Personal and Public Battles in Father Comes Home From the Wars Review

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'
• Review: ‘Tootsie’ Proves Its Worth as a Musical
• ‘That’s So Raven,‘ ‘Family Matters’ Star Orlando Brown Arrested for Domestic Violence
• "Father Comes Home From The Wars" Begins Performances

Parks creates a song out of the situation, circling back to themes and dilating on the hopes and fears of a fateful decision that’s being made in the context not of freedom but of violent oppression. Parks expertly carries themes and conceits throughout the saga. The Colonel and the captured Captain Smith discuss Hero's "worth" in financial terms based on his skills, his conduct, and his purchase price.

Hero returns to the plantation and to his sweetheart, Penny (Sameerah Luqmaan-Harris), for the final act, a tour-de-force homecoming that elevates everything that has come before. Parks, who is best known for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize winner “Topdog/Underdog,” proves herself a master at fusing the highbrow and the low. In addition to providing theatre of the highest caliber to the diverse communities of Southern California and beyond, CTG supports a significant number of play development and arts education initiatives. Garry Hynes, artistic director of the renowned Druid of Galway, Ireland, will direct the Druid production at the Taper. Hynes won a Tony Award for her direction of "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" on Broadway in 1998 and directed McDonagh's "The Cripple of Inishmaan" at CTG's Kirk Douglas Theatre in 2011, and also Arthur Miller's "The Price" at the Taper this year. The 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, "Disgraced" by Ayad Akhtar, will be presented in its West Coast premiere, June 8 through July 17, 2016.

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Bonney has a strong handle on tone and is able to navigate rapidly from comedy to pathos, often displaying both simultaneously, which at times leaves half the audience laughing and the other half disturbed. She also effectively incorporates Steven Bargonetti, who throughout the production provides impressive musical accompaniment on the guitar and banjo. The three parts are one story with the same characters in the same time period, though either of the first two segments could be presented alone and still feel complete. Brown was part of the play's 2014 world premiere at the Public Theater in New York. The rest of the Taper cast is collectively strong, though Powell's Homer and Wingate's Smith aren't as sharply characterized as they could be.

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.

The intimacy between those two people was apparent then and hopefully it’s apparent as we replayed it. If the show weren’t entertaining, the themes of racism, sexism and the actual trial itself wouldn’t receive the attention they’re getting. 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. Mass shootings, a staple of CNN programming, are so routine in America that it's no wonder this kind of violence has become part of the background fear of contemporary life. In "Office Hour," having its world premiere at South Coast Repertory, playwright Julia Cho explores the insidious effect...

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

From its opening beats, in which a group of "less than desirable slaves" wager over the fateful decision of a would-be soldier, to the reappearance of that soldier's lost dog nearly three hours later, Bonney's production grabs its audience and refuses to set it free. Parks is reconsidering the Civil War and military service in general from the perspective of an African-American slave. Not only are the wartime trials faced by Hero (Sterling K. Brown) relevant, Parks' plan to track Hero's descendants in parts 4-9 will connect the saga to present-day conflicts. The contemporary canon needs those future plays, and we need Parks to write them. A new play at the Mark Taper Forum, however, subverts that idea. It’s called “Father Comes Home From the Wars, Parts 1, 2 and 3.” It’s about a slave named Hero who goes off with his master to fight for the confederacy in the civil war.

With so much happening for you, tell me about your decision to continue with Father Comes Home From The Wars. Week by week it became clear just how strong the connection was for our audience. Then it started to hit me, oh — this is bigger than anything I could have possibly anticipated. KCRW is here to provide you with local news, music discovery, and cultural connection.

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Her character’s self-referential acknowledgement of the absurdity of the situation, including the fact that suddenly a dog can talk, seems unworkable on the surface, but makes perfect sense in person. When the conclusion of the play is successfully reached, it continues to register memorably on the senses because it combines and utilizes American history, contemporaneity, and escapism with a fruitful and precise flair by everyone involved. Part two is arguably the most well-rounded in the way it is artfully crafted by the three actors who effortlessly hit every note. It is anchored by the Colonel, who is in the middle of nowhere, and is holding captive a soldier from the Union Army . Hero, who has now entered the war to do his Colonel’s bidding, is the catalyst of the scene.

Hero is played by Sterling Brown, who played Christopher Darden in the FX miniseries “The People v. O.J. Simpson.” The master is played by Michael McKean from “Better Call Saul” and “This is Spinal Tap.” It was written by Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks. In this devastatingly beautiful new play set during the Civil War, a slave named Hero (played bySterling K. Brown) is offered his freedom if he joins his master in the ranks of the Confederacy. The choice is to leave the woman and people he loves for what may be an empty promise. His decision brings him face to face not only with a nation at war with itself, but with what freedom truly means.

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.