Home Front

Daniel Algie’s Home Front is a highly-charged, explosive play that reveals how the violence of distant war affects the heart of America. It is a re-imagining of Euripides’ Herakles, telling the story of the unsettling homecoming of a Vietnam MIA.

The play takes place on the porch and in the front yard of a Midwest farmhouse during a summer’s weekend in 1972. Harrison, an honorable Army corporal missing in action for seven years, has been declared dead by the military. His wife’s attempt to deny official notification of her husband’s death has led her to a nervous breakdown and hospitalization. Her father-in-law has offered shelter to his grandsons and their unstable mother, but his dark view of his deceased wife and his missing son suggests an emotional disconnect laced with anger and despair. When Harrison unexpectedly comes down the dusty country road – having escaped first from an imprisonment by the Viet Cong and later from his stateside Army hospital – he brings home his shattered spirit in the hopes of making it whole again. But his attempts to rediscover his family and friends delivers unexpected consequences.

Home Front is a soaring, sublime disquisition on the suffering of war, the role of heroism and the healing power of friendship and community. Like a tragic poet, Algie rips into the souls of two children, their grandfather, mother and soldier-father. His realistic, intimate drama gives voice to our war-weary age.