Father Comes Home From The Wars

Table of Content

• Things To Do Newsletter
• Top-Grossing Broadway Musicals of All Time, From 'Hamilton' to 'The Lion King' (Photos)
• The Taper's Stellar 'Father Comes Home From the Wars'
• FATHER COMES HOME FROM THE WARS, DISGRACED and More Slated for 2016 at CTG's Mark Taper Forum
• "Father Comes Home From The Wars" Begins Performances
• Modernized ‘Jungle Book’ Production Comes to Pasadena Playhouse on July 17th

Her critically acclaimed play "Kin" received its world premiere in 2011 at Playwrights Horizons. Her television work includes the series "Codes of Conduct" , "Jerusalem" , "Masters of Sex," "Smash" and "Boardwalk Empire" . She is a 2009 recipient of the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, three Lecomte du Nouy Lincoln Center playwriting awards and she is a Susan Smith Blackburn Award finalist. Part 3, The Union of My Confederate Parts takes place back on the Texas farm, where Homer and Penny still live but most of the other slaves have died or fled. They are hiding a group of runaway slaves and contemplating heading out with them.

Repeating his performance from the Public, Brown gives us a Hero who is as proud as he is flawed. It's no given that heroes are the most interesting characters in the sagas around them, but Brown adds new layers and shadings from act to act. Robinson and Luqmaan-Harris are excellent as well, while guitarist and music director Steven Bargonetti provides enhancing choral-like musical accompaniment. Part 3, The Union of My Confederate Parts, picks up the action from part 1 back at the Texas plantation.

Things To Do Newsletter

Hero weighs all sides of the issue with his fellow slaves and his love, Penny. When it appears he will stay home, one slave comments, “Instead of picking a field of battle, he’s going to be picking a field of cotton,” and the others talk of the beating they will all be punished with as a result. Parks’ nearly three-hour dramedy explores moral dilemmas the slaves themselves sometimes encountered.Father Comes Home deftly looked at culpability for wrongs inflicted on slaves by their masters and on the slaves by each other. But Bonney’s smooth staging facilitates a hypnotic storytelling flow. Unfolding on a minimal set by Neil Patel that is stunningly lighted by Lap Chi Chu and made even more picturesque by ESosa’s costumes, the production is as lovely to behold as it is to listen to. The chronology is relatively unhurried as the plot keep thrusting choices upon Hero that have no easy answers — choices that divide him from himself.

The play is very much divided into three parts as the title would suggest, each act polished enough to exist as a standalone. In part one, the focus is on whether Hero should risk life or possibly limb vis-à-vis the looming choice to leave his surrogate family, especially girlfriend Penny (Sameerah Luqmaan-Harris) for a brighter future. The mood is pensive, filled with substantive doses of wisdom doled out by a character called The Oldest Old Man , who has more or less adopted Hero as his son. Parks avoids the tropes usually found in American slave-centered stories, and instead focuses on the bigger picture of what it means for any human to be free, both physically and psychologically. It’s a topic that goes far beyond slavery, and its deft handling is what makes Father Comes Home From the Wars a play that will likely go down as an epic for the ages. This isn’t surprising and doesn’t count as “news.” Yet deep into a career that includes a 2002 Pulitzer Prize (for Topdog/Underdog), she has reached a new level of powerful yet accessible storytelling with Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3).

Top-Grossing Broadway Musicals of All Time, From 'Hamilton' to 'The Lion King' (Photos)

All the now-former slaves except Hero take off for the North, thinking they need to escape. At the end, Ulysses sits alone with Odyssey facing an uncertain future and, as a symbolic first act as a free man, burying the master. If he serves, he has been promised his freedom by the owner who says he values his worth, and who has a history of broken promises. "I got a chance at getting something," says Hero, whose decision will have reverberations among the master's other slaves.

In a play that is as emotionally attuned to its characters as it is capacious, Parks presents freedom as both an existential puzzle and a historical wound. And both of these dimensions are fully realized in Brown's sonorous performance. This section is enlivened by the return of Hero's dog, Odyssey (played with roving canine high-spiritedness by Patrena Murray in a kind of furry vest). This loyal and lovable pooch has a full report on Hero's whereabouts but is easily distracted by the smells and sights of characters who are fiercely debating whether to make a break for it or wait around for a possible good ending to the Civil War. Steven Bargonetti, the Musician, plucks out on guitar the bluesy songs Parks intermittently stitched into her drama. He also offers occasional accompaniment, allowing the playwright's springy dialogue to play like recitative.

The Taper's Stellar 'Father Comes Home From the Wars'

There’s a character named Homer, a love interest named Penny and even a dog named Odyssey. What’s more, there’s a hero named Hero, who goes off to war and returns to find things have changed quite a bit while he’s been away. She received a Tony Award in 2012 for her work on “The Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.” Her plays include “The Book of Grace,” “In the Blood” , “Venus” , “365 Days/365 Plays” and “The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World,” among others.

There is also reason to believe the Colonel will double cross Hero; he has before. Hero acknowledges being torn between wanting the master to die so he can flee and wanting him to give him freedom. Goes Out newsletter, with the week's best events, to help you explore and experience our city. Hero, who has become the subject of much speculation on this ragtag Texas plantation (his fellow slaves are taking bets on whether he’ll join the fight), feels sickened by the thought of joining the Confederacy. He told Penny (Sameerah Luqmaan-Harris) that he won’t leave her.

But she didn't hold back when asked for her thoughts about the controversy over Hollywood's diversity problem that came to a head with another overwhelmingly white edition... Charles McNulty is the theater critic of the Los Angeles Times. He received his doctorate in dramaturgy and dramatic criticism from the Yale School of Drama.

Brown is stellar conveying dignity, guilt and heartbreak in his Father Comes Home role. McKean shows emotion in between all the pomposity as the Colonel struts around. Wingate is pitiful and stoic as the captured Union soldier and Roger Robinson, who plays a wise old slave, adds greatly to Part 1. Lastly, Murray is entertaining in her antics and story-telling. Parks, aided by music director Bargonetti, turns drama into spoken music. The exquisite freedom of her style serves an American story that is as much about our present as it is about our past.

FATHER COMES HOME FROM THE WARS, DISGRACED and More Slated for 2016 at CTG's Mark Taper Forum

It’s an ambitious, nearly three-hour production that breaks new ground in depicting the now-familiar era of American slavery. First, the play explores some of the complicated moral dilemmas faced by the slaves themselves, giving them an agency and a culpability that is far too often bypassed. And second, it frames the conflict not as some stilted, hyper-serious period piece — but as a yarn loaded with modern idioms and an often whimsical humor.

Winner of the 2015 Kennedy Prize for Drama, this explosively powerful play set throughout the Civil War from Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks reveals the burden of history and its effect on an individual’s ability to transform. In part 1, A Measure of a Man, Hero's decision to follow his master into war is tracked by a raft of characters, each of whom pulls him in a different direction. His fellow slaves are evenly split based on how much they've wagered. The crippled slave Homer , whom Hero betrayed, would like Hero gone, thereby opening up his prospects with Hero's wife, Penny (Sameerah Luqmaan-Harris). The unnamed Old Man , who has been Hero's surrogate father, hopes Hero will achieve glory on the battlefield.