Review: A father's grief for his son killed in a school shooting makes a heart-wrenching case for gun reform
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The image of a grieving parent is not an uncommon sight on the dramatic stage.Euripides, whom Aristotle called “the most tragic of the poets,” returns to the figure of the grief-stricken parent in “Hecuba,” “Hippolytus” and “The Bacchae,” to cite just a few disparate examples of characters brought to their knees by the death of their child.Shakespeare offers what has become the defining portrait of this inconsolable experience in “King Lear.” Cradling the lifeless body of his murdered daughter, Lear can do nothing but repeat the word “never” five times, the repetition driving home the irrevocable nature of loss.In tragedy, the protagonist is often plagued by guilt for his own role, however inadvertent or inescapable, in the catastrophe that befell his loved one.
Theseus in “Hippolytus” and Agave in “The Bacchae” both have reason to feel that they have blood on their hands.Lear, though “more sinned against than sinning,” recognizes only after it’s too late the error in judgment that led to the devastation from which there can be no return.The difference with “Guac,” the one-man performance work at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, is that Manuel Oliver isn’t just playing a bereaved father.
He is one.Oliver’s 17-year-old son, Joaquín, known as Guac to family and friends, was one of the 17 lives lost in 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.The production, written and performed by Oliver, turns a parent’s grief into a theatrical work of activism.
Co-written by James Clements and directed by Michael Cotey, “Guac” has been sharing the story of Joaquín’s short but vividly lived life with audiences around the country.Oliver didn’t just love his son.
He liked him.Guac was his best friend.
He was also his trusted guide to American culture.Immigrants from Venezuela, the family had made a new start in a country t...