Father Comes Home from the Wars Study Guide

Susan-Lori Parks was born to an Army officer father and a mother who had been a college professor. Her family—which included two siblings—moved a lot during her childhood because of her father’s military career; she lived in Kentucky, California, North Carolina, Maryland, and Vermont, as well as West Germany, where she spent a considerable number of her elementary school years. Parks grew up Catholic and attended a Catholic high school before pursuing a B.A. in English and German Literature at Mount Holyoke College, which she earned in 1985. In college, she had the opportunity to participate in a seminar taught by James Baldwin, who immediately appreciated her talent. It was in part due to his encouragement that she pursued playwrighting. Parks’s first production came in 1987 with a short run of her one-act play Betting on the Dust Commander. By the 1990s, she had achieved widespread recognition for her work and in the early 2000s, she was both awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and a Pulitzer Prize for her play Topdog/Underdog. Parks has written more than 20 plays, four screenplays, a novel, and various essays, most of which consider themes of race, racism, and history in America. She has received no fewer than 15 awards for her work. She is married to a jazz musician, with whom she has one son. In addition to her playwrighting, she teaches at New York University.

The internal and interpersonal dramas of Father Comes Home from the Wars play out against the backdrop of the American Civil War. This conflict began in April of 1861, several months after 11 southern states formally seceded from the United States of America to preserve the legal institution of slavery. It ended four years later, in April of 1865. On January 1, 1863—at just about the midpoint of the war—President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Although the United States was not able to enforce the order in areas still under Confederate control, the Proclamation conferred freedom on formerly enslaved people either in areas under Union control or who escaped their enslavers and ran north of the Union lines. At the end of the play, Hero/Ulysses carries a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation back to his friends on their West Texas plantation yet fails to read it to them. This echoes the events at the heart of the American holiday of Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery in Texas with the enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation there on June 19th, 1865—over two months after the Confederate surrender. Notably, however, enslaved people in Delaware, Kentucky, and in the service of Indigenous people were not formally emancipated until later in 1865 and 1866. Written in 2015, however, the play uses this history to reflect on more recent events, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, which began around 2013 in the United States. This movement responded to a series of murders of Black Americans, including Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Rekia Boyd—many of whom were killed by on- or off-duty police officers. The Black Lives Matter movement seeks to bring attention to the systemic racism, discrimination, and inequality that persist in the United States despite the Civil Rights movement.

With characters named Hero/Ulysses, Homer, and Penny (a diminutive of Penelope), and with a protagonist who leaves his father, lover, and country to go to war then returns years later a changed man, Father Comes Home from the Wars pays clear homage to the ancient Greek epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey, composed by Homer sometime in the late 8th century B.C.E. on the basis of an older oral tradition. The Iliad tells the story of the Trojan War and the many men who fought in it on the side of the Greeks only because of an oath they’d sworn and not necessarily because it was in their interests. The Odyssey follows its titular character Odysseus (styled Ulysses in Roman versions of the tale) as he slowly makes his way home from the war to find his faithful wife, Penelope, still waiting for him. The style of Father Comes Home from the Wars, with its use of choruses in both the first and the third parts, its questions about the nature of truth, freedom, and honor, and its examination of its protagonist’s fatal flaws, draws from the tradition of Greek drama. In particular, this play echoes the only Greek drama trilogy that has come down to the modern era intact, Aeschylus’s Orestia, which was composed around 458 B.C.E. The Orestia also deals with events surrounding the Trojan War, in particular the murderous drama of King Agamemnon’s family. And, like Father Comes Home from the Wars, it uses its linked plays to ask broader questions about ideals like justice and revenge. Finally, as an adaptation of Homer, Father Comes Home from the Wars joins the company of other modern reimaginings of the epic, including Margaret Atwood’s 2005 Penelopiad—which tells the story from Penelope’s perspective—and Barry Unsworth’s 2002 The Songs of the Kings, which draws attention to the underlying violence and distinctly unheroic actions of the men lionized in The Iliad and The Odyssey.