The Bible in particular is
one grand story of Family. In this autobiographical play, Cain tells his own
family story of Bill Cain: growing up.
The Cain family- his mother Mary, father Pete, and brother Paul- are
presented to us in a simple format with carefully choreographed
stagecraft. Bill speaks directly to the
audience to introduce scenes, give context to the many funny or infuriating
moments in the family’s life, and to share his insights. From childhood through
each parent’s untimely death from cancer, we learn about how a family
functions. He makes it clear that there is no need to apologize for it as
dysfunctional, the embarrassed description many of us offer to hide what hurts
and comforts us most about family memories.
The scenes of the play move back
and forth deftly from the present, in which adult Bill cares for his dying
mother, back into episodes from the past to illuminate family “scripture”- his
parents’ imperfect but ultimately solid relationship and his brother’s brave determination
as a teenage athlete, a student, and later, a soldier who volunteered to serve
in Vietnam. The adult actors play their earlier selves; this discloses in a
wonderful way the necessary task Bill has undertaken: to befriend the child in
himself. At one point the adult actor portrays an early childhood tantrum over
a smashed Hallowe’en pumpkin he dropped after his older brother cast aspersions
on his ability to carry it, and then steps out of that portrayal to reflect on
his loving father’s reassembly of the pumpkin. He reads his “family-as-Bible” to
us right onstage to unveil his own revelation: the determination we have all
had, and have, even as adults, to stay wedded to our own unhappiness out of
sheer pride. Parents will recognize so many scenes that convey poignancy and
humor. In a wonderful interfaith image,
he describes his father carrying him as a rabbi carries the Torah, and anyone
who has been present for the Torah service in a Jewish congregation knows that the
great scroll does in fact rest on the rabbi’s shoulder just like a sleeping
child being carried to bed with love, from a car seat or living room sofa.
The weary tasks of eldercare
feature prominently in many exchanges Bill has with his mother that resonate
well, the playright surely knows, with many in the theater’s audience. It is a
chance to laugh at oneself in these scenes of repetitive scripts when we know
that they know that we know, about everything,
from sneaking cigarettes to avoiding any talk of the dreaded diagnosis until it
can no longer be put aside.
The audience is caught a little off
guard when, just as casually as we later learn that the older brother Paul
became an award-winning high school teacher, we also learn that Bill became a priest. This aspect of the tradition and culture are
employed in visually meaningful ways to the attentive onlooker. Vesting onstage for funerals and blessings,
son Bill enacts both familiar Catholic rituals as well as everyday sacraments,
and he hallows actions we all recognize.
He raises his mother’s dish of applesauce mixed with crushed meds in the
Eucharistic gesture of consecration before handing it over to her to try to get
down with a spoon in her increasingly weakened state.
Another indication of deliberate
and subtle detail in the production is the open notebook that remains on a
table; the table is re-purposed throughout the production, featuring the
actors’ use of the minimal props and spare décor of the living room that is the
principal set for the entire play. Whether the table becomes a medical
examination table in one flashback scene, or takes on the nature of a desk with
an invisible phone connecting the family spread apart in later years, the
notebook remains open for the entire play, a pen resting in the crease of the
open pages. This touch keeps narrative itself
ever present, and enables the kind of externalization of a writer’s thoughts that
is often done more easily by voiceover in film, but that is most effective
onstage using props as deep symbols of creative presence.
In the end, despite the length of
some less important scenes, both the Playbill
and American University Radio critics have distilled very well Bill Cain’s
truth about the family: it is a “crucible to turn passion into love.” (WAMU 88.5, Metro Connection, Rebecca Sheir, “Playwright-Priest
Pens Play about Faith and Family,” April 5, 2013). The onstage actor
playing “Bill Cain” makes it clear that we are adding new books to the Bible
throughout our lives, passionately resisting or pursuing our many goals,
suffering along the way, and a human life-in-family lives out (as stated by theologian Edward Farley) “the inherited symbols and narratives of
one’s faith,” such that “one is embodying or incorporating oneself into a
living tradition. That’s a creative act and an interpretive act, an act of
theological understanding.”
Amen. With applause.
*Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. C++ and Java all good: not that kind of code, but another language just the same.
