IN MY FATHER’S HOUSE
As I fiddle about
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When he discovers that Leo is planning to adopt a preadolescent foster son, John tries to break out of his emotional paralysis and prevent a replay of the circumstances he suffered. But John’s initial burst of activity stalls as he crashes into the same maddening forces that made his own protracted abuse possible–Leo’s seductive, disarming manipulativeness, his father’s passive, reality-denying complicity, and John’s own shame and uncertainty.
Also like Hamlet, John is visited by a ghost. Not the ghost of his father–though his immobile, self-pitying father is certainly a phantom figure–but the ghost of himself. In an early scene, John the adult watches helplessly as little Johnny, his childish doppelganger, plays a game of hide-and-seek with Uncle Leo. As the family’s husky-voiced spinster housekeeper coaches the boy–“You’re cold, freezing . . . you’re getting warmer, boiling hot”–the audience is drawn into the horror of a world in which every seemingly innocent banality of family life is twisted into a monstrous threat. “If he was a snake he’d bite you,” exclaims the housekeeper just before Leo bounds out of the closet. “Your bath is drawn, milord,” Leo casually coos to his young charge later as he beckons the boy up the stairs to the shadowy second floor. And as little Johnny heads upstairs, possessed by a dread other adults write off as childish moodiness, adult John watches this eternally replaying action, unable to move beyond it or to change it.
