‘Fatherland’: Insurrectionists and Oedipus Trump

Stephen Sachs’ “Fatherland” is the first work of live theater to dramatize the attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. A politically engaged family tragedy, it tells the real-life story of Jan. 6 insurrectionist Guy Reffitt, whose teenage son turned him in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It is a tale of treachery playing out on planes personal and political — Eugene O’Neill colliding with Bertolt Brecht.

But “Fatherland” has a twist: A  type of docudrama known as “verbatim theater, every word of dialogue is taken from public records. Sachs organizes the story with a veteran dramatist’s care in a series of mise-en-scène that moves fluidly, even cinematically, from one vignette to another, from the Reffitts’ Texas home, to the Capitol Building’s steps, to a federal courthouse. Its thematic sweep places it in a long tradition encompassing Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” and Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” but in modern times chimes most closely with Charlie Chaplin’s 1957 “A King of New York”, in which a little boy, Rupert Macabee, is pressured by U.S. authorities to inform on his parents. 

I spoke with Sachs on March 4 in Los Angeles, where the play has been extended through May 26 at The Fountain Theatre.

TD: How and when did “Fatherland” come about?

SACHS: I first learned about this case in 2022 when the trial happened. It hit the headlines and became national news. This 19-year-old son turning in his father to the FBI—what a fascinating story it was. It sounded mythic, going back to the ancient Greeks or Shakespeare. I tucked it away in the back of my head.

Then last year, I was thinking about wanting The Fountain Theatre to have a voice in this crucial election. I was just racking my brain, thinking of what play we could do that could speak out on this issue. Then I remembered: Oh yes, there was this story about a kid who turns in his dad. I read the court transcripts and the testimony of the son testifying against his father and being cross-examined by the two attorneys. And I just thought to myself: “There’s a play here.” 

TD: Tell us about the fact-based story of “Fatherland.” 

SACHS: It’s a story of a family in a small town in Texas. They’re a family who has traveled around the world. The father worked as an oil worker. Then one day, the oil industry collapsed and suddenly the father was out of work. They suddenly had no money. The father fell into a chasm of depression and then the pandemic hit and he was in isolation a lot. He was adrift. 

In my mind, he was a previously decent man who had fallen from grace. In an effort to attach himself to something greater than himself, he began this delusional attachment to Donald Trump, trying to pull himself out of this abyss and connect to something which he felt was greater than himself. He joined a far-right militia called the Three Percenters. He began to go to Trump rallies and attend these meetings. He was always a gun owner, but now he’s carrying a pistol on his hip and he has an AR-15.

His son just slowly began to see his father disappear from him and this new creature emerge. He was a heavy drinker and abusing his wife. When Trump sent out that Tweet [on Dec. 19, 2020] saying everyone needs to come to the Capitol on Jan. 6, it “will be wild!” like so many men and women across the country, this man took it as a call to arms. He drove [so he could bring firearms] all the way from Texas to Washington, D.C. to attend the rally and attack the Capitol. 

It’s about the son realizing that his father was there at the U.S. Capitol and coming to the tortured decision of turning his father in to the FBI. For his own good. For the sake of his family and his father’s well-being. Having to pay the price by having to actually testify against his own father in federal court. 

TD: When the family returned to Texas the father was unemployed. How could he afford a whole armory?

SACHS: I don’t know the answer. When they came back to Texas, he tried to start his own business. He worked as an engineer with a home construction company. They sold sunroofs and things. He never quite got back on his feet. He never returned to the oil industry. When he was arrested and brought before the judge, the court determined that he could not afford his own attorney, to pay for his own attorney. That he was destitute. An attorney was appointed for him by the court.

TD: What other far-right extremist groups did the father belong to?  

SACHS: He was a member of the Oath Keepers. He had an Oath Keeper T-shirt that he used to wear. I think he was actually wearing it on Jan. 6 at the Capitol. [On May 25, 2023, Elmer Stewart Rhodes III, 58, of Texas, founder and leader of the Oath Keepers, and Kelly Meggs, 54, leader of the group’s Florida chapter, were sentenced for seditious conspiracy and other charges related to breaching the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.]

TD: What role did Guy Reffitt play in the storming of the Capitol Building?

SACHS: When the crowd began to storm the front of the Capitol, on the front steps, there was a big marble stairway on the right-hand side that they were trying to climb up. And this man, Guy Reffitt, he climbed up on top of the railing, this wide marble railing, and led the way up this stairway. He went by himself and challenged the Capitol Police officers. Behind him, this crowd of protesters were standing by and waiting. He went forward and confronted [the officers]. They shot him with pepper spray and rubber bullets, but that did not deter him. Then he gestured for the rioters behind him to follow him and pass him by and go inside.

So, Guy Reffitt did not actually ever make it. Which is part of the pathos of his story. He did not ever make it into the Capitol himself. He remained outside.

TD: I think he was hit by bear spray. 

SACHS: Exactly. He was hit by a number of things: Rubber bullets; pepper spray; and then finally bear spray, which is what brought him down.  

TD: Can you describe the technique you used to write the script?  

SACHS: It’s called “verbatim theater.” There’s a history of this kind of work. To me, the spirit of it goes back to The Living Newspaper of the Federal Theatre Project of the 1930s, when fascism was rising in Germany. In this country, The Living Newspaper was a company here that would take stories and newspaper articles and turn them into plays. So “Fatherland” comes from that same spirit. I even went back and looked at some of those old Living Newspaper plays when I was hunting for material, because in my mind, what’s happening, the rise of fascism, the threat of fascism in this country, echoes what was happening in Germany during the rise of Nazism there. The legacy links back to that.

What I did was I took the court transcripts and began to cobble them together and created a piece. Some of the exchanges in the courtroom, I would just use verbatim what they would say. And the challenge of the work was to then create scenes. For that I’d use language from the trial and then I also found interviews that the son had done and were publicly shared. I also got ahold of transcripts of some of the recordings the son did between him and his father on his phone, and I was able to use them in the play as well.

TD: Is this style similar to what Truman Capote called “the nonfiction novel”?

SACHS: In my mind it is. It’s like a nonfiction play. It’s a true play, which is not an oxymoron but sort of a hybrid piece that takes real-life dialogue and — it doesn’t transform it, because it leaves it intact — and performs it in front of an audience. There are examples of it, more recently [Moisés Kaufman’s]”The Laramie Project” [dealing with the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old University of Wyoming gay student]. There was a play performed in New York a couple of years ago called “Is This a Room” [by Tina Satter], which was a dramatization of a person [whistleblower Reality Winner] under interrogation. They used the verbatim transcript of her interrogation and performed it live onstage. There’s a history of this kind of work.   

TD: In your play, the son described himself as “a socialist” who voted for Bernie Sanders for president. 

SACHS: Yeah. He’s a liberal thinker, a progressive, who believes that government’s role is to see that all citizens are treated equally and fairly. The father was never really political himself, until Trump. His wife, the mother, says he was never politically minded at all. It wasn’t until his own life had shattered, then he read “The Art of the Deal”, and he was swept up into the cult of this man.  

TD: What other media did he consume? 

SACHS: He watched lots of TV, for hours and hours and hours. He’d watch Newsmax and Fox News, Tucker Carlson. He and his son went to the [2016 Oliver Stone] movie “Snowden” [about the NSA whistleblower] and they both liked it, a lot. I know he consumed a lot of Trump’s books and would watch Fox News, sequester himself in front of the television, consuming all of that material.  

TD: Watching the Jan. 6 Committee hearings, I kept wondering to myself, “Why didn’t the Capitol Police open fire on the protesters to repel them?” Your play seems to have an answer: Rioters like Reffitt were carrying firearms. And if the Capitol Police had opened fire, a number of the protesters might have followed suit and returned fire. 

SACHS: Absolutely correct. As part of my research, I saw the [2022] documentary, “January 6th” focused on the Capitol Police. An interview with an officer who was part of the small squad of 25, 30 officers who were down… at the foot of the Capitol, plugging a hole. They had thousands of rioters pushing and beating them in, trying to get into this tunnel, and this little squad of Capitol Police officers were fighting them off for hours. And they were just exhausted. They were being beaten on, spit on, assaulted, and physically, spiritually broken …

They were very tempted to fire on the [rioters]. But they realized that if they did that, there were thousands of arms in the crowd, this mad mob was fully armed. If one Capitol Police officer had fired into that crowd, or even above the crowd, it would have unleashed a fusillade of shooting that would have been a massacre, a historic bloodbath on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. It just took enormous restraint by the Capitol Police not to do that.

TD: You’ve been at the helm of LA’s Fountain Theatre for more than a third of a century. How does “Fatherland’ fit in with its mission statement of “creating, developing, and producing plays that dramatize urgent issues and matters of the heart, reflecting the diversity of LA and the nation.”

SACHS: The play is dramatizing an urgent and political issue that’s facing LA and the country. It was imperative to me that “Fatherland” open before Super Tuesday.  Not that this small play is going to change the outcome of the election, but it was essential to me that we speak out as an artistic organization on what’s happening in our country today. The fact that “Fatherland” is an original piece of theater that was created by us for our community and country, addressing, dramatizing issues that are pertinent to this time reflects that it’s a perfect example of what and who we are about. 

TD: You’ve announced that after 34 years as The Fountain’s co-founder and artistic director, you’ll be leaving your post by the end of 2024. Why? And what’s next? 

SACHS: I’ve reached a time in my life — I turned 65 this year — where I’m asking myself, “How do I want to spend my remaining years?” Thirty-four years running a nonprofit theater is enough for me. We’ve done excellent work for a long time. I’m ready now to explore other things, opportunities, that life has to offer. I’m really looking forward to spending more time with my family and traveling with my wife. I’ve written a novel, so I plan to turn my writing now toward literature, rather than play-writing.  I’m proud that “Fatherland” is the final play I’ve created and directed at The Fountain because for me it epitomizes what I’m about as an artist. It’s theatrically bold, tells a human story, and dramatizes an urgent political and social issue that is relevant to our time. For me, that’s always been the mission of our organization and my calling as an artist.