a brave Brechtian drama about slaves during the time of the Civil War. Nothing and no one are quite what they seem. It’s a commentary about blacks today who sell out their people for, what? (Can we put Clarence Thomas in this equation?) And a powerful feminist commentary.
The characters boldly represent archetypes. There is the villain slave master (Ken Marks), Homer (Jeremie Harris) the brave young slave who attempts to escape, Hero (Sterling K. Brown), the misnamed slave who turns him in, Penny (Jenny Jules), who loves Hero, and a captured Union soldier (Louis Cancelmi) who turns out to be only passing for white and challenges both master and Hero about their attitudes about slavery. The acting is cool and superb. Director Jo Bonney makes surreal events seem natural. The mood is drab, the costumes are drab with raggedy gray and tan clothes. But the country music performed by Steven Bargonetti sets a strong mood. Parks challenges a lot of stereotypes about how black playwrights might deal with slavery, starting with the fact that Hero is an anti-hero. As it’s just the first part of projected series that continues the story, we can’t know yet the sense of it all, yet one wonders at what will happen in the next odyssey of a man, now called Ulysses, who starts out betraying fellow slaves.
In the first play (really an act, but called a play), slaves are chatting, wondering whether Hero will go to the war with his confederate master, who has promised him freedom for his service. He opines, "I was thinking I’d be on wrong side." By the way, he’d been promised his freedom before and the master reneged. So why do these slaves (writ the current oppressed) keep believing their oppressors? Yes he does go to war with the master, a Confederate colonel. Second chance for freedom. First was when he caught Homer, who had run away, and at the master’s order he cut off his foot. He explains to Penny, "I got a chance at getting something." Freedom. Is that how a hero gets freedom? And to emphasize the humiliation, he has to run behind the boss master who rides on a horse. It requires him to foot through horse droppings. And flying bullets. In the second play, he is in a clearing with the colonel and Smith, a captured Union captain who is held in a bamboo prisoner box. (It reminds one of the Vietnam tiger cages the American side used.) He asks the captain if he ever wanted to own a slave. The response is "No." It turns out that the "captain," who claims he commands a troop of colored soldiers from Kansas, is actually one of them – he just appropriated the jacket of an officer. When the master leaves, will Hero free the "captain?"
There is no subtly about where power resides. The colonel declares, "I am grateful every day that God made me white. As a white I stand on the summit and all the other colors reside beneath me, down below. For me, no matter how much money I’ve got or don’t got, if my farm is failing or my horse is dead, if my woman is sour or my child has passed on, I can at least rest in the grace that God made me white." (Please translate that to how poor Southern whites are encouraged to feel.) Hero is not so sure he wants the freedom that the war could give him.
At first Penny agrees to fix up the cottage for Hero and the new woman he has brought back. She says, "Why I thought I deserved something special, I’ll never know. I’ll go inside and make the house ready. For you and for your new bride. You can count on me, Old Hero, to do at least that." She dutifully goes into the house. And then there is a feminist challenge.
Inside, Penny makes up the marriage bed Finally, Hero has only the critical loyalty of Odyssey Dog, the terrific comic Jacob Ming-Trent dressed in a shaggy rug, to tell his shaggy dog tale. Is Odyssey Dog the voice of Parks?
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