Father Comes Home From The Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3)

The American Repertory Theater in Cambridge continues its commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’ new trilogy, Father Comes Home From The Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3), a co-production with The Public Theater in New York. Inspired by Homer’s Odyssey, it centers on Hero, a slave who journeys from his plantation in Texas to the battleground and back again, to face a changed world as a changed man. Incorporating themes of love and betrayal, the price of freedom, and the worth of a man, the ambitious play offers insight into conditions for slaves in 1862 on the cusp of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

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Father Comes Home From The Wars, Parts 1, 2 & 3 is having its world premiere at the American Rep Theater in Cambridge. It’s a soul-searing, deeply insightful work, the first of three parts of an epic new play by Pulitzer Prize-winner Suzan-Lori Parks that cuts to the quick of the black experience in America.

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Plays of this much intensity and focus demand total attention, and reward one with kaleidoscopic satisfaction; the more you reflect on what you’ve seen and heard, the more you find meanings, jokes, and intriguing connections.

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The Epic Begins: Suzan-Lori Parks Traces The Legacy Of Slavery And The Civil War At A.R.T.

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It’s not every play with major social themes like this one that could metaphorically mix the classical with the clowning as successfully as this work, and it’s not every playwright who could carry this off with such fearless focus and energy. Parks knows her sources well and utilizes them with all the aplomb and dexterity of a master juggler with a firm eye on the jugular. Pity the temerity of a theatergoer who’s unwilling or unable to surrender to the almost-lost art of storytelling at its purist.

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Grappling with a series of moral issues – between races, between spouses, between friends — during the Civil War, “Father Comes Home” is gripping and tense, throwing an ugly past up in our 21st-century faces.

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Even after three hours of watching on Wednesday, I was ready to see more. That’s the mark of a good story.

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“We have to reframe this. We can’t allow people who have told the story incorrectly or have left out important details [to] win the day. Sometimes, we have to go back in and say … ‘This is a little more complex.’”

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As a musician and an ardent lover of jazz, Suzan-Lori Parks approaches playwriting as if she’s composing a piece of music. In writing “Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3),” her historical trilogy set during the Civil War, she was channeling something deep inside her, “following that voice and not asking too many questions.”

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Pulitzer winner Suzan-Lori Parks’ new play, Father Comes Home From The Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3), opens Friday at the American Repertory Theater’s Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge.

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When she thinks she’s right, she’s certain of it. No doubts, no fretting about self-sabotage. While some have knocked her work as self-indulgent or annoying at times, she has an exceptionally vivid sense of herself as a writer who exists on another plane from dramaturgical nit-pickers.

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Suzan-Lori Parks’ stunning new drama, Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3), is that rare work of art: one that bears the heavy burden of its subject matter—the peculiar institution of American slavery—but that carries it lightly. (The nearly three-hour production runs through Nov. 16 at the Public Theater.)

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Even in our supposedly ADD culture, people long for stories that engage the deepest possible issues in the most gripping possible ways. Father Comes Home From the Wars is one of those stories — or maybe more than one.

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“Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3),” swoops, leaps, dives and soars across three endlessly stimulating hours…

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The American Repertory Theater and Harvard University are among four universities and five performing arts organizations — all of them in former Union or Confederate territory — teaming up for an ambitious project inspired by the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.

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