The America Play

The Foundling Father is a gravedigger, and he decides to translate that skill into digging a replica of the Great Hole of History, a theme park he visited on his honeymoon. The Foundling Father remembers the original Great Hole as a place where real historical people existed and could be observed, although Lucy later explains that these people were only actors impersonating historical figures. As a gravedigger, the Foundling Father lays the dead to rest, providing a marked and categorized place to memorialize regular people. But he longs to dig for greater men, imagining how, if he had been alive earlier, Mary Todd Lincoln might have called on him to bury President Lincoln.

But those who are deemed historically great can only exist in the past. Therefore, the Foundling Father sets out to dig a new Great Hole of History as a site where he can be Lincoln. In the original Great Hole the Foundling Father describes the different historical people as coexisting simultaneously, gathered as an ensemble of important figures rather than within their own historical contexts. The Great Hole is also a place where Black histories are lost beneath the surface, just as the Foundling Father’s body and the artifacts of his life become lost.

When Lucy and Brazil search for the Foundling Father, they take a different tactic. Rather than relying on a construction of history, they dig beneath the surface, listening for echoes and voices, and finding physical remnants. By digging, Brazil is attempting to stir up the past, unlike gravedigging, which lays the past to rest. Although Brazil finds his father’s body and some of his belongings, these artifacts don’t tell a full story, and many of them are insignificant. Brazil interprets them and creates his own understanding of his father’s life. In the end, the Foundling Father must also be buried and laid to rest, but in a place where he is no longer lost.