Making It Home by james colgan
If you only had a few days left to live, who would you want to be there to see you over and why?
Danny O’Brien is from a small town in Eastern Kentucky, but for the last forty years, he has lived in San Francisco where he has had a successful career as a lawyer. He has learned about fine wines and food, the Ballet, the wonders of the ocean, and the magnificence of European cities. He is educated,...
If you only had a few days left to live, who would you want to be there to see you over and why?
Danny O’Brien is from a small town in Eastern Kentucky, but for the last forty years, he has lived in San Francisco where he has had a successful career as a lawyer. He has learned about fine wines and food, the Ballet, the wonders of the ocean, and the magnificence of European cities. He is educated, sophisticated, and a notorious ladies’ man. But, as the old saying goes, you can take a boy out of the country, but you can’t take the “country” out of the boy. At heart, Danny is still a country boy.
And the Big City, despite its allure, has been wearing on him. When a series of tragedies visit him, he decides to shuck it all and return to Kentucky. He outwardly longs for quiet, the country life, family, and home. In truth, he’s simply running away.
When he gets back to Kentucky, he finds his younger brother, Tommy Joe, a rough man that Danny hardly knows, dying of cancer. His brother, bitter, unhappy, and afraid, lashes out at Danny. Danny endeavors to re-connect with Tommy Joe in some way, using their mutual love of baseball as a bridge.
Danny’s illusion of “home” is further eroded when he confronts the reality of his seriously dysfunctional family, the center of which is “Mama,” Lila O’Brien. Lila is in her mid-seventies, hardbitten, disapproving, and mean. She is quick to use her vicious tongue to quash the slightest disagreement. As Danny remarks early in the play, “Well, you know how Mama is. She’s either right or she’s pissed off.” Lila is not overjoyed at her son’s return, and quickly takes him to task for his most recent failing, his divorce from a much younger woman. She makes it clear that she wants no part of Tommy Joe’s illness, and refuses to visit him. She leaves Danny with the scornful question: “Boy, what kind of ‘home’ are y’all expectin’ to find around here?”
Danny also encounters Tommy Joe’s nurse, Amy Randolph, whose cloying sweetness covers an iron hand and a ferocity that surprises and intimidates both Danny and Tommy Joe.
As Tommy Joe’s health deteriorates, Danny comforts him by reading a short story about a young man badly wounded in the war who is trying to make it home. The story serves as an accompaniment to the final scene where Tommy Joe talks of death and life and exacts a painful promise from Danny before “making it home.”