Big Daddy, Crazy Daddy
Your child's story is their own, except that it's yours. Nobody offers that insight better than Tennessee Williams the gay son of an abusive father.
Born Thomas Lanier Williams in Mississippi, the childless playwright dissected the father-son synergy in what is often a throwaway subplot of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." (Currently on Broadway with James Earl Jones as the Big Daddy every actor in the part has been measured against even without knowing.) While the drama is usually billed as a star turn for Maggie, the unsatisfied wife of ex-football star Brick. But in every production whether she shines and Brick's failure comes across as pathos not bathos depends on the the success of the actor playing Brick's father, Big Daddy.
More often, writers just have dads coming along for the ride in their child's life, as does Steve Tolz. In "A Fraction of the Whole," he provides a round-the-world romp where a son in rebelling against the world as he finds it tries to both embrace and repulse his crazy father.
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