Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
✭✭✭✭✭
by Suzan-Lori Parks, directed by Weyni Mengesha
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
August 4-September 1, 2016
Smith: “You belong to yourself”
The serious drama of ancient Greece was written in the form of trilogies. The only extant trilogy that has come down to us is the Oresteia by Aeschylus concerning a father, Agamemnon, who comes home from the Trojan War in the first play only to be murdered by his wife. That sets off a cycle of revenge in the second play that is ended in the third with the invention of a system of law.
Suzan-Lori Parks, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Topdog/Underdog in 2002, has shaped her ambitious play Father Comes Home from the Wars in the form of a trilogy and infused it with references to classical Greek literature. Where the war in the Oresteia was the Trojan War that united Greek city-states against the common enemy of Troy, the war in Father Come Home is the American Civil war that set state against state and family against family. Just as the Oresteia is about the end of personal revenge through the coming of law, so Father Come Home is about the end of legalized slavery through the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. The play is breath-taking in its achievement and received a production directed with deep insight by Weyni Mengesha and acted with deep emotion by the entire cast.
Part I, “A Measure of a Man”, opens on a plantation in 1862. As a Chorus of Less Than Desirable Slaves is waiting for the dawn it is making bets on whether the hero of the play, named Hero (Dion Johnstone), will go to off to fight in the Civil War along with his master or will refuse his master’s order and stay home. Hero’s good luck charm, his dog Odyssey (Parks doesn’t mind making her references clear) has run off and can’t be found.
Hero’s dilemma is that his master has promised him his freedom if he goes to war. If he goes to war alongside his master on the Confederate side, he will be fighting against the freedom of slaves. Complicating his feelings even more is that his master has promised him his freedom twice before without keeping his word. The first time involved telling his master where a runaway slave Homer (Deren A. Herbert) had gone. The second time was fulfilling his master’s command to cut off Homer’s foot with an axe as punishment. While his beloved Penny (Lisa Berry) wants him to stay, Hero thinks this will be a chance to prove himself in war.
The title of Part II, “A Battle in the Wilderness”, refers partly to the battle between Union and Confederate troops that is drawing ever nearer to where Hero, his master, now a Confederate Colonel (Oliver Dennis), and his captive Union solider Smith (Gregory Prest) are hiding out in the woods at noon. The title also refers to the enormous internal battle within Hero which yet again is whether to go or stay. In this new context, staying means staying and fighting alongside his master. On the other hand, Smith encourages Hero to leave his master and join the other side. Smith came into the war as part of the 1st Regiment Kansas Volunteer Infantry (Colored), the first black regiment organized in a northern state to see action in the Civil War. Defection would allow Hero to fight for a cause he believes in, while staying would theoretically win him his personal freedom if his master keeps his promise.
The decision is made all the more difficult by the way the Colonel positively relishes the feeling of power it gives him to own another human human being. The Colonel launches into a fascinating debate about what a human is worth (the Colonel can think of this only in monetary terms) and what use freedom would be to someone who had only known slavery. Hero sums up the slave’s mentality when he says that as a slave he is worth $800 but as a free man he is worth nothing.
Part III, “The Union of My Confederate Parts”, returns to the style of Greek tragedy, this time with a Chorus of Runaway Slaves, near the Colonel’s plantation, who are waiting for night to arrive so that they can move on. The central question is again whether to go or stay, but this time it applies to Penny. For months she has been waiting for Hero’s return and like Penelope in the Odyssey, has resisted the temptation to believe her man is dead and to choose a husband. This is a different time and place and Penny has slept with Homer but has refused him any tenderness. Homer wants join the runaway slaves and wants Penny to go with him, but she feels bound by her promise to Hero to wait for him, even it means waiting for his body to arrive for burial.
Each of the three parts of the play is absolutely gripping. In using a style that is both contemporary and poetic, Parks forces us to see the dilemma the central characters face both from their own historical position and from ours. We know what the right thing to do would be for a person now, but we also have to think of what the right thing to do would be for a person then. Parks thus keeps us intensely engaged with the action both intellectually and emotionally.
Director Weyni Mengesha has drawn intensely committed performances from the entire cast. The central character may be called Hero, but he is totally unlike Odysseus in the Odyssey. Odysseus was renowned for his daring and craftiness, while Hero, when faced with a choice in Parts I and II, wavers to and fro with every new argument. Frustrating our modern sensibilities, Parks has made Hero the portrait of a slave. Never having to make independent decisions, Hero is nearly incapable of deciding anything for himself and when he does decide he chooses what is known over what is unknown. Dion Johnstone gives a hugely empathetic performance as Hero. He makes us feel how every piece of advice tears him in a new direction. Hero knows that freedom is a good thing but can’t decide how best to achieve it. It is symbolic that at the end of Part II, Hero is wearing both a Union and Confederate jacket. Even in Part II when we learn of Hero’s lack of faith, disappointed as we are in him Johnstone makes clear that Hero has acted out of innocence, not malice.
Lisa Berry gives a magnificent performance as Penny. She makes us feel the complexity of Penny’s emotions in Part I, wanting Hero to stay for her own personal reasons, but simultaneously wanting whatever is best for him even if it means leaving her. In Part III, Berry rises to even greater heights as Penny forces herself to stay true to her promise to Hero despite overwhelming pressure to leave. I don’t want to give away the ending, but Penny undergoes the most massive emotional changes of any character in drama after Hero’s arrival and after he tells his news. The vehemence with which Berry depicts this 180º change in Penny is so strong and so true to life it knocks the breath out of you.
In playing Hero’s master, Oliver Dennis plays a role unlike any you have seen him play before. The Colonel proudly discourses on the superiority of the white race and on the thrill of owning people. Dennis shows him to be an exceedingly vain and contemptible human being. Yet, underneath his vile exterior, Dennis shows that the Colonel feels a strange love for Hero. He says Hero has replaced his own son who died young. In a wonderful move Dennis shows that once the Colonel is aware of having expressed positive sentiments about Hero, he suddenly retreats to racist dogma as if to save himself from the empathy that his sentiments imply. In this way Parks demonstrates how slavery also takes a toll on the slave-owners whose position requires them to excise any feelings of common humanity.
Deren A. Herbert is a remarkable force as Homer. It is thrilling to see two such strong actors on the same stage together, their characters pitted with equal weight against each other. Having been betrayed and maimed by Hero, Herbert’s Homer burns with an inner hatred he can barely contain. Herbert makes us feel that because of Homer’s past he has achieved a clearer world-view than Hero will ever have.
Among the others, Walter Borden gives a wonderfully warm performance as the “Oldest Old Man”, who thinks of himself as Hero’s father. Gregory Prest carefully gradates the increasing power that his character of the Union soldier Smith has over Hero. Akosua Amo-Adem, Marcel Stewart and the resonant Roy Lewis form an excellent ensemble as the Chorus. Divine Brown’s musical interludes are so full of feeling we wish she were featured more. And Peter Fernandes is hilariously rambunctious and reflective as the Dog. In this Parks allows a bit of Aristophanic humour to slip into her tragedy, but then she asks the general question of what causes any one being to “belong” to another whether in law or in love.
Father Comes Home from the Wars is a riveting piece of theatre and Soulpepper could not have staged it at a more appropriate time. Its analysis of the factors that have poisoned race relations is so incisive the play should be required viewing. Hero’s notion at the end of the play that the Emancipation Proclamation has made all the slaves free is filled with the irony of our contemporary knowledge of how hard white people worked after than time to ensure that black people, though free, would never feel equal. Thus, as Parks depicts it, the new world Hero faces at the end of the play is filled more with loss, doubt and sorrow than it is with happiness. Parks’s play is a masterpiece that deserves the widest possible audience.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Peter Fernades and Dion Johnstone; Lisa Berry, Dion Johnstone, Walter Borden and Deren A. Herbert (in blue) with Chorus; Roy Lewis, Dion Johnstone, Lisa Berry, Marcel Stewart and Peter Fernandes. ©2016 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www1.soulpepper.ca.
2016-08-05
Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts I, II & III)