Give me long plays. Give me “Angels in America” and “Nicholas Nickleby” and “Peer Gynt” and “The Mahabharata.” One of the greatest theatergoing experiences of my life was a 20-hour epic called “The Warp,” presented in the dirt-floor catacombs underneath the Roundhouse arts center in London.
There’s something exquisite that happens when you sit so long in a theater that you get exhausted just watching. Your mind bends. Your consciousness changes. You’ve entered another world.
“Father Comes Home From the Wars Parts 1, 2 and 3” is not a long play compared to those mentioned above. Technically it’s three short plays, which collectively add up to a mere three hours. But it’s also just the first three installments of what its author, Suzan-Lori Parks, has suggested will be a nine-play opus. The first three parts stand alone, an epic unto themselves. The Yale Repertory Theatre, in collaboration with San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, has given the plays a long, wide, deep, expansive and wonderfully expressive production, with blue skies and towering shadows. It’s on the proscenium stage of the Yale University Theatre through April 7.
On the night I attended “Father Comes Home From the Wars” at the Yale Rep, a fire alarm went off during the intermission. This meant the theater had to be temporarily evacuated. (Most of the audience stuck around eagerly to see how this grand drama ended.)
A three-hour play with a 50-minute intermission — I relaxed into all this as if I were taking a warm bath. I find leisurely, languorous, loquacious plays comforting.
Despite its three-hour running time, plus intermission, “Father Comes Home” is clear and crisp, easy to follow and easy to want to follow. It’s a genuine epic, with big ideas that force your attention and concentration. Plus there’s a talking dog.
Liz Diamond, who directed key early plays by Parks back in the 1990s (including two at Yale), does not let the play get stodgy or one-note. Both the playwright and the director are bursting with simple, effective ways to keep the drama popping. Borrowing from the masters, the opening scene of “Part 1: A Measure of a Man,” plays like it was Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” “Part 2: A Battle in the Wilderness” has a Eugene O’Neill feel to it. “Part 3: The Union of the Confederate Parts” is flat-out Greek drama, with an ensemble of runaway slaves serving as a chorus. You’ll find elements of Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht and August Wilson in there, too.
The show’s coolest stylistic element may be blues musician Martin Luther McCoy. Unlike a lot of shows with guitar-strumming interlopers, McCoy’s not used as a clumsy strolling-troubadour narrative device. He performs full-length blues numbers with the full-bodied, full-voiced intensity of a concert act, then sits at the side of the stage and lets the actors do their thing.
The actors sometimes acknowledge the musician’s presence. Not nearly as much, however, as they acknowledge the audience. So much of “Father Comes Home” has the performers directly addressing the audience that it feels at times like a storytelling event.
Parks understands the power of simple, declarative speeches. She accesses everything that still makes ancient Greek drama so powerful. So does the well-picked cast, an ensemble that includes several Yale School of Drama students in their early 20s (among them the show’s pensive star, James Udom) and other actors who are old enough to be those students’ parents or grandparents (including the extraordinary Steven Anthony Jones in a role labeled “The Oldest Old Man”). The cast is a blend of East and West Coast regional theater talents, who have formed a common language around the poetic rhythms and stirring monologues of Parks.
The first three parts of “Father Comes Home From the Wars” offers up a complete story. It’s inspired by Homer’s “The Odyssey,” and there are characters named Ulysses (the Latin name for the Greek hero Odysseus), Penny (for Ulysses’ wife Penelope) and even Odyssey Dog, Ulysses’ faithful pet who in this case is a talking animal that resembles a human in a shabby coat. (Gregory Wallace is effective in this tricky canine role, which in the wrong hands could easily be overplayed and distracting.)
But this is not your (insert 100 greats here)-great-great-grandfather’s “Odyssey.” Parks sets this odyssey just six generations ago, during the American Civil War. The prevailing issues are freedom and survival. The strategy in the wanderings of Ulysses (who is known in the first two plays simply as Hero, a slave) is to change the relationship he has with his slave master, protect his friends and family, and fight in a war that could change all their lives for the better.
Parks adds alarming twists to the tale that are unlike anything in Homer’s epic. She also doesn’t take heroism for granted. She wonders what is the real point of leaving one’s home and family for a big adventure. She ponders what’s being missed or lost. She values family and community. She asks big questions that elevate supporting characters into truth-to-power gamechangers:
“When has one of us ever had a choice, except for you, Hero?”
Did I say earlier that I found this show comforting? A show set amid rusted iron girders, a show that deals in superstition and trepidation, a show in which characters point guns and knives at each other (and at themselves), a show that treats a banjo as a weapon of destruction, might not seem soothing. But that’s the glory of Parks’ writing, Diamond’s direction and the plainspoken intensity of the 12-person cast. “Father Comes Home From the Wars” is smoothly paced. It has blue skies and bluesy music. It’s not sensationalized or showy. It’s language-based, and those words flow steadily and gracefully.
I hope to be sitting happily through this show again before it leaves New Haven for San Francisco. Then I’ll wait patiently for Parks to finish the next six installments. I long for long, lustrous shows like this.
FATHER COMES HOME FROM THE WARS, PARTS 1, 2 & 3 plays through April 7 at the Yale University Theater, 222 York St., New Haven. The performance schedule has changed slightly since the show was first announced, due to setbacks caused by the recent snowstorms. Performances are Tuesday through Friday at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., with an added Wednesday matinee on March 28 at 2 p.m. Tickets are $20 to $90. 203-432-1234 and yalerep.org.
