Ulysses as an American Slave
‘Father Comes Home From the Wars,’ by Suzan-Lori Parks
Charles Isherwood
October 28, 2014: By turns philosophical and playful, lyrical and earthy, Suzan-Lori Parks’s new play, Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3), swoops, leaps, dives and soars across three endlessly stimulating hours, reimagining a turbulent turning point in American history through a cockeyed contemporary lens. An epic drama that follows the fortunes of a slave who troops off to fight in the Civil War — on the Confederate side — Ms. Parks’s play, which opened at the Public Theater on Tuesday night, seems to me the finest work yet from this gifted writer. (Ms. Parks won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for Topdog/Underdog.) The production also represents a high-water mark in the career of the director Jo Bonney. And while I’m throwing around superlatives, I might as well add that Father Comes Home From the Wars might just be the best new play I’ve seen all year. Ms. Parks’s mighty aims are signaled by the noble template she has chosen to tell her story: Homer’s The Odyssey, the epic poem about a Greek warrior’s long journey home from an epochal conflict. But her classical borrowings are loose, frisky and far from self-important. The central character in the plays is a slave named Hero (Sterling K. Brown), who leaves behind a devoted wife, Penny (Jenny Jules), and eventually claims the name Ulysses: the Roman name for Homer’s Odysseus, but also, of course, the name of the leader of the Union forces.
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