The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Yale Rep’s lyrical take on price of freedom
Opening trilogy of ‘Father Comes Home From the War’
As Yale Rep’s Liz Diamond explained it, she was red hot to direct Suzan-Lori Parks’ ambitious trilogy, “Father Comes Home From the Wars, Parts 1, 2 & 3,” two years ago. Diamond rates the play among the playwright’s best.
“I thought it was extraordinary and I thought the Rep should do it,” said Diamond, a devout admirer of Parks since directing her play “Betting on the Dust Commander” nearly 30 years ago. “I thought that Yale Rep, as a theater company that had supported her during her early years, should be one of the first regional theaters to do this great, magisterial play.”
Diamond’s wish comes true as “Father Comes Home From the Wars, Parts 1, 2 & 3” officially opens Thursday (after two preview nights) at the University Theatre. The play, which includes race and freedom among its chief themes, has only become more timely since premiering off-Broadway at The Public Theatre four years ago.
“Two years ago, we were in the middle of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, which has hardly become less important or died down,” said Diamond, who will direct the play next month at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, which co-produces “Father Comes Home” with Yale Rep.
“The apprehension in the body politic of ongoing, undying issues of racism in the country is no less urgent than they were two years ago, and no less urgent than they were in 1863.”
Diamond’s reference to America during its Civil War is apt because Parks’ trilogy is set during that period. Riffing loosely off of Homer’s epic poem “The Odyssey,” and less obviously “The Oresteia” and “The Mahabharata,” “Father Comes Home From the Wars” concerns Hero, a slave, promised his freedom if he’ll join his master in the Confederate army.
Parks divides the work, the first third of her projected nine-part stage saga, as follows: Part 1, “A Measure of Man,” in which Hero must decide whether or not to join his
master on the Confederate battlefield; Part 2, “The Battle in the Wilderness,” where Hero and the Colonel lead a captured Union soldier toward the Confederate lines as the cannons approach; and Part 3, “The Union of My Confederate Parts,” where Hero’s loved ones left behind question whether to escape or wait for his return.
The play does several things, said Diamond, who has directed four of Parks’ plays at the Rep and elsewhere.
“It puts us in the presence of a young man striving to achieve freedom under absolutely impossible circumstances,” she said. “It’s also describing the ways in which any form of oppression can infect an individual heart and soul to such an extent that liberation becomes a project of self-actualization as much as it is a project of revolution.
“When we meet Hero, his struggle is as much to liberate himself from the internalized boss-master as it for him to liberate himself from the boss-master who, in fact, owns and absolutely rules over him.
“This speaks directly to the white supremacist culture that still thrives in the United States today, I think, on an even larger and more universal level,” said Diamond, serving as resident director at Yale Rep for the past 25 years.
“I think this play really asks a huge and very simple question, which is: What does it cost to become free?” said Diamond. “That connects not only to liberation from an oppressive, hegemonic, dominant power that’s external, but it also has to do with how to be free in one’s own relationship to the world.
“Those two fabulously huge questions just really felt, to me, wonderfully worth raising in the theater,” she said.
Since its premiere in March 2014, critics all describe the play, which includes songs written by Parks, as “lyrical.” This musicality, as Diamond sees it, is Parks’ signature style.
“One of the early things that made me fall in love with Suzan-Lori’s work in the very beginning is — and we’re talking nearly 30 years ago — is that her writing is unbelievably rhythmic,” Diamond said. “There are images that are unbelievably poetic. The metaphors, the wordplay, are so rich and delicious.
“All of this began long before Suzan-Lori learned to play the guitar to learn to write music,” she said. “It’s fascinating to me that, deep into the middle of her life, Suzan-Lori has become an accomplished musician, a singer and a woman with a band of her own. She’s a bard!
“Suzan-Lori says when she talks about her plays, that she hears them first,” said Diamond. “She hears the characters. She has an exquisite ear. She must walk down the street and sort of soak up what she hears and transmute into this wonderfully distilled speech that she passes through the refinery of her musical and poetical imagination. I actually hear myself using these phrases, they’ve become a part of me, phrases from her plays that I directed years ago. It’s because they’re so organically poetic.”
Parks’ language, however, invigorates her audience rather than lulls them into “a trance state,” as Diamond said.
“She’s just as good at plot as poetry,” Diamond said. “Just when you need something to happen, it happens.”
Even though Parks draws elements from classic Greek mythology, her play is very much about America here and now.
“Suzan-Lori’s project is not to create some African-American edition of ‘The Odyssey,’ per se,” Diamond said, “as much as to write a new legend drawing on these tropes, these templates, you could say, of epic heroic sagas, in order to tell a distinctly, peculiarly American epic.”