Email
PrintAbsent fathers
Like a figure out of Greek tragedy, Kevin Lōttes was twice fatherless. First, his birth father died just before he was born, the victim of a car accident where drinking was involved. The second time, eerily, his stepfather died in a head-on collision with a drunk driver while Lōttes was away at college.
So maybe it’s no accident that Lōttes’s plays often are meditations on absent fathers and wounded sons.
Take San Francisco Scarecrows, about two good friends, both fatherless, who travel across the country to meet with one of their estranged fathers. The meeting happens, but the father doesn’t want anything to do with the son.
“The two sons end up being fathers to each other,” says Lōttes, 33. “I see the world through a fatherless lens. My father was killed before I was born. And my stepfather was killed when I was 19. Now that I am a father and a stepfather, I see how important it is to stick around.”
Lōttes doesn’t only explore a father’s absence through death. He excavates the more subtle ways fathers go missing. “There’s absence from being shut down or cut off from your father,” he says, “and I try to explore those undercurrents in my work. My play, Cracking Nuckols, is about absent fathers. It’s about a grandmother trying to raise her granddaughter without any male influences.”
For Lōttes, the father figure is an overpoweringly mysterious presence in life that is not as concrete as the mother. Though fathers can be devouring, like the Greek god Cronus, who ate his offspring, they also can be remote, distant and hard to pin down. A son seeks out a blessing from the father and follows his way into the world. But sometimes that blessing turns out to be a curse.
“When you become a father, you will always be nine months behind everything. Maybe that’s part of it,” says Lōttes.
You can hear echoes of Sam Shepard and Arthur Miller in Lōttes’s work. It’s there in the spare language and wounded way in which the characters respond to hints of inner darkness and fate.
“What I saw in Shepard was the prevailing presence of the father,” says Lōttes. “Shepard has these overbearing, alcoholic fathers who generate fear. Miller has the father who lives vicariously through his sons.”
Lōttes, who has written subtle and funny essays on pop music, was drawn to theater because of its live, three-dimensional aspect. “The form of it was ancient. And acting is about being in the moment. It’s close to being in a band. Actors have to improvise. You have these two opposing forces, and it’s all done by language, rhythm and momentum. Everything in theater for me goes back to music.”
So far, Lōttes has had six of his plays produced in Columbus, mostly at MadLab Theatre. He especially likes to write plays about two characters. “There’s nothing more exciting than that. You see the truth unraveling. There’s nothing more heated or important.”
Lōttes grew up in southern Indiana in a small town called English. His stepfather was a furniture factory worker and his mother a teaching assistant at a local elementary school. “I grew up in an Edward Hopper painting?—“Early Sunday Morning”—where you’re a kid on Main Street with a bike.” It wasn’t until he went to the University of Southern Indiana that he got exposed to theater. There, he was required to take one theater class. “That’s when I started writing plays and reading Sam Shepard,” he says.
Actually, he got really serious when his stepfather died while Lōttes was at home for the summer. He started to write incessantly then and hasn’t stopped. He pulls out a wad of Moleskine journals and shows me with a smile the many crossed-out passages.
He says he is interested in the truth, like all artists, but he also wants his plays to reach an audience the way a profound song touches the soul of a listener. “I want my audience to see that without a father, children grow up not knowing who they are,” Lōttes says. “Part of their identity is missing. I want people to ask the question, ‘Where is the father?’ ”
Jory Farr can be reached at joryfarr@gmail.com.
This story appeared in the February 2011 issue of Columbus Monthly.
