Home Fires Burning: Everlasting Moon & Paradise Whiskey

Call me academic, but I don’t understand why performed narratives keep being called plays. It takes nothing from the worth of the Home Fires Burningto say this program is made up of two related stories, told in first person in chamber-theater style. The narrator in each case is a woman -- costumed, made up, using props, and acting as an interpreter of what happened and is happening to her.

“Everlasting Moon” finds Child (compelling Betty-Jane Parks), roughed up, dirty, in disheveled striped pajamas, atop a tree, telling of her life to the point she’s at now. Born as summer died and her mum’s spirit left on the wind of which Child sings, she’s kept the record -- one of her “treasures” -- in her pocket.

Raised by Granny, Child existed at one with the land’s small animals. She ate apples, herbs, what grew wild and eggs from a chicken. When Granny died, she “gave her a good death” in a fairy ring where she herself’ll need to be.

Parks conveys the difficulty of doing without fire, then the chicken and eggs, then the power gone from her treasured flashlight. A kind woman, Judy, came, took her to a huge gray house and left her among little bed fellows. So many cried, especially at night, with its abusive big shadows. At night going to the bathroom, Child got raped and beaten, fought back, and struggled away, straining through hunger, thirst, pain to find home’s fairy ring. With ground being unsafe, Child’s up a tree...but how long can she stay? What treasure can she offer to get “a good death?” Is that the “Everlasting Moon?”

Despite Parks’ strong performance of Child’s vividly detailed journey, it’s unclear whom she’s asking for help. Why offer her story along with a “treasure” to the audience when no response is possible from outside the fiction?

In “Paradise Whiskey” though, the Old Lady narrator talks to a government worker, younger than previous (also unseen) visitors. Conceding a bit to demands of drama, the heroine conflicts with “the government” that must want her to move. Her story -- one she’s told often -- gives reasons for staying in harsh surroundings, alone. Or is she?

Among chilling details: forced by her father to wed at 14 a government worker so she’d have a pension, she had six kids before 19 and 3 more later. Her womb fell out after the last, Joseph, was delivered.

Her husband abused her and all the kids, who scattered when they could. Unable to survive his harsh treatment, little Joseph died and, due to frozen ground, was kept in the root cellar where his mother spent as much time with his body as possible until the thaw. Husband’s cruelty hit a new low when his wife couldn’t make him a pie, and he burned a whole side of her face, still horribly scarred. What happened to him and then Joseph’s body explains why she hadn’t left with a son who offered to move and care for her. Instead, she asked for Paradise Whiskey and received boxes of small bottles of it.

What the whiskey means to the old lady figures in her tenacious hold on life and her loved one with which Roxanne Fay comes close to spellbinding.

In a “talkback” the actress-author admitted not pinpointing the time of the story -- ”probably the 1930s or ‘40s.” But I know of at least one place in backwoods Kentucky where I may have glimpsed the old lady in the mid-’60s.