HOME is Sweet Sorrow is the third part of Anne L. Thompson Stretching’s Blood Trilogy. It is perhaps the most cerebral of the three shows. Where Parts I and II (A Lesson in Blood and A Long Way from Home) have multiple protagonists and fast-moving action while exploring dysfunctional family relationships in a dysfunctional society, HOME is Sweet Sorrow definitely revolves around the story of Willie Taylor and his 1971 return from Vietnam.

When we last saw Willie in 1967, he was the black sheep of a damaged family. Although a “good-boy” he was the member of his family whose ideas were largely ignored. He couldn’t find a job that he could both be interested in and hold. When we meet him in 1971, he has returned to the Brooklyn apartment as a temporarily paralyzed veteran, disillusioned and broken by four years of war in an unforgiving jungle where the US may have done as much damage to its troops as the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese did.

The pace of HOME is much slower than the first two parts of The Blood Trilogy. The audience is left to absorb each of Willie’s revelations about Vietnam. The killing of women and children, sometimes justified, sometimes out of fear, never being able to see the enemy, getting doused by Agent Orange, racist Officers, American soldiers getting fragged by non-Comms all are part of the memories that haunt Willie.

Laquan Halley as Willie provides the finest performance I have seen from him. It is much more nuanced and layered than he has done, or been asked to do, in the past. Kevin Leonard as the family “patriarch” gives an incredibly good performance as Jacob Taylor. It is the first time that Thompson-Stretching ask him to show empathy, and he becomes the only character that can feel what Willie is going through and how much Willie most endure on his lonely journey. He offers support when asked and only when asked. Leonard has provided many other fine performances, but this was the best I’ve seen.

Patricia Fields as the swing played the family “matriarch”, Shanna Taylor, in the performance I saw probably did not fully understand the power that “Shanna” had in previous parts of the trilogy and had some difficulty portraying her as a powerful woman who was breaking under the life’s stresses. I would suspect that Gina McKinney who played the role in A Long Way from Home would have exploited the breakdown that Shanna is going through when she took the stage in HOME. The use of the Church and Jesus as an escape from reality would have been something she slipped in and out of rather than a constant.

Joy Foster as Luella Taylor is asked to do much less here than she was in A Long Way from Home. But her relationships with Rommel Sermons’ Sgt. Thomas Avery seems as problematic as her relations with white realtor Joe Falco. The audience, from observing Sgt. Avery, knows that this might be a man who goes along to get along and may not have the best interests of anyone but himself in mind.

HOME is Sweet Sorrow is an extraordinary cap to Thompson-Stretching’s Blood Trilogy, but to fully appreciate it, it needs to be done in Rep where we can see all three parts either on a weekend or within a week. Done that way the really powerful impact of Thompson-Stretching’s writing will be fully absorbed.