Bringing It All Back Home is a one-act play by Terrence McNally. It is a biting satire of a middle-class family and their reaction to losing a son in Vietnam.Dramatists Play Service, Inc, Terrence McNallyplaydatabase.com: Bringing It All Back Home
Productions The play was produced in New Haven in 1969Zinman, Toby Silverman."Selected Bibliography" Terrence McNally: A Casebook Routledge, April 8, 2014, , p. 181 and at the Provincetown Playhouse, New York City, 1971."Biography, Famous Works" filmreference.com, accessed April 29, 2014
It was produced by Solid Hang at the Collective Unconscious, New York, in September 2005."'Bringing It All Back Home' at the Collective Unconscious" newyorktheatreguide.com, August 29, 2005, accessed March 2, 2016
Concept This play is one of several of McNally's that dealt with the Vietnam and Iraq wars: Botticelli (1968), Witness (1968), and Some Men (2007). Peter Wolfe (professor of English at the University of Missouri-St. Louis) notes that Bringing It All Back Home is an anti-war play, and also examines the family.Wolfe, Peter. "Chapter Three", The Theater of Terrence McNally: A Critical Study, McFarland, 2013, , p.55
Plot The father of the household makes obscene phone calls while his teen son and daughter fight about the illegal drugs at their high school; the mother blots it all out. Then the body of their son Jimmy, killed in the Vietnam war, arrives. A television station wants to film their reactions. Jimmy arises and wonders why he died.
References
Further reading Terrence McNally : 15 short plays, Terrence McNally, Smith and Kraus, Lyme, NH, c1994,
External links Review of Bringing It All Back Home by Scott Makin