The devouring father is one of the most terrifying figures handed down to us from the dark depths of the antique psyche. The Titan Cronos eating his children is the Greek ur-text, of course, but there are parallels in other mythologies. In Persian myth, the hero Rostam unknowingly kills his son, Sohrab (my namesake), on the battlefield. In the Bible, meanwhile, the drama takes on the moral legibility typical of divine revelation: In Genesis, Noah awakes from a drunken stupor to find that his son Ham has seen “his nakedness”—that is, at least according to the most plausible exegesis, Ham has committed maternal incest with Noah’s wife. The enraged patriarch curses Ham’s son Canaan down the generations, culminating in Israel’s destruction of the Canaanites.
In Salt, the latest play by Matthew Gasda, the devouring father takes on unsettling contemporary resonances, both sexual and geopolitical. While much of the bipartisan elite seems to have moved on from the miseries and traumas inflicted on my generation by the post-9/11 wars—moved on to other wars, that is—the rising New York playwright isn’t quite ready to do the same. The GOP-blowhard Dad must pay the price for his transgressions, in the next life if not this one.
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