Being part of a family is like house arrest: There’s no escape.
Sometimes you don’t want to get away — some families, that is, are perfectly wonderful — but it really doesn’t matter whether or not you desire freedom, because you can’t have it. Likewise, the family brand is not a temporary tattoo; it bleeds deep into your skin, branching out beneath the surface with its delicate filigree of insinuation.
Your family is you. And vice versa.
There’s a reason for these ruminations. Three days before George W. Bush was sworn in as president, I stopped by the Chicago Cultural Center to see the Rivendell Theatre Ensemble’s production of Heather McDonald’s play “Faulkner’s Bicycle.” It’s as brief as a sigh, this lovely, lyrical drama about two sisters and their mother in Oxford, Miss.
I didn’t altogether know what to make of it, frankly, until I watched President Bush take the oath of office last Saturday while the nation — and his mom and dad — watched.
“Faulkner’s Bicycle” is about one of the worst moments in family life: the realization that a mother (played with exquisite pathos by Diane Dorsey) is disintegrating mentally, like a fragile shoreline that is crumbling against the steady onslaught of the ocean’s waves.
President Bush’s inauguration was about the best moment in family life: the chance for the parents who raised him to witness a son’s installation in the highest office in the land. No matter what one thinks of Bush’s politics or the legal maneuvers that placed him in that office, the moment was magical. A mother and a father — a father who once had held the same office himself — watched while their child accepted the grave and astonishing challenge of the presidency.
It was all about history, but it was also all about family.
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Some of us, thank God, may never have to face the agonizing decline of a parent, grandparent or other family member. And few of us will ever see a relative ascend to the White House. But between those two extremes of family moments — the tragic and the joyous, the dreaded and the celebratory — lie all the ordinary days of family life, the conversations and the arguments, the road trips and the Sunday dinners, the changes, the chaos, the loss.
And the love. Always, even when it seems to hurt more than anything else, the love.
“Faulkner’s Bicycle” has nothing to do with contemporary politics. It’s about two adult daughters (splendidly played by Tara Mallen and Mary Cross) and their disparate ways of coping with nature’s cruelest trick: the fact that as some people grow older, their behavior becomes more infantile, until one day we find them, as the women find their mother, frightened and needy and incoherent.
The play, which includes occasional visits from a bemused neighbor named William Faulkner (portrayed with graceful understatement by Kent Reed), might have looked quite different to me had I not contemplated it alonside the Bush inauguration. I might have seen it as a meditation on ambition, since one daughter leaves Oxford while one stays behind; or gossip, since Faulkner’s wobbly rides on his bicycle are the talk of the town.
But a good play is, like Ernest Hemingway’s definition of Paris, a moveable feast; wherever you are, it meets you there and supplies sustenance. For me, “Faulkner’s Bicycle” is about the harsh beauty of families — harsh because your family can hurt you sometimes, and beauty because they almost never mean to.
To the soaring exhilaration of the inauguration, the play supplied the necessary counterweight, the poignant minor chord that gives every family’s anthem its range and depth.
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“Faulkner’s Bicycle” runs through Feb. 24. Ticket information: 773-472-1169.
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