Fatherland: A Greek Tragedy for Today

That fateful January 6th, as we watched armed, helmeted rioters storm our nation’s Capitol–us drinking coffee at the top of our very blue hilltop in the middle of our very blue city–we had to wonder what planet produced those foaming nutcases. I mean, really!

Fatherland, the brilliant docudrama premiering at the Fountain Theatre, takes us several long strides toward understanding just how so many regular, normal, workaday Americans have been molded into fire-breathing psychopaths by “The Biggest Loser,” who needed no such molding.

Rather than deploy a thespian’s fevered imagination to cobble together a story of what might have happened leading up to that fateful day, playwright Stephen Sachs has dissected real trial transcripts, augmented by public statements and social media posts, to plot the crash and burn of an actual patriotic, beer-drinking, down-on-his-luck oil field roughneck, who became so blinkered by Trumpian fantasies that he took up arms against his country–and is playing a dear price for it in solitary confinement.

In the talkback after Sunday’s riveting performance, Sachs–who doubles as the Fountain’s soon-to-retire artistic director–called his masterpiece something of a Greek tragedy, as Fatherland has a son and a father migrate so far to the opposite ends of the current political spectrum that the son finally makes the agonized decision to turn in his father to the FBI for the father’s criminal activities on that painful day.

Both sharply specific and grandly universal, the play features four characters known simply as Father, Son, U.S. Attorney, and Defense Attorney–leaving it to you to extrapolate their experiences to the many hundreds of self-made storm troopers who followed a similar path and now can only hope Trump will cut them loose if he manages to breach the White House gates again.

But the father, touchingly played by Ron Bottitta, was a real-life defendant named Guy Reffitt, who has pulled a seven-year stretch in a federal pen as the first convicted January 6th defendant, while the son–named Jackson Reffitt and adroitly played by Patrick Keleher–is off to college, still estranged from the family he betrayed.

The gradual decay of their father-and-son loving relationship into the harshest of divides rings painfully true, forming the emotional core of this moving play, with scenes depicting the courtroom testimony interspersed with earlier domestic scenes with the son trying to talk sense to his increasingly radicalized–and frequently drunk–father.

The two attorneys, Anna Khaja, playing the just-the-facts prosecutor, Risa Berkower, and Larry Poindexter as the short-handed public defender, William Welch, look like they could have stepped straight out of a real courtroom–and not just one on a movie set.

Afterwards, playwright Sachs said he desperately wanted his theatre to contribute to today’s difficult political discussion–and his Fatherland has done just that. Catch it if you can.

The Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Ave., E. Hollywood. Friday and Saturday at 8 pm, Sunday at 2 & 7 pm, and Monday at 8 pm; extended through May 24. Running time 70 minutes, with no intermission.