'Father Comes Home from the Wars' and 'The Oldest Boy'

Father Comes Home from the Wars, Suzan-Lori Parks’s lyrical new drama at the Public Theatre, is set at the time of the Civil War but rooted in Greek mythology. Parks tells the spellbinding story of a black slave named Hero and his Boss-Master, who promises that if Hero follows him to war, he’ll grant him his freedom.

Part 1 finds Hero, a principled, honest, hardworking man, in deep conflict. His surrogate father, a character called the Oldest Old Man, wants him to go, while his devoted wife Penny begs him to stay. Moreover, there’s his moral dilemma over fighting for a Confederate army that wants to preserve his enslavement. An ensemble of fellow slaves, functioning as a Greek chorus, places bets on whether he’ll go or stay, soliciting the audience for their opinions as well.

The word of a slave

At one point, Hero is ready to chop off his own foot (like his best friend Homer) to avoid serving rather than lie to his master or run away. But Hero can’t go through with it. “Even though you’re owned by another man, your word is your bond.” So off to war he goes. Why, the play asks? Does Hero really believe his master’s promise of freedom? Or does Hero follow his master into war, believing that he belongs to him?

In Part 2, Hero and the Boss-Master, now “the Colonel,” capture a Union soldier, who offers Hero a Union uniform and enlists him to join his unit. Again, Hero must make a difficult decision. Part 3 conflates the Agamemnon and Ulysses stories of mythology with the Civil War narrative. It dramatizes Hero’s homecoming and his encounters with Homer and Penny (a.k.a. Penelope), the last remaining slaves. It also features a marvelous new character, a talking canine named Odyssey Dog, Hero’s loyal companion, who tells the audience the story of Hero’s return from the war and reveals the troubling truth about Hero’s nature.

The worth of a man

Father Comes Home from the War is a crowning achievement of a prolific American playwright who weaves a unique and vivid tapestry of American history on an empty stage, with only a tiny slave cabin and an upstage ramp for entrances and exits. Guitar and banjo accompaniment (composed by the author and performed by Steven Bargonetti) adds a lyrical narrative to the spare scene.

Under Jo Bonney’s inspired direction, an ensemble of ten enact this moving tale with humor and heart. Ken Marks as the cruel Colonel, Sterling K. Brown as the conflicted Hero, and Jenny Jules as the passionate Penny give true performances, while Jacob Ming-Trent as the irrepressible Odyssey Dog steals the show.

Ultimately, Parks raises the probing questions of integrity, identity, the “worth of a man,” and the intrinsic meaning of freedom. “If you win,” says the Colonel to Smith, speaking of the slaves, “they’ll all be free. What then?” That provocative question hangs in the air throughout the play. It’s Parks’s prophesy of the African-American struggle for identity that will continue long after the Civil War is over. (Stay tuned for six more parts in Parks’s nine-part cycle.)

Uptown at the Lincoln Center Theater, playwright Sarah Ruhl offers another stirring story steeped in mythology, this time, Buddhist. In her exotic theatrical parable, The Oldest Boy, a contemporary American couple (Caucasian wife, Tibetan husband) are approached by two Tibetan monks who have had a vision and come to America to claim the couple’s three-year-old son as their spiritual leader.

Archetypes all

As in Parks’s play, the names of Ruhl’s characters are archetypal. There’s Mother, Father, A Monk, The Oldest Boy (played by a puppet), and a Chorus. The Monk claims that the “Oldest Boy” is a reincarnation of his spiritual teacher, who died three years ago. The parents yield to the Monk’s invitation to come to his monastery in India, where their son can live and teach the religious community. “Your son has lived many lifetimes,” the Monk consoles the protesting Mother. “He will know what to do.”

Performed, as Parks’s play is, on an empty stage with an upstage panoramic platform, an ensemble of 12 actors, under Rebecca Taichman’s elegant, ritualistic direction, enact the enthronement of the Oldest Boy, celebrating the sanctity of predestined identity and the notion that our children are not our own, after all.

Essential truths

Like Parks, Ruhl ventures where angels fear to tread. Just as Parks fearlessly reinterprets American history through a classical perspective, Ruhl invokes both Buddhist and Old Testament mythology (the Abraham/Isaac story) to examine the essential meaning of parenthood, ownership, and sacrifice. “You brought him into the world. Now he belongs to the world,” says the Monk.

In a sense, Ruhl’s message is the opposite of Parks’s. “I belong to myself,” says the struggling Hero, in contrast to the Oldest Boy, who belongs to all. On the other hand, perhaps these two colorful, insightful parables about identity are, to quote playwright Tom Stoppard, “two sides of the same coin...or the same side of two coins.”