Arts of War on the Web

Standing O Productions, a new theater company in Severna Park, Maryland, will be present its version of the Vietnam War play Tracers Nov. 13-22. The play, first put together by a group of Vietnam veterans in Los Angeles in 1980, is a collage of interrelated scenes that follows the lives of a group of grunts as they move from basic training, on to combat in Vietnam, and to their homecoming.

For more info on dates, times and ticket prices, go to www.standingoproductions.org or call 410-647-8412

To learn more about the background of the play, check out the excellent 1985 New York Times article that ran when the play opened at the Public Theater.

On May 17, 1968, during the height of the Vietnam War–and of the antiwar movement–nine people, including two priests and a former nun, broke into a suburban Baltimore draft board (in Catonsville, Maryland), and burned several hundred files with home-made napalm. The protesters, including their leader, Father Daniel Berrigan, were arrested and put on trial, an event that was a media sensation in which the defendants were dubbed “the Catonsville Nine.”

Daniel Berrigan went on to write “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine,” a play based on the bombastic trail’s goings on. It premiered in 1971 in Los Angeles. Since then, the play has had several incarnations. The latest is a now-touring production by the non-profit, politically oriented Actors’ Gang of Hollywood founded by, among others, the actor Tim Robbins.

The show features an ensemble cast going through their paces on a bare-bones, abstract courtroom set, behind which looms an American flag. “While one is humbled by the nine’s moral rigor, the play is more sermon than debate,” Charlotte Stoudt wrote in her recent L.A. Times review. “The real drama lies in the conversion stories each defendant recounts — experiences after which they could not continue their lives as before. Bigotry in the South, bombing in Africa, murder in Guatemala: The Berrigans may have been on trial, but it’s the American government that is indicted here.”

The next gig for the play will be on September 12 at the Reston, Virginia, Community Center, followed by will two performances, September 17 and 18,  at the University of Maryland’s Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center in College Park. It then heads for Australia’s Brisbane Festival for three performances, September 24-27.

Several events, under the rubric of  “the Catonsville Nine Engagement Project,” will take place in and around the U. of Maryland in conjunction with the play.  At 7:00 p.m. on Friday, September 18, for example, there will be a panel discussion at the Robert and Arlene Kogod Studio Theatre dealing with the university during the Vietnam War. Among other things, a student uprising shut down the school in 1970 following the incursion into Cambodia. The events are part of the U of M’s “Semester on Peace.”

Bryan Doerries founded The Philoctetes Project, an innovative form of psychodrama using ancient Greek plays, in New York City last year as a way to help emotionally troubled active-duty military personnel and veterans.

In a recent article in the Kenyon College Alumni Bulletin Doerries said that he thought up the idea of inviting veterans and active-duty military to see 2,500-year-old dramas because they deal with timeless themes about combat stress. The idea of the program, which Doerries directs, is that professionally acted readings of his translations of two plays by Sophocles can help audience members, who often repress their feelings about these subjects, at least begin to examine the issues, and perhaps begin to deal with them.

The readings are bare-bones affairs. There are no costumes, sets, or props. The actors sit in a semi-circle on an otherwise empty stage, reading their lines from behind metal stands or tables holding their scripts.

“I’m astounded by how much these plays resonate with my experiences and those of my friends and colleagues,” one veteran who took in one reading in New York City said. “The commonalities are stunning. I can say with complete certainty that every military man and woman in this theater has seen something of themselves in those characters onstage.”

“I think the narrations are timeless,” another veteran said. “The weapons may have changed, but the results are the same as they were centuries ago. We’re still human beings killing each other.”

Tonight, Friday, February 20, is the first of ten performances at the Kensington Arts Theatre in Kensington, Maryland, of One Red Flower, new musical play inspired by the book, Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam, the great oral history put together by Bernie Edelman for the New York Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission. The book also was the genesis of the 1987 movie of the same name.

This version of One Red Flower, with book, music and lyrices by Emmy-award winning director Paris Barclay, is directed by Craig Pettinati and produced by Jenna Ballard. The play examines the lives of six young soldiers serving together in Vietnam, primarily from 1969-70.

The other performance dates are Feb. 21, 27, 28 and March 5, 6, 7, 8, 13, and 14. For more info go to the Kensington Arts Theatre web site.

Photo by Tina Barney

There’s a terrific profile of the playwright David Rabe by John Lahr in the November 24 New Yorker. In the article, headlined “Land of Lost Souls: David Rabe’s America,” Lahr deconstructs all of Rabe’s work for the stage, including Streamers, one of four of Rabe’s plays set during the Vietnam War.

Lahr tells us that Rabe began Streamers—which is now playing through January 11 at the Roundabout Theatre in New York—”soon after he was discharged, in 1967, from the Army’s 68th Medical Group.” According to the article, Rabe was drafted into the Army in 1965, when he was 25, after having dropped out of graduate school (in theater at Villanova). He spent a year in Vietnam “doing clerical work and guard duty and building hospitals.” Rabe’s unit, Lahr notes, “was not under daily threat; he was not exposed, he said, ‘to the horrors of risk.”’

Although Rabe felt “secondhand guilt about not being in a combat unit,” his service in the Vietnam War had a long and strong impact on his post-war life and his writing career. To find out the details, check out the article on line.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

David Rabe, one of the nation’s most honored playwrights and screenwriters, is best known for Streamers, the last of his Vietnam War trilogy. Streamers, which Rabe wrote in 1976, is set in a basic training barracks in Virginia in 1965. It deals with the tensions that arise among a small group of trainees as the Vietnam War hovers ominously in the background. Rabe was drafted into the Army and served in a military hospital in Vietnam in 1966-67.

The latest New York City production of Streamers, by the Roundabout Theater Company, opened early in November and is scheduled to run through January 11 at the Laura Pels Theater. Directed by Scott Ellis, the play, which received a generally favorable review by Charles Isherwood in The New York Times, features Hale Appleman (as Richie), Brad Fleischer (as Billy) and J. D. Williams (Roger) (above).

For ticket information, click here.

The latest production of Frost/Nixon, the play written by Peter Morgan about the 1977 TV interviews between Brit journalist David Frost and the recently resigned U.S. President, opens November 11 and runs until November 30 at the Eisenhower Theater in The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Stacy Keach (above, in the chair) plays Richard Nixon in this docudrama, which deals with many aspects of Nixon’s presidency, including his Vietnam War policies.

The play is coming to the silver screen on December 5 when director Ron Howard’s version hits the nation’s multiplexes. The movie stars Frank Langella as Nixon and Michael Sheen (who played Tony Blair in The Queen and a severely disabled man in Music Within, the under appreciated biopic about Vietnam veteran Richard Pimentel. You can see the movie trailer, as well as a video of the original televised interview, at this New York Times web page.

Brian Delate (above) is among the handful of Vietnam veterans who have made a career in show biz—in his case, as an actor, and now a director. Delate, who served as a draftee infantry sergeant in Vietnam in 1968-69, has appeared in a ton of movies, including The Truman Show, The Shawshank Redemption, Spiderman, and Far From Heaven, and TV shows such as Law & Order, Sex and The City, and NY Undercover.

Delate’s latest endeavor is Soldier’s Heart, a feature film that won the Best Narrative Feature Award at this year’s GI Film Festival in Washington. Delate wrote, directed, and has a supporting role in this powerful movie, which looks at a Vietnam veteran’s battle with post-traumatic stress disorder. You can take watch a trailer on You Tube

To find out more about the film, including how to order a DVD at Delate’s website.

I’ve known about Susan Austin Roth’s play, Missing Pages, for several years now, ever since she contacted us to help with verisimilitude questions. The play centers on the relationship between a World War II veteran of the Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps who is beginning to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease and his Vietnam veteran son, from whom he has been estranged for several years.

The story was inspired by Roth’s father’s war diary and correspondence, which she discovered after he died, as well as by one of the best Vietnam War memoirs,  John Ketwig’s And a Hard Rain Fell…a G.I.’s True Story of the War in Vietnam.

It’s a long process to bring a serious drama to the stage. Missing Pages has been going through that process since 2006. Part of it includes readings at several venues. The next ones will take place in New York City on Friday, November 7, at 8:00 p.m., and Saturday, November 8, at 7:00 p.m. at the Studio Theatre at 549 W. 52nd St., between 10th & 11th Streets.

Admission is free, but reservations are recommended. To do so, call 212-247-4982, ext. 105, or send an email request to boxoffice@ensemblestudiotheatre.org

They call it “Literature to Life.” The definition: bringing a book to life on the stage using one actor doing dramatic readings of verbatim passages from the book. The concept was developed by the American Place Theatre in New York City and designed for middle and high school students.

The Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts in Hartford, Connecticut, has taken the concept to a higher level. During the current 2007-08 season The Bushnell has chosen five books from the L to L roster and turned them into performances for adults. The series began last October with Richard Wright’s searing memoir, Black Boy.

It ends with a series of performances beginning on June 23 of Tim O’Brien’s masterful The Things They Carried, a series of interconnected Vietnam War short stories featuring a character named Tim O’Brien.

Tickets are on sale now. For more info, go to http://bushnell.org