In My Father's House would make a gripping play with its tight plot and strong scenes of confrontation, its Ibsenite central character …, and its central unsettling question, which brings together public and private issues of great moment to the black community in modern America yet which opens historical perspectives reaching from slavery days to the present.

The question relates to a profound cleavage between the male generations, between black fathers and sons….

There's little doubt that the Reverend Martin and his ravaged older son are meant to represent historical generations. Also, the year 1969 [the year of the novel's action], a time when much of the impetus of the civil rights movement had been checked, following the King and Robert Kennedy assassinations, and when the cult of the guerilla warrior and of the gun was spreading among disillusioned younger blacks, is deliberately chosen to heighten the intergenerational tension. Gaines...