Ron Bottitta and Patrick Keleher Photo by Maria Baranova

Joel Daavid's simple set–two desks, an upstage chair, an abstract backdrop–tells us we'll be in a courtroom, and Alison Brummer's very red lighting suggests heated exchanges to follow. With good reason: The trial is that of Guy Reffitt, a name that might be unfamiliar to you, but whose fate isn't. The self-professed patriot–simply "Father" in Fatherland, his name is never uttered–was the first insurgent up the Capitol steps on January 6, and the first to be convicted. What's unusual in his case is who ratted on him: his teenage son Jackson, here just "Son." No names? Sachs may be overreaching in trying to universalize their story.

It's quite a story, though. Father (Ron Bottitta) was a successful oil worker, one who rose handily from driller to supervisor, taking his wife and three kids with him to Malaysia for a long-term assignment. When oil prices collapsed in the mid-2010s, he lost his rig gig, trekking back to Texas and poverty. Only mildly political till then, he read "The Art of the Deal" and suddenly became entranced with all things Trump, most especially the former president's rants about the U.S. "becoming a socialist dumping ground for criminals, junkies, Marxists, thugs, radicals, and dangerous refugees that no other country wants." You'll hear a lot of Trump voiceovers in Fatherland, whether you want to or not.

Father joined the Oath Keepers, the Texas Three Percenters (so called because of their utterly false contention that only three percent of colonists were involved in the American Revolution), and several other far-right organizations, and devoted increasing amounts of time and artillery to their causes. His story from here reads like that of any January 6-er: Convinced that the 2020 election was stolen, he eagerly drove 1,400 miles to Washington, well-armed, and led the procession up the Capitol steps. As his defense attorney (Larry Poindexter) points out, he didn't actually enter the Capitol or commit any violence.

While Father was rushing headlong to the right, Son (Patrick Keleher) was veering to the left, and a Father-Son relationship that had always been, as Son tells the prosecuting attorney (Anna Khaja), "pretty great," curdled badly, leading to violent threats from Dad–at one point he chillingly tells his offspring, "I put you in this fucking world, I can take you out." With violence escalating at home, including against his mother, Son makes a vital decision, the whole reason for Fatherland: He informs on Father, to the FBI.

Here's the thing. The text of Fatherland, the script says, "comes from court evidence, public statements, and the official transcript of The United States vs. Guy Wesley Reffitt." Sachs invented nothing. We'll have to take him at his word, but much of the Father-Son interplay is so intimate, so personal, I find it hard to wrap my head around its being out there for anybody to see. Son, on Christmas Eve: "Dad, please be safe in D.C. You want to be an important person who makes a difference; you're going about it in all the wrong ways. You're, like, risking not only your business but your life. That isn't something to just throw away." That's public record, down to the "like"? Son did grant a lot of interviews, including a famous one with CNN, but a public record that contributes pages and pages of dialogue is difficult to fathom.

And maybe limiting Fatherland to that record was a mistake. Voluminous as it is, it leaves out a lot: How did Father and Son develop such different political perspectives in the first place? What of the mother and two sisters, about whom we hear practically nothing? What happened after sentencing–do Father and Son have any contact at all, how cordial is it, and how has Son's relationship with the rest of the family improved or deteriorated since this 2022 trial? No clue.

The senior Reffitt probably screamed a lot; Bottitta sure does, and while there may be a lot of accuracy to his blustering masculinity, there's not a lot of variety to it. Keleher finds more range of mood in Son, who, as he says several times, genuinely loves his dad; the emotions on Keleher's face are so readable, you may weep along with him at moments. Poindexter and Khaja have much less to play, as the attorneys–calculating and steely, respectively–but do so capably. Sachs, who also directs, keeps the pace brisk, and while there's a lot of face-front-and-declare going on, that's what happens in a courtroom, I suppose.

Fatherland, at City Center Stage II in a Fountain Theatre production, is consistently gripping; I wasn't bored for a minute. But I'm not sure how much it adds to a public discussion that's already pretty much calcified. If you watch MSNBC and were all smiles at the images from Chicago in August, you'll see your preconceptions about the far right gratifyingly validated. If you watch Fox and Newsmax, well, you probably don't want to see this, but if you do, you'll nod at Father's perception of how the right's rebellion is "about the disgusting acts the legislative branch has committed on the people for over 50 fucking years." And if you're in the middle, you'll probably just be depressed. Two camps, trapped in their respective bubbles, prone to anger, each bent on silencing the other. Some pick-me-up!