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I Never Sang for my Father by Robert Anderson
7 Men, 4 Women
Author of: Double Solitaire, Solitaire, You Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running, The Shock of Recognition, The Footsteps of Doves, I'll be Home for Christmas, I'm Herbert.
This is the story of a grown man, a widower, with an elderly mother whom he loves and an 80-year-old father, whom he has never loved, hard as he tried.
The father has been mayor of a small town in Westchester County, a self-made and highly respected man. Beneath these trappings, however, he is a mean, unloving and ungenerous man, who has driven his daughter away because of her marriage to a Jew and has alienated his son through his possessiveness, his selfishness and his endless reminiscences.
When the mother dies, the son is faced with the responsibility of having the father on his hands just at a time when he wants to remarry and live in California. Alice, the sister, pleads with Gene not to take on the burden of the old man and ruin his life but Gene cannot capitulate as he tries once again to rouse in himself affection for his father and succeeds, but only for a moment.
This moving and perceptive work probes into the disquieting alienation which can exist between father and son – and which time and old age can only deepen, despite the best intentions of both.
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