3 Review(s)

Home at the End of the Day consists of three related oneact plays that portray the complex history of an American family in the second half of the 20th century. The three plays reenact the family’s conflicted history from the 1940s through the 1990s and give voice in both serious and comic ways to the search for reconciliation and unity against a background of loss and dissonance. The family jar has cracks, but it isn’t broken. The mother-figure, Miriam, wittily encourages her younger son, Robert, in a near end-of-life conversation in Act 1, “Reunion of a Summer Evening,” to find ways to make peace with an older brother and father, both of whom have been distant shadows in their lives. Acts Two and Three – “Blue Nights in South Florida” and “Twilight Unveiling at the Hotel De Dream” – fuse realism and fantasy in quest of this peace. The three acts recapitulate in dramatic form an emotional and psychological cycle: life, death, and rebirth. Improbable reunions and resolutions become possible in a blend of comedy, documentary realism, and fantasy. Readers and audiences in other cultures will be able to take the measure of their own family histories by contrasting them with the interactions of this play. America invented the 20th century and with it the hallenges of modernity. Home at the End of the Day may help deal with some of its problems.