Media Archive

Epic play takes from Suzan-Lori Parks takes on slavery, identity and redemption.

Like any show with a stellar opening, Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) makes you want to see the rest of volumes in the series; it’s that good.

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.

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.

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.

Eve Ensler’s new play poses the question “What is garbage?” in a plea for enlightened consumerism.

Sure, there are preachy moments, but for the most part Ensler finds the tricky balance between drama and comedy, between making some serious points and inducing some genuine laughs. The actors, main and supporting, nail it. The characters, while exaggerated at times, are not caricatures, and all of them evolve their positions over the course of the play.

Political correctness is a hostile phrase. It is used as a dismissal of those who criticize the systems of power. The phrase is used to squash and indict those who question and criticize. They are pigeonholed as being too pure, too uncompromising, too demanding, too narrow. Ensler takes the phrase and ups the ante to an obsession. She turns the tables and fuses them inside out: OPC becomes the diagnosis for those who care too much.

“How are we to survive as a species if we insist on destroying the world we love?”