PARENTS ARE COMPLICATED, AREN’T THEY?
Even the closest parent-child relationships can take expert navigating. They embarrass us. They nag us. They worry when they shouldn’t.
Like many of us, I spent some years as a teenager and young adult angry at my father. It is the job of young people to push boundaries, to separate themselves, to forge their own identities. Often, for a time, the familial relationships are the collateral damage of that forging’s heat. My life looked so different from my father’s. Like Lisa, I was a gay artist eeking out a life in New York that had earned me the respect of colleagues and peers, but not much of a savings. By contrast, my father had been a civil servant since he was 22. By the time he was my age, he had married, divorced, had a son, a home, a mortgage. What could he understand of my life? What could I understand of his?
LIKE MANY OF US, I SPENT SOME YEARS AS A TEENAGER AND YOUNG ADULT ANGRY AT MY FATHER.
Nabokov wrote that “any soul can be yours, if you find and follow its undulations.” Like Nabokov, Lisa’s play seems to ask, How might I know better my father’s heart, before its too late? How might I know my own heart better because of this?
When I was younger, I was often mortified by my father, who seemed to me excessively Jewish, provincial in his Brooklyn-ness. But as I grow older, increasingly I see his face when I look in the mirror and note the sounds of Brooklyn around the edges of my own voice. In so many ways, I am my father, and though I may roll my eyes, I also know some of the things I love best about me are the things he put in there as he raised me.
The father we come to know in Lisa’s play is warm, playful and capable of a level of radical empathy that is stunning, that enlarges his heart, enlarges Lisa’s too, and ultimately our own.
As I read Lisa’s play again, I’m struck by the sense of loss that permeates it. We are surrounded by loss, and to be alive is to be in a constant state of letting go. But what I learn from this play is that the tonic to this loss is the expansion we feel when we take the time to know each other.
Profile Theatre’s 2.5 Minute Ride ticket and schedule information here.
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