Regarding Gabriel Ortiz’s story in My Prodigal Son, we can’t imagine a more intense telling or audience response to an account of a journey to an adulthood. It encompasses acceptance of a father by his son and, in a circuitous way, of the son by the father. There’s an addicted, husband-blaming mother in the background and brothers who followed the wrong path, but Gabriel both forged a bond with his father and escaped what could have been his family legacy.
Gabe moves between presenting his imposing father and his accented speech, mostly with material gained from his letters and his observations as a child through young adult.
Sometimes he visited his dad in San Quentin, even when he hated missing a favorite TV program. Ortiz duplicates how his father learned and then explained cell protocol. What a contrast with earlier things he recalls about his dad like how good he was at baseball. But there was “no real relationship.”
He demonstrates, shirt-off, scatological remarks his dad had tattooed and accompanied him on a robbery that got him bits of candy--and later caught where he’d hidden it. His brothers thought him too white, a victim for their torture, but he reveled in a picture of his dad who looked like him. He prayed for his father to come home.
Prayer played a major part in Gabe’s father’s life, as he came to believe one must “rely solely on God’s word.” He behaved well enough to qualify for an early release but meanwhile, there was the powerful pull of drugs on Gabe’s mother.
The song “Crazy” seemed to have been written for her feelings toward Gabe’s father. She told Gabe of horrors, especially concerning his birth, that made him promise to stop writing his dad.
The estrangement didn’t last. Dad won release. The Prodigal Son was coming home. What happened afterward was both happy and sad, but Gabe came to forgive. Who was the titled prodigal son of his play, we wonder after all, or were there two?
