Home Front: What We Thought We Won

It’s VJ Day—August 14^th, 1945—the day World War II finally ended and Americans are ecstatic. In a crowded Times Square barroom, revelers toast and laugh and dance the night away.

In their midst, a handsome Black naval officer (C.J. Lindsey) cute meets an attractive white war widow (Austin Highsmith Garces). Knowing that even in cosmopolitan Manhattan, scant few couples look like them, so they initially keep a polite and cordial distance—nervously flirtatious but distant nonetheless.

Then, in the euphoria of that moment, and perhaps needing respite from the just-ended war’s heartaches, they allow themselves to believe that a new world has come, a world free of the biases and hatreds of American’s past, a world where even a love affair between the two of them could flourish. And so, indeed, they fall in love.

So begins “Home Front,” Warren Leight’s powerful drama, which had its West Coast premiere this past weekend at Burbank’s Victory Theatre.

James and Annie’s life together begins in a dank Greenwich Village apartment—dimly lit, raggedly furnished, next to the boilerroom—the best an interracial couple could hope to find even in hipster New York. The play then lets us watch as a much sadder reality undercuts the couple’s glorious, if hopelessly naïve, vision for themselves.

As the outside world besets them as an interracial couple—and especially daily affronts the Black man, relationship or not—an upstairs neighbor seeks to support the couple along the perilous path they have chosen. A veteran himself—a decorated Army medic severely wounded in an especially prolonged and ugly battle—Edward (Jonathan Slavin) knows how cruel society can be as a gay man who must fend off similar affronts.

Directed by Maria Gobetti and produced by Tom Ormeny, Evan Bartolett, and Gobetti, Home Front is a crosscurrent of racism, homophobia, domestic abuse, misogyny, you name it, but it is no polemic. Though it’s a work of fiction, you can easily imagine three people like these coming together in that city at that point in history, especially with the cast's heart-rendingly wonderful performances.

The three of us were utterly charmed. Hollywood Progressive heartily recommends "Home Front."

Home Front at The Victory Theatre Center, 3326 West Victory Boulevard, Burbank. Through February 12, Friday and Saturdays at 8 p.m. Sundays at 4 p.m.

Photos by Jeff Lorch