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Full-Length Play, Drama / 4w, 7m. Robert Anderson. This moving and perceptive work, by one of our most distinguished playwrights, probes into the disquieting alienation that can exist between father and son—and which time and old age can only deepen—despite the best intentions of both. "…written with… Request license. Get the Script.
I Never Sang for My Father (Original, Play, Drama, Broadway) opened in New York City Jan 25, 1968 and played through May 11, 1968.
I Never Sang for My Father is a 1970 American drama film, based on the 1968 play of the same name. It tells the story of a widowed college professor who feels dominated by his aging father, yet still has regrets about his plan to leave him behind when he remarries and moves to California.
Based on the Robert Anderson play, it is the story of an 80-year-old man's dominance over his widowed son, and belligerence towards his daughter who...
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Old West
Midway through Act 1 of I Never Sang for My Father, Gene Garrison, the hero, steps forward and addresses the audience, confiding to them his father’s lifelong addiction to television Westerns: “[W]e hurried through [dinner] to rush home to one of my Father’s rituals … [t]he television Western.... He would sit in front of them hour after hour … falling asleep in one and waking up in the middle of the next one … never knowing the difference …” (Anderson, I Never Sang for My Father,p. 19). The W...
Rotarians
The play’s Tom Garrison is a member of the Rotary Club International, a service club for businessmen (and later, businesswomen) and professionals. The Rotarians meet each week to discuss and implement community projects in education, citizenship, and social programs, as well as to participate on the international level in encouraging peace between nations. They are called “Rotarians” because originally their meetings would rotate between members’ places of business week by week. The first Rot...
The graying of America
It was in the 1960s that people started to take note of the general aging of American society; as one textbook on aging from 1960 notes, “there will soon be … almost 50 million of us beyond 50 years of age” (Tibbits and Donahue, p. xiv; original emphasis). Sociologists and economists began to speculate on the profound changes that a significant population of seniors might have on the American way of life—the changes, more specifically, that might transpire in employment patterns, pension bene...
The plot
Act 1 opens at a train station, where forty-year-old Gene Garrison has come to pick up his aging parents, Tom Garrison (nearly eighty) and Margaret Garrison (seventy-eight) who have returned from Florida to their New York State home. Tom is a domineering man who believes that he is the only one who has a sense of what is really happening around him; he has a terrible cough, is more or less deaf, and obviously ill. He feels concerned for his wife rather than himself, however; she needs a wheel...
Roosevelt
“’[G]o through [obstacles] or over them, but never around them.’ Teddy Roosevelt said that, I took it down in shorthand for practice.... Any young man in this country, who has a sound mind and a sound body, who will set himself an objective, can achieve anything he wants within reason” (I Never Sang for My Father, p. 38). Teddy Roosevelt is one of Tom Garrison’s heroes, a model of behavior to which the old man has clung for his whole life. During Roosevelt’s presidency (1901-1908), the United...
Production
I Never Sang for My Father began as a film script entitled The Tiger, which was completed in the summer of 1962. It was then sent upon a convoluted journey in an attempt to bring it to stage or screen, a process so arduous it seemed unlikely to ever see production. Anderson first offered the film script to Fred Zinneman, who praised it and stated that he would love to work on the movie as long as Spencer Tracy would play the role of Tom Garrison. Tracy declined the offer and meanwhile another...
Adler, Thomas P. Robert Anderson.Boston: Twayne, 1978. Anderson, Robert. I Never Sang for My Father. New York: Dramatists’ Play Service, 1968. Brubaker, Timothy H., ed. Family Relationships in Later Life.Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1983. Cawelti, John G. “The Gunfighter and Society.” The American West5, no. 2 (March 1968), 30-5, 76-7. Guernsey, Ot...
This is both the substance of—and the trouble with—Robert Anderson’s new Broadway play, I Never Sang for My Father. Sometimes poignant, sometimes sentimental, always earnest, it...
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Meet the original Broadway cast of I Never Sang for My Father on Broadway, and find out who was in the Original Cast, what parts they played and more.
