“Remember me!” cries the ghost of Hamlet’s father.
And so we do — on Father’s Day, June 19 this year.
Father’s Day is an odd celebration. Like Mother’s Day, Teacher’s Day, Administrative Assistants Day, it’s almost an apology — a way of acknowledging someone many of us take too much for granted.
Not all of us, though. There is one sort of person who never stops thinking about father.
Someone who obsesses over dad, broods over dad, can’t let dad go. Someone who tries — on a nightly basis — to confront him, exorcise him, forgive him, or be forgiven by him.
That person is a playwright.
“Oedipus Rex”! “Hamlet”! “King Lear”! “Death of a Salesman”! “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”! “Fences”! It’s amazing how many of the Great Plays center on confrontations of fathers and sons (sons and daughters, in the case of “King Lear.”)
These are the plays that are constantly revived, reworked, re-interpreted. Recently there have been at least three “Hamlets” vying for attention in New York: an opera at the Met, “Fat Ham” at the Public Theatre, and Robert Icke’s acclaimed “Hamlet” at the Park Avenue Armory.
A 2022 movie, “The Northman,” delved into the Viking origins of the Hamlet myth, and a touring “Hamlet” will be coming through North Jersey in June and July. “I’m a little shocked that there’s all these Hamlets popping up,” said Jon Ciccarelli, artistic director of the Hudson Shakespeare Company, which is staging the production.
Meanwhile, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” just completed a run at off-Broadway’s Minetta Lane Theatre. “Death of a Salesman,” with Wendell Pierce and Sharon D. Clarke, is coming back to Broadway Sept. 19.
Tickets, by the way, make a great Father’s Day gift.
Hop on pop
Classics aside, even run-of-the-mill theater pieces are always trying to come to grips with Dad: “I Never Sang for My Father” (1968) “The Subject Was Roses” (1964), “All My Sons” (1946; an early, lesser Arthur Miller play). A current off-Broadway play is called “Who Killed My Father.”
Why this father fixation, on the part of so many playwrights?
A lot of reasons, perhaps. Not least the oldest of all writer’s maxims: “Write What You Know.”
“I think the nature of a writer in general is to explore relationships,” said Michael Bias, a Bergenfield playwright and director. “And what’s your first relationship? It’s with your mom or dad.”
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He himself is working on a play, right now, that involves four generations of fathers and sons living under one roof. “They all live together in the same house, and there’s no women,” Bias said.
Will sparks fly? Take a guess.
“There’s something inherently universal about fathers and sons,” Bias said. “And I guess, in the hands of a really good playwright, something very dramatic about it.”
It must also be said that — historically — the majority of playwrights have been male.
When a female playwright like Lorraine Hansberry comes along, she is as likely to create a Big Mama character, in “Raisin in the Sun” (1959), as a male playwright like Tennessee Williams is likely, in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1955) to create a character called Big Daddy.
“I bet if you spoke to a lot of therapists, a lot more boys have issues with their dads than they do with their moms,” Bias said.
The conflict of fathers and sons is primal, universal. Sigmund Freud pointed that out in 1910.
In his view, it had to do with the rivalry of the child and the father for the affection of Mommy.
“Oedipus complex,” he named this syndrome — after the main character in Sophocles’ tragedy “Oedipus Rex” (c. 430 B.C.) who murders his father and marries his mother. Quipped songwriter Tom Lehrer: “One thing on which you can depend is, He sure knew who a boy’s best friend is.”
Baked into the father-son relationship is competition. Can I fill my father’s shoes? Is my son trying to replace me?
As time goes on — as sons grow up, and parents grow old — those questions only become more acute, those resentments more intense. We all work them out in our various ways. Playwrights work them out on the stage. “We all have similar experiences,” Bias said.
Even Hamlet.
Spirit of revenge
Now there’s a guy who would appear to be on good terms with dad. “So excellent a king,” Hamlet calls his father. “See, what a grace was seated on his brow; Hyperion’s curls; the front of Jove himself.”
Had Hamlet Sr. requested a necktie, or a Black & Decker drill — as perhaps your father did this month — then “Hamlet” (1600) would be over before it began.
But Hamlet’s father, returning from the grave, wanted something very particular from his son. Revenge. Kill my brother — that’s what you can get me this year. “Remember!” he keeps nagging.
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Hamlet spends the rest of the play brooding about his odious assignment. “To be, or not to be,” he moans.
“The interesting thing is that these could not be two more polar opposite men,” said Ciccarelli, whose “Hamlet” can be seen in many North Jersey towns this summer, including Hackensack (June 22 and 29), Wayne (June 30), Kinnelon (July 23) and Jersey City (July 28)
“Hamlet’s father is a warrior,” Ciccarelli said. “Hamlet is a 30-year-old college student, depending on which lines you go by. It’s the intellectual versus the warrior, the old guard versus the new Renaissance man. What could this man of intellect see in this man of action?”
Did Hamlet secretly resent his noble, wonderful, perfect dad?
If he did, could you blame him? And could you blame the innumerable sons, in innumerable plays, who have a hard time living up to father’s expectations?
“Pop, I’m a dime a dozen and so are you,” says Biff to his dad, Willy Loman, in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” (1949).
A leader of men — that’s what Biff was supposed to be. But with son fully grown, and dad ignominiously shuffled onto the unemployment line, father and son each have to confront the harsh reality: they’re both nobodies. “Pop, I’m nothing! I’m nothing, Pop. Can’t you understand that? There’s no spite in it any more. I’m just what I am, that’s all.”
Troy, the dad in “Fences,” is a frustrated ballplayer, barred from the major leagues by his color. He is patronizing toward his son Lyons — a would-be musician, always cadging handouts, who in turn looks down his nose at his father’s job as garbageman.
“I don’t wanna be carrying nobody’s rubbish,” Lyons says. “I don’t wanna be punching nobody’s time clock.” To which Troy replies: “What’s the matter, you too good to carry people’s rubbish?”
Plenty of misunderstanding to go around, in August Wilson’s Pulitzer- and Tony-winning 1985 drama.
Sons disappoint their dads. But dads, equally, disappoint their sons. Part of the process of growing up is recognizing that Dad, the god, the paragon — the guy whose expectations you’re always trying to live up to — is just a flawed human being, like yourself. The comedown can be brutal.
“Jesus, Papa, haven’t you any pride or shame?” says Edmund, the son of the great actor James Tyrone (playwright Eugene O’Neill based the character on his own father, actor James O’Neill).
Only in “Long Day’s Journey into Night” (1956) the father turns out to be not so great. He’s a skinflint, whose cheapness has inadvertently led to his wife’s drug addiction and his son’s worsening TB.
“Don’t think I’ll let you get away with it,” Edmund rages.
“I think all of us tend to put our parents on a pedestal,” Bias said. “And then comes this moment in life when you realize they’re just human beings.”
You know what? Maybe theater tickets aren’t such a great Father’s Day gift. Particularly if you — like the characters in these plays — have a complicated relationship with pop.
But remember the lesson of these dramas. Try, if you can, not to be too hard on The Old Man.
Because — take it from Shakespeare, Arthur Miller and Sophocles — he’s trying not to be too hard on you.
Jim Beckerman is an entertainment and culture reporter for NorthJersey.com. For unlimited access to his insightful reports about how you spend your leisure time, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.
Email: beckerman@northjersey.com
Twitter: @jimbeckerman1
