Arts of War on the Web

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.

One of the greatest college football games was played on November 23, 1968, during the height of the Vietnam War when undefeated Harvard scored sixteen points in the last 42 seconds of The Game, including a two-point conversion, to tie arch-rival (and, until then, undefeated) Yale, 29-29.

I, along with more than a half million other Vietnam veterans, didn’t have the chance to see that game, nor read about the next day, since we were otherwise engaged in Southeast Asia.  Now we will be able to get a feel for what happened that day with Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29, Kevin Rafferty’s just-out 40th-anniversary documentary, which has received rave reviews in The New York Times and the Boston Phoenix.

In the film, Rafferty (who, among other things, directed, produced, and edited the very funny and kind-of-scary documentary Atomic Cafe [1982], which looks at the bomb and the fifties, and shot Michael Moore’s first doc, Roger and Me [1989]), uses contemporary interviews with 40 former players as well as grainy black and white footage of the amazing game.

It is quite a cast, including Harvard offensive guard Tommy Lee Jones (yes, that Tommy Lee Jones, who roomed with Al Gore at Harvard) and Yale captain and quarterback Brian Dowling (above), the legendary athlete immortalized as “B.D.” by his Yale classmate Garry Trudeau in “Doonesbury.” Aside from taking place at the war’s height, the film deals directly with the conflict in the form of ne of the players, former Harvard defensive back Pat Conroy,  who talks to Rafferty about being a Vietnam veteran.

Harvard Beats Yale (you have to love the title, which is what the Harvard Crimson used as its headline) is now on the documentary circuit. To see if it’s coming to your town, go to the film’s website.

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.

When I learned last week that Larry Heinemann, the noted Vietnam veteran novelist, is now teaching at Texas A&M, I wrote an entry on this page. Then I remembered that another celebrated novelist who served on the ground in the Vietnam War, Tim O’Brien, also has been teaching in Texas.

In fact, O’Brien—whose surrealistic, in-country novel Going After Cacciato won the National Book Award, and whose novelistically written memoir If I Die in A Combat Zone and interconnected short stories, The Things They Carried, deal with the Vietnam War—has been teaching at Texas State University, San Marcos since 1999.

According to a page on the school’s web site, ten years ago, when O’Brien was living in Cambridge, Mass., Tom Grimes, the novelist who teaches at TSUSM, invited him to come to the San Marcos, which is located between Austin and San Antonio in the Lone Star State.

“I spoke with Tim in 1998, and he agreed to come here for a year,” Grimes, who is is the head of Texas State’s MFA in creative writing program, said. “He came, and loved the program so much that he decided to stay, and of course we arranged that.”

O’Brien now lives in Central Texas, where he is working on his next book. That one, he says, will be based on his experiences as a 61-year-old father of two boys, ages 2 and 4. “It’s a combination of fiction and nonfiction,” O’Brien—who named his main character “Tim O’Brien” in The Things They Carried—says.

He teaches full time every other year at Texas State (formerly known as Southwest Texas State), spending one semester teaching MFA students, and the next semester talking to undergraduate English classes, conducting small workshops, and participating in campus events such as Scholars Day. On alternate years, he teaches workshops to MFA students in the Creative Writing Program.

“It’s the kind of environment I can thrive in,” O’Brien says of Texas State. “The students are really top notch, and my colleagues, like Dagoberto Gilb and Tom Grimes, are good teachers. They take it seriously, work hard at it, and they’re also good writers.”

Attention: Veterans of the Battle of Hamburger Hill (aka Hill 937 on Ap Bia Mountain) in May of 1969.

John DiConsiglio, a writer with Scholastic Press, which publishes books and magazines used in schools as teaching aides, is working on a book for high school students on Hamburger Hill.

“The book would focus on the real-life stories of real veterans,” DiConsiglio told us. “This style
connects well with kids. They are fascinated to hear real experiences rather than read from dry textbooks.”

He is therefore looking for veterans of that engagement who would like to share their stories for the book. “I’m trying to talk to as many people from as many different perspectives as I can,” he told us today (November 13). “Ideally, I would talk with them over the phone in the next few weeks. I’d try not to take up too much of their time.”

If you’d like to help, call 703-533-3758 or email john.diconsiglio@verizon.net

Larry Heinemann (above), the much-honored novelist who put in a life-changing 1967-68 tour of duty in the Vietnam War with a 25th Infantry Division mechanized infantry battalion, has journeyed from his home town of Chicago to become Writer in Residence in the English Department at Texas A&M University in College Station.

Heinemann’s autobiographical Close Quarters (1977) is one of the most under appreciated in-county Vietnam War novels. His second literary effort, Paco’s Story (1987), a biting tale of the war’s brutal emotional aftermath, won the National Book Award for fiction. Heinemann followed that with a comic novel set in his home town, Cooler By the Lake, which came out in 1992.

Heinemann’s most-recent book is Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam , (2005) which is part memoir, part travelogue, and part political treatise. It’s a creatively written look at the author’s eventful Vietnam War tour, as well as a meditation on two of his trips to Vietnam in the early 1990s, along with a strong indictment of the politicians and generals who waged that war.

Aside from teaching writing in the Lone Star State, Heinemann also is working on a murder mystery and a collection of Vietnamese folktales. For a sample poem “The Geese” (first published in Hanoi), and an excerpt from Black Virgin Mountain, go to this Texas A&M web site.

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.

The new Fall 2008 issue of Bridges, the newsletter written and produced by Lindy Poling’s Lessons of Vietnam history students at Millbrook High School in Raleigh, North Carolina, is now on the web.

The issue includes “Unlocking My Father’s Past,” an article by student Michael Nguyen about his father, Luong Nguyen, who as a young South Vietnamese Navy officer went to The Naval
Officers Candidate Academy in Newport, Rhode Island, as part of the Nixon Administration’s Vietnamization program, then served in Vietnam until the war ended in 1975. After the war he was put in a re-education camp for five long years—an experience that the father had never shared with his son.

Michael Nguyen was born in Vietnam in 1991, and came to this country in 1993 “through a humanitarian program that allowed Vietnamese POWs who had spent five or more years in a reeducation camp to immigrate to the U.S,” he says in the article.

It was through a class assignment that Luong Nguyen first told his war and post-war experiences to his son. “Hearing my father’s story for the first time was a surreal moment in my life,” Michael Nguyen said. “Learning about my father’s experiences made me realize that this was a man who has sacrificed so much for my very existence. My Lessons of Vietnam class became the key to opening the door to my father’s past—a door bolted shut for many years.”

Choreographer David Dorfman’s “underground” isn’t exactly your normal dance-theater production. As it’s (non-capitalized) name might suggest, is based on the violent anti-Vietnam War protests of the radical Weather Underground in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.

As you might surmise, the piece consists of energetic groups of dancers moving about the stage raising clenched fists and pantomiming throwing objects that could be rocks or even bombs. The dancer/actors also make mini-speeches about the goals of violent protest.

The 50-minute show has been making the rounds of theaters around the nation. Next stop: Thursday and Friday (November 6 and 7) at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland in College Park.