Last Tuesday evening in Midtown Manhattan, Jackson Reffitt, a 22-year-old from Texas, cried through the first professional play he’d ever seen, which was about him.
“Fatherland,” which recently opened Off Broadway, tells the story of how Jackson came to turn in his father, Guy Reffitt, a member of the antigovernment Three Percenter militia, for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. It depicts Guy growing increasingly radicalized and agitated, stocking up on weapons and boasting to Jackson, a Bernie Sanders supporter, that something big was in the offing. He eventually carried a gun to the Capitol, where he threatened to drag Nancy Pelosi out of the building by her ankles. A few days later, he told Jackson and his sister, “If you turn me in, you’re a traitor, and traitors get shot.”
What he didn’t realize is that Jackson, panicked by his father’s violent outbursts, had sent a tip to the F.B.I. on Christmas Eve of 2020. After the Capitol attack, he met with an agent, and later testified at the trial where Guy was convicted and then sentenced to more than seven years in prison.
Jackson had nothing to do with the creation of the play, a piece of documentary theater in which every line was taken from official sources like court records and recordings. “Fatherland” uses his words and his story but not his name — the characters are referred to simply as Father and Son. Jackson first learned of it from a text from his sister when it opened in Los Angeles this year. But he’d since been in touch with its creator, Stephen Sachs, and decided he had to see it for himself, traveling to New York and staying with friends in Brooklyn.
The experience of sitting in the dark and watching the worst moments of his life recreated onstage was at once wrenching and therapeutic. He hadn’t expected it all to feel so real.
One reason I was eager to speak to Jackson, an earnest, polite community-college student wearing a T-shirt celebrating labor organizing, is that his story, while extreme, is also archetypical of the Trump years, which have been marked by countless tales of family estrangement. Some of these ruptures involve famous people, like George and Kellyanne Conway, Elon Musk and his daughter Vivian, and Rudy Giuliani and his daughter, Caroline. Many more are anonymous. A 2017 Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 13 percent of respondents had ended a relationship with a family member or close friend because of the presidential election. When Kamala Harris chose Tim Walz as her running mate, girls sobbed on TikTok that he reminded them of their dads before they started mainlining MAGA rage.
