The GoodheART Report – A Stormy Start for Father Comes Home

Nina Goodheart, A.R.T. intern and gap year advocate, is back to take you inside another opening night at the theater.

This week, two forces of nature swept through Cambridge. The first was the blizzard Juno, which dumped several feet of snow on the steps of the A.R.T. The second was the next show of our season, Father Comes Home From The Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) by Suzan-Lori Parks.

Last night, A.R.T. audience members proved their mettle by braving wind and ice to attend the opening night performance of this new play. But for all the bluster of the storm, the thing that struck me most about Wednesday’s show was the quiet. In an age of push notifications and pop-up ads, any moment of silence is noteworthy, and last night’s performance held several.

I don’t mean to say that the audience was anything less than engaged – quite the contrary. They cheered for Steven Bargonetti, the troubadour who guided us through the show and bookended each act with a dose of soulful strumming. They roared with laughter as Jacob Ming-Trent raced around the stage in the role of Hero’s dog, “Odd-See.” And they gasped (at least, I did) at the sound of cannons echoing through the theater.

But in reaction to several of the Greek-inspired saga’s harrowing plot twists, the audience seemed to collectively hold its breath. It is a testament to the work of the show’s committed cast and creative team that when an actor took a pause, the audience paused right along with him. When, late in the play, two damaged characters were able to find what was missing from themselves in each other, a hush fell over the crowd. And when the slave Hero held up his hands as he described being confronted by patrollers who demanded to know to whom he belonged, the house was silent, but I could feel one thought rippling through the rows of the theater: “Hands up, don’t shoot.”

But as demonstrated by the cannons pounding away throughout the play, creeping closer and closer to where Hero stood, danger is never far off.  Wrapped up in deceptively lyrical language and unhurried guitar picking, Suzan-Lori Parks’ play might seem to the uninformed as a meditation on issues of the past.  But anyone who sees the show will know that Father Comes Home is undeniably critical and contemporary.  Its silences are not chances to catch your breath, but to force anyone who may still think that systematic oppression is an issue of the past to realize that we are actually in the eye of the storm.

Nina Goodheart is a full-time artistic intern, production assistant, and blogger at the American Repertory Theater. She can also recite the complete American musical theatre canon on command.