Father Comes Home From the Wars

The final part of the play focuses on the theme of Making New Choices Versus Repeating Old Stories as the characters—particularly Penny—are faced with repeating the choices of their counterparts in the Odyssey or making new choices that change their fate and establish them as characters in their own right.

Some of the circumstances that the characters in this play face mimic those faced by characters in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. For instance, in Part 1, Hero is reticent to leave home for a war, just like Homer’s Odysseus. He ultimately has little control over his own destiny and winds up leaving for the war against his gut instinct and his hesitation to leave his family behind. In this way, Hero is repeating old choices made by his Ancient Greek predecessor.

At first, the characters in Part 3 also seem to be following the choices pre-determined for them by their Ancient Greek counterparts. The Ancient Greek Penelope waited for Odysseus to return for 20 years, refusing to remarry as she held out hope that Odysseus would return. Like Penelope, Penny is “rooted” to the cabin in Texas, waiting for Hero to return. Even after she thinks he’s dead, Penny won’t agree to leave because Hero “promised he’d come home. And when he comes I’ll bury him” (123). Her loyalty to Hero extends past his death. In this play, Homer wants to be in a legitimate relationship with Penny, but when he asks her to kiss him, she tells him he must “like the sound of no” (118). Like the Ancient Greek Penelope, Penny holds her suitors at arm’s length as she waits for her “hero” to return from war.

After Hero returns, it seems like Penny will continue to follow Penelope’s trajectory. Infamously, Odysseus cheated on Penelope while he was away, having a sexual relationship with the sorceress Circe and the nymph Calypso while Penelope was loyal to him at home, waiting for his return. Though Penny is pregnant with Homer’s child, her heart is still loyal to Hero. In an aside to the audience, she says that she “laid down” with Homer because “there was room in [her] bed,” but her “heart” is “full. No room in there for nothing else” (123). When Hero arrives home with the new name “Ulysses” and a “new wife” Alberta, Penny is heartbroken but “dutifully goes onto the house” to get it ready for Hero and Alberta (148). At this point, she seems to be repeating the “old story” of Penelope.

Acting as a Chorus, the “Runaway Slaves” have a dialogue about “old stories” that stresses the need for characters to forge new paths and break out of narratives that deny them power. The Second Runaway says, “I’m scared of what will happen next. / The old story guides me to a dangerous place / A place I head to by homing habit” (151). The Second Runaway acknowledges that Penny is walking the path of Penelope’s “old story,” but at the same time, he expresses an anxiety about repeating “dangerous” past choices. In the patriarchal world of Ancient Greece, Penelope had little autonomy or freedom of her own, and very few options except to wait for Odysseus’s return despite his infidelity. However, if characters repeat the same decisions from the “old stories,” they also reinscribe the social environments that animated those decisions. The Third Runaway says that as Penny “makes up the marriage bed” for Hero and his new wife, “she takes her place in a long line of the Wronged” (151). Penny, like Penelope, initially puts her own needs and happiness below her husband’s. Hero, for his part, is acting out the old story of Odysseus to such a degree that he now goes by his chosen name Ulysses—the Roman version of Odysseus.

The Chorus of Runaways also reveal that knowing about past mistakes will help characters make better choices in the present. In this way, they are speaking to their 21st century audience, reminding them that they must consider the history of enslavement to negotiate racial politics thoughtfully and intelligently in the present. When the Second Runaway says that the old stories happened “so far back,” the Third Runaway replies, “What could they have to do with you?” (151). This calls to mind the idiom that if we do not know the past, we are doomed to repeat it. Old stories are important because people can learn from them and make new choices, rather than repeating old ones and the old systems they upheld.

Penny, too, ends up choosing a new path to freedom rather than repeating the old story set in place by her Ancient Greek counterpart. The three Runaways encourage Penny to “Come with us” and therefore to “Come break the chain” (152). By making a new choice—to run away to freedom, away from her unfaithful husband—Penny can chart a new course and start a better life. In the end, after Ulysses attacks Homer in jealousy, this is exactly what Penny chooses to do. When Ulysses tells her “I don’t want you going,” she responds, “I’m leaving. I’m gone. Let’s go” (158). The change from “I’m leaving,” a statement in the present tense, to “I’m gone,” a statement that declares she has already left, shows that Penny has definitively decided to “break the chain” of the “Wronged” who came before her.

This leaves Ulysses alone with Odyssey Dog at the end of the play. His actions have effectively alienated his old friends. Old Man died before he returned, and Homer and Penny have both decided to leave him. The final stage of the traditional hero’s journey is “return,” where the hero “makes a successful return to the ordinary world,” achieves “a balance between who he was before his journey and who he is now,” and is finally “at peace with his life” (“Writing 101”). However, Hero, who is now Ulysses, is not a hero of an Ancient Greek epic, but an enslaved man trying to gain freedom in an unjust system. Even after freedom is accomplished, the trauma of enslavement doesn’t disappear. This highlights the theme of The Struggle for Freedom in an Unjust System. The idealized character arc demarcated by the hero’s journey is ultimately implausible in the real world of injustice and systemic racism, highlighting the Subversion of the Hero’s Journey. Ulysses’s consolation at the end, as he buries the Colonel, is that “These are my hands now” (159), and at the very least, he gets to choose what to do with them.