​“The Son Also Rises” Shines Light Close to Home

One could say that Ernest Hemingway’s self-exile to Paris was somewhat analogous to a gap year—similar to that which inspired the new student-written play “The Son Also Rises.” Patric C. W. Verrone ’18 wrote] the play after his own gap year, when he traveled around Europe and read Hemingway’s novel “The Sun Also Rises.” The young, hopeless characters of the Lost Generation captured Verrone’s attention and led to his 21st-century reimagining of the work.

Originally, Verrone’s script was a one-act; the Blank Theater in Hollywood performed that version of it last summer. After returning to Harvard, Verrone found himself repeatedly revising the story. Now, he and Jamie P. Herring ’18 are co-directing a new production of the piece, which will run Oct. 8-Oct.11 in the Adams Pool Theater. The story, renewed with themes of fluid sexuality and modern existentialism, is the expatriate life—millennial-style. Jake Barnes, the protagonist, spends his time with a group of friends who have also dropped out of Princeton and moved west to California. Though Barnes wants to be a writer, the group’s motivations pull him in weirder directions. The entire crew eventually ends up at a music festival called (winkingly) Pampalana.

Benjamin I. Ubiñas ’19, who plays Jake Barnes, views his character as a young man torn between two motivations. “I see it as a struggle between a desire to rebel and a desire to produce,” Ubiñas says. Like many students, Barnes and his cohort want to assert their sense of youth while also being pragmatic.

The cast hopes their characters’ search for what matters most comes across in the play—even as they get rip-roaring drunk and sleep indiscriminately with one another. That search might feel familiar to many Harvard students; Verrone feels that many of the play’s moments are directly drawn from life on campus. “A lot of them are very exaggerated people, but people you could run into on Mass. Ave on Friday night,” he says.

Verrone says he wants to spark conversation. “This is my exaggerated, hyper-realistic version of what I think people our age are like. And I just wanted to put it in front of everyone and be like, do you agree? Is this just bullshit? Or is this real?” he says. In the ongoing back-and-forth over millennial identity, head-shaking and naysaying are common and consensus is rare; “The Son Also Rises” aims to add its voice to that debate.