When, in the course of human events, the political bands that have connected a people appear to be dissolving rapidly, it’s fair to ask: Who in their right mind would want to revisit the chaos of Jan. 6, 2021, in the form of a play?
I wouldn’t have thought that I did. That history is too recent, too fraught, too unresolved. Yet the theater has always been a place in which to search the dark corners of a nation’s soul, and to sit with grief.
That emotion figures palpably in “Fatherland,” a finely calibrated, surprisingly affecting new work of verbatim theater at New York City Center Stage II. It tells the true story of Guy Wesley Reffitt, a middle-aged rioter from a Dallas suburb who was sent to prison for his role in the Capitol attack, and his son, Jackson, who was an 18-year-old high schooler when he turned his father in to the F.B.I., and just 19 when he testified against him.
Conceived and directed by Stephen Sachs for the Los Angeles-based Fountain Theater, where the play was staged earlier this year, it is on one level about the profound grief of no longer recognizing a parent you love, or a child you raised. But like another new Off Broadway drama — Arlene Hutton’s “Blood of the Lamb,” more on which below — “Fatherland” is also about the grief and anger, the fear and disorientation, of no longer recognizing your own country.
Using text from the transcript of the elder Reffitt’s 2022 trial, and other publicly available sources, the play calls its central characters simply Father (Ron Bottitta) and Son (an exquisitely restrained Patrick Keleher). Their clash, for all its 21st-century Americanness, is as primal as any parent-child conflict from ancient Greek drama, or from Shakespeare.
Toggling between the son’s testimony and flashbacks to the events he describes, the production uses a thrumming underscore (by Stewart Blackwood) to amp up the tension. But Sachs and his fine cast make the tale’s inherent human messiness paramount — love and hate tangled up in loyalty and bravery.
Those words mean starkly different things to the father, a gun-toting Trump devotee and militiaman who wears a bulletproof vest around the house, and his gentle son, whose politics are much further left. The son worries about the danger his father poses to himself and others, and what betraying him will do to their family.
In the run-up to Jan. 6, the father reminds him: “I took you to register to vote, don’t forget. Got your form filled out, in the mail, made you part of the voting society.”
The son replies peaceably: “I know.”
Then the father stocks up on ammunition and zip ties for his Washington adventure, and off he goes.
“Blood of the Lamb,” directed by Margot Bordelon at 59E59 Theaters, is similarly topical and also set in Texas, not in the recent past but in the very near future: “Next week,” Hutton’s script specifies.
You can take that directive as both grim and wry, because this play from Occasional Drawl Productions is about abortion rights, bodily autonomy and restrictive laws that can endanger pregnant women’s lives when they miscarry or need medical help.
Twenty-one weeks pregnant, Nessa (Meredith Garretson) was flying back to New York from Los Angeles when she lost consciousness and the plane was diverted to Dallas. An ultrasound there revealed that her baby was dead. Now, with the fetus still inside her, she wants to get home to her doctor before infection sets in.
What she doesn’t realize is that she has entered a dystopia. Her rights are subordinate to those of the fetus, which — under a new statute that exists in the world of the play — has been deemed a Texas citizen and given a lawyer to represent its interests.
In a room with a guard outside, Val (Kelly McAndrew), the lawyer, says Nessa is free to leave, but her fetus is not. She must remain in Texas until she has “given birth.”
Val warns, “If you leave with said citizen with the intent of termination you will be charged with abuse of a corpse, which is a felony.”
Resonant though the issues of the play are, Hutton has stacked the deck. Nessa’s phone, identification and credit cards were left on the plane. Her spouse, a research scientist, is unreachable on a ship off Antarctica — and is a woman, which adds marriage equality and I.V.F. to the points of left-right debate.
All this is too schematic, rendering the play more thought experiment than drama, and Nessa more construct than person. McAndrew, though, makes Val complicatedly human. A mother of five and a Christian who thinks she is acting honorably, she tells Nessa: “People who follow their beliefs are not bad people.”
It’s just that sometimes, in pursuit of those beliefs, they can do a world of harm.
The post Disoriented in America: Two Political Plays Reflect a Changed Country appeared first on New York Times.