Getting to the Deep Stuff: The Music of Father Comes Home

-
By Taylor Steinbeck

For playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, music isn’t just a medium she embraces in her art—it informs the very framework of her life. Growing up in a musical home, she and her siblings jitterbugged to their mother’s favorite jazz standards and belted out Puccini alongside their opera-loving father. These musical forms—along with the blues and show tunes, among others—have stayed with Parks and have influenced how she writes her plays. Embodying the playwright’s lyrical writing style, Father Comes Home from the Wars has a musicality that recalls the past while retaining emotional immediacy, making it intricately layered and deeply personal.

The Musician (Martin Luther McCoy) plays a song in A.C.T.'s 2018 production of
Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3). Photo by Joan Marcus.
A blues musician herself, Parks composed the music and wrote the lyrics for the songs in Father Comes Home. Music is a part of Parks’s makeup as an artist; whether it lives in the rhythm of the dialogue or the construction of the narrative, it seeps into most of her work. “All my writing is more like songs,” said Parks in an interview with theater scholar Shawn-Mari Garrett. “I try to sing to people.”

A key element of Parks’s aesthetic is a technique she calls Rep & Rev. According to Parks in her essay The Elements of Style, repetition and revision is a “concept integral to the Jazz esthetic in which the composer or performer will write or play a musical phrase once and again and again; etc.—with each revisit the phrase is slightly revised.” Parks lifts this concept out of music and applies it to her plays. In her works, characters repeat certain phrases and words that take on new meanings in different contexts as the narrative progresses—she does this to show that characters are “experiencing their situations anew” and by extension, the audience experiences them in a new way too.


Repetition and revision isn’t just an attribute of jazz, but, according to Parks, it’s also “an integral part of the African and African-American literary and oral traditions.” Rep & Rev’s reincorporation of what has been said gives it a call and response-like quality. Call and response is a performance technique that has a long history in churches, work songs, and African American music. “In its most elemental form, it consists of a musical statement given by a song leader that is immediately followed by a response from a chorus,” says UC Santa Barbara Black Studies professor Dr. Earl L. Stewart.” In Father Comes Home, the Chorus of Runaway Slaves performs call and response as they contemplate when they should make their getaway.

SECOND: Dark enough to jet.

FIRST, SECOND AND THIRD: Not yet

Not yet

Not yet

Not yet.

By using call and response, Parks aligns herself with African American storytellers and musicians of the past, while building her own distinctly African American narrative. Just as jazz weaves several musical genres such as the blues, spirituals, and West African musical customs into a single composition, the music of Father Comes Home draws inspiration from a variety of sources, from the bluesy beats of singer-songwriter Robert Johnson to the Broadway sounds of musical theater writers Rodgers and Hammerstein. Parks excavates both her own personal history and the history of her ancestors to experience a musical catharsis. “My plays beg for feeling. They beg for the gut response,” says Parks. “Let the stomach-brain, let the heart-brain, inform your head-brain, and not always the other way around. Because then we’re getting to some deep stuff. And it’s frightening. But it’s also healing.”

Don't miss this Saturday's InterACT event, Playtime! Before this matinee performance, get hands-on with the theater artists who make it happen at this interactive workshop. In this special pre-show workshop, you will gain firsthand insight from the principal and understudy musicians who create the spirit of Suzan-Lori Parks’s mythic drama—don’t miss this opportunity to hear from beloved Bay Area musician/performers Martin Luther McCoy and David James—and their guitars! Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) ends this Sunday, May 20, at A.C.T.’s Geary Theater. Click here to purchase tickets. Want to learn more about the music in the play? Order a copy of Words on Plays, A.C.T.'s in-depth performance guide series.

Popular posts from this blog

“To Be or Not to Be”: The Iconic Speech’s Origins, Interpretations, and Impact

-
Image
By A.C.T. Publications Staff The opening line of Hamlet ’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy is theater’s most iconic, most referenced quote. What’s less known is the famous speech’s history, with Hamlet ’s earliest publications offering varying versions of its language. Also questioned is its meaning—is Hamlet contemplating suicide or is he weighing the consequences of murder? Though definitive answers are unlikely to arise, the questions “To be or not to be” asks have kept audiences, scholars, and actors engaged for centuries. Hamlet ’ s "To be or not to be" speech as it appears in the three original editions of the play. Photo by Georgelazenby. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. The first edition, or First Quarto (Q1), of Hamlet was published in 1603. Because the text is much shorter than later editions and its language is less poetic, it is nicknamed the “Bad Quarto” by scholars. “To be or not to be” in Q1 reads as: To be, or not to be—ay, there’s the point. To die,
Read more

The American Sound: The Evolution of Jazz

-
Image
By Cecilia Padilla There is nothing so uniquely American as jazz music. In its simplest form, jazz embodies the essence of the American people: bold and inventive. The improvisation of the jazz ensemble can even be seen as a metaphor for the American democratic ideal: musicians playing solos have the liberty to express themselves as long as they adhere to the overall structure of the tune—individual freedom but with responsibility to the group. The evolution of jazz music also carries with it the social development of our nation from slavery to the swinging songs of World War II. Musically, jazz contributed immensely to the way contemporary musicians approach instrumentation, composition, and vocal arrangements. It is difficult to find a popular tune today that does not derive from such jazz icons as Joe Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Thelonious Monk. Jazz is the great equalizer; for more than a hundred years, it has been the common ground between blacks and whites, me
Read more

A Hell of a Businessman: A Biography of Joe Glaser

-
By Simon Hodgson Born in 1897, Joe Glaser was the son of a successful Russian Jewish physician in Chicago. He originally intended to follow a similar career and entered medical school, but after passing out in the operating room, he realized he wasn’t cut out to be a doctor. He started off in business selling used cars, but found better luck managing prizefighters. In his biography of Al Capone, Laurence Bergreen notes, “Glaser’s power to fix fights earned him a reputation as a sage of boxing, especially among reporters.” With advanced word as to which fights were fixed, Glaser could predict the results—and even the number of rounds—of many bouts in Chicago. His connections with organized crime continued in his next career change, when he began running nightclubs and whorehouses in the South Side for the Chicago Outfit, the powerful underworld gang led by Capone. Glaser’s tendency toward illegal action nearly ended his career. In 1928, he was sentenced to ten years in prison for
Read more