Media Archive

DOUBLE UP: Taylor Mac and Mandy Patinkin make a great comedic team in ‘The Last Two People on Earth.’

When a flood of epic proportions wipes out all but two scraggly survivors, played by Mandy Patinkin and Taylor Mac, there is very little left for them to do but sing and dance. In fact, that’s pretty much all they do as THE LAST TWO PEOPLE ON EARTH.

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

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.

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.

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

“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.’”

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.”

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.

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.