The Hero at Metropolitan Playhouse

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2. The Hero

Metropolitan Playhouse:

Gilbert Emery; dir: Alex Roe.

Authors

• Gilbert Emery

In 1919, a prodigal son returns from the battlefields, apparently a hero of the Great War, and a family must grapple with an uneasy past and a far from certain future. Andy Lane is an upstanding, if uninteresting insurance salesman, barely able to make end meet for his wife, Hester, his mother, young son, and a Belgian war orphan they shelter. His brother Oswald ran away at sixteen with a forged check, and without his pregnant girlfriend, leaving his parents and Andy to clean up the mess. Now twelve years later, Os re-appears, a wounded veteran of the French Foreign Legion with an easy charm and a romantic story. The family and the entire town dress him in their own dreams and hopes, but when the man proves no more reliable than the reckless boy, a reckoning is demanded of everyone in the family. The Hero is a poignant play about the nature of sacrifice, the demands of ordinary life, and the need for heroes in a time that old orders have broken down.