Father Comes Home from the Wars is award-winning author Suzan-Lori Parks' play about a young enslaved man during Civil War times. Published in three parts in 2014, Parks' play follows Homer, a slave who is given an opportunity to escape bondage. However, he first must fight for the Confederacy alongside his master in the Civil War against the Union. Throughout the play, Homer encounters a number of difficult scenarios that challenges how he (and many other people) looks at slavery, the nature of the war, and what it means to be a whole person in a strange world. For instance, during the play's second phase, a colonel and a white man named Smith consider the morality of slavery. One man says that he never wanted to own a slave; the other says they would secretly like to. This divide, the play says, exemplifies the stark divide in the country between the North and South, which led to the outbreak of the Civil War.
In their glowing review of the play in 2014, The New York Times suggested Parks' play was the best they had seen the entire year. Additionally, they praised Parks' "philosophical, playful, lyrical, and earthy" play, which features well-drawn characters and "noble" story. The play is still put on by theater groups across the country to this day, showing the play's popularity more than a decade after its initial publication.
