Civil War-era dilemma resonates in show at ACT.
Decisions aren’t internal, private matters in “Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3).” Every hem and haw, every second (or third) guess, every twinge of conscience — all the insecurities most of us would prefer to hide or smooth over, presenting a slick resolve to the outside world — each of these moments gets practically its own play in Suzan-Lori Parks’ epic three-hour drama, which opened Tuesday, May 1, at ACT’s Geary Theater in a co-production with Yale Rep.
The choices of Hero (James Udom), a Civil War-era slave, aren’t just his own. As he weighs whether to join his master, the Colonel (Dan Hiatt), in fighting for the Confederacy or to stay home but reject the promise of freedom “dangled” before him as a reward for his service,
every hint or swerve toward one side or the other ripples through the entire slave quarters. His choice might mean their punishment. “For his 10 lashes we’ll get 20,” one of the other slaves (Rotimi Agbabiaka) posits.
For Hero, it will mean either leaving the woman who’s essentially his wife, Penny (Eboni Flowers), or disappointing the pride of a father figure, the Oldest Old Man (Steven Anthony Jones). And either way, it’s a false dichotomy, says Hero’s rival, Homer (Julian Elijah Martinez): “Both choices are nothing more than the same coin flipped over and over. Two sides of the same coin, and the coin ain’t even in your pocket.” Easy for him to say, though. Neither he nor any of the other slaves has known the same burden or blessing of agency.
And that’s just the first part of the triptych. Hero must also decide whether to stay his course or abandon it, and in the third part, Parks opens up the play’s agency. Here, other characters get to be the heroes of their own stories, or at least make decisions. For Parks, that’s as much a part of freedom as a proclamation on a piece of paper, as no longer having a price, as having no white man you can say you belong to in effort to appease a “patroller” on the road. (The connection between our country’s past and present subjugation of black men has rarely been clearer or more harrowing than it is in “Father.”)
Parks’ script makes the story of all these decisions feel at once as ingrained as a founding myth you should know already — she says she drew on her own childhood with her army officer father as well as on the Greek myths “The Odyssey,” “The Oresteia” and the Sanskrit epic “The Mahabharata” — and as changeable a tennis match. Her language capers, all frisky action verbs on which the cast rocket forward. Hero can “feast on” promises; freedom “glittered.”
Director Liz Diamond doesn’t always do the text justice, keeping the script restrained and grounded when it wants to dance on its inborn rhythms. Even bluesy entr’actes, though achingly sung and strummed by Martin Luther McCoy, only sentimentalize and downplay a story that wants to stretch upward.
But Yi Zhao’s gorgeous lighting design on Riccardo Hernández’s stark, asymmetric set does much to elevate where the direction falls short. In particular, in a scene near a battlefield, it’s as if the whole show is lit by the embers of war peaking through clouds of gun smoke. Then, both the white light of heaven and the crimson of hell beckon from different corners of the stage. Given where America went after the Civil War, given that our men must still make their own version of Hero’s terrible choice, is it any wonder that he can’t charge blindly toward freedom?
Lily Janiak is The San Francisco Chronicle’s theater critic. Email: ljaniak@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LilyJaniak