"My fingertips were on everything, but then they would be. . . ."
- Robert, The Dying Gaul by Craig Lucas
Last week, I had an episode with my d aughter that let me know being a parent, and being a part of a family that supports and helps each other, can be a very elusive and hard to name thing, indeed.
You see, we have a fancy TV, one of those plasma, high definition kinds-of-things, a gift from a relative to make our new home more comfortable. It's probably the most expensive thing we own, including our car.
So you can imagine the consequences when one day I returned home from rehearsal in the late afternoon to notice something very alarming: the sun revealed a small, obviously child's handprint on the delicate plasma membrane.
Needless to say, there was to follow much weeping and gnashing of teeth. My daughter protested her innocence, but in the face of such obvious evidence, she was hardly a believable witness. Words were definitely had, not all in a way I am proud of, cards of contrition were written and amends were offered, maybe even extracted. The matter was left and all sides felt convinced that a difficult parent/child moment had passed, hopefully with growth and not injury.
Three days later, I returned home in the same late afternoon sunlight to find another handprint on the TV, just to the left of the previous one, which was now miraculously missing (you can't fix these screens). At the discovery my daughter fled screaming to her room, agonizing and claiming her innocence.
I was astonished and truly upset but, on closer inspection, I discovered there was no handprint at all on the TV . . . although there was one on the adjacent glass door, and the sun in late afternoon reflected a handprint onto the TV. My daughter's innocence was legitimate all along. The glee and triumph exploding from her was perhaps the greatest of her young life, and amends were certainly extracted - this time from the parents.
That handprint is all you need to know to prepare you for Prayer for My Enemy. This is a play about the experience and damaging consequences of childhood. In this family, the handprints are everywhere and each child believes themselves wrong in the eyes of their parents, and cannot wipe them away. How we parent, what we experienced as children, how we pass on our emotional lives, can wreak untold emotional damage on our families and our communities and ultimately our lives.
Craig Lucas is the only writer I know who can capture the handprint that isn't there, chart its consequences, and make such a new kind of play as to help us understand how our love and our hurt can be so complex and intertwined. I think Craig knows that our inability to tell each other the truth has deep reverberations inside our relationships and families.
More than that, our inability to be truthful, face the consequences of the truth, and take responsibility for it and each other - whether it is in our families or in our public discourse - is the greatest threat to our nation.
Craig's play is unlike anything I have ever directed. He captures not only the course of our lives, but every layer and thread and unspoken thought and misplaced gestures in a very new way.
You may or may not find yourself catching up with asides, unspoken thoughts spoken, or simultaneous events creating impossible resonances, but these all add up to the great gift of an electric and special playwright using the theater to give us new ways of seeing not only a handprint that isn't there, but the delicate impact of the misunderstanding and mayhem that it ever was.
