I Never Sang for My Father

I Never Sang for My Father

by Robert Anderson

Born in New York in 1917, Robert Woodruff Anderson graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard University before serving in the U.S. Navy. He afterward wrote radio and television scripts, taught playwriting, and endured the death of a wife before writing some of his best-known works. I Never Sang for My Father was originally conceived as a film script, and, after a brief Broadway run, it made its screen debut in 1970. At heart a drama about survival, I Never Sang for My Father pits father against son in the struggle to live independently in the face of death and aging. Reflected in the relationship are conflicting influences of the two characters' times.

Events in History at the Time of the Play

Old West. Midway through Act 1 of I Never Sang for My Father, Gene Garrison, the hero, steps forward and addresses the audience, confiding to them his father's lifelong addiction to television Westerns: "[W]e hurried through [dinner] to rush home to one of my Father's rituals... [t]he television Western.... He would sit in front of them hour after hour... falling asleep in one and waking up in the middle of the next one...

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