Bringing It All Back Home (play)

Bringing It All Back Home is a one-act play by Terrence McNally. It is a biting satire of a middle-class family and their reaction to losing a son in Vietnam.^[2][3]

Bringing It All Back Home
Written by	Terrence McNally
Characters	Sam - father Mona - mother Jimmy - son killed in war Johnny - younger son Suzy - daughter Ms. Fatima - TV reporter television support crew casket delivery people[1]
Date premiered	1969
Place premiered	New Haven
Subject	antiwar
Genre	Drama
Setting	United States, Viet Nam war era

Productions

The play was produced in New Haven in 1969^[4] and at the Provincetown Playhouse, New York City, 1971.^[5]

It was produced by Solid Hang at the Collective Unconscious, New York, in September 2005.^[6]

Concept

This play is one of several of McNally's that dealt with the Vietnam and Iraq wars: Botticelli (1968), Witness (1968), and Some Men (2007). Peter Wolfe (professor of English at the University of Missouri-St. Louis) notes that Bringing It All Back Home is an anti-war play, and also examines the family.^[7]

Plot

The father of the household makes obscene phone calls while his teen son and daughter fight about the illegal drugs at their high school; the mother blots it all out. Then the body of their son Jimmy, killed in the Vietnam war, arrives. A television station wants to film their reactions. Jimmy arises and wonders why he died.