Life During Wartime
Two plays examine war from far behind the lines
By Don Shirley
Other than shopping, what are a citizen’s responsibilities during wartime? Several playwrights are exploring that subject.
In Jessica Goldberg’s spare but quietly powerful Body Politic, an Echo Theater Company production at the Zephyr Theatre, a Hollywood screenwriter (Kristina Lear) and an Army captain (Michael James Reed) are at odds over this topic and others. She’s asking for permission to research a script by spending time in the wards at Walter Reed Hospital; he’s the officer who denies her request.
The captain lost a foot during his own service in Iraq. But he’s going to put his best foot forward, so to speak. He swears that none of the soldiers in his ward will end up holding scrawled signs begging for handouts, as some of the Vietnam vets did. He tries to persuade the screenwriter that his loss was in the cause of her “freedom” and points out her distance from the reality of the battlefield.
Yet his refusal to show her the ward is surely motivated, at least in part, by his unwillingness for her to witness the psychological wreckage of one particular patient, a blinded vet who’s asking the captain for help in committing suicide.
The same actor who plays the blinded vet, Jeremy Maxwell, also (and virtually unrecognizably) plays the vet’s opposite – a smooth-talking Hollywood exec who’s supervising the writer’s film project. The Hollywood guy’s primary interest in the project is its dramatic and financial potential. His hope to make big bucks is so basic that he hardly needs to mention it.
The writer and the captain achieve a wary mutual respect, tinged with sexual attraction. But their relationship reaches a level of deeper candor after the writer meets and interviews the captain’s pregnant wife (Samantha Shelton), who fears that her husband might return to Iraq for yet another tour.
Goldberg’s dialogue is mostly restrained and conversational. Although Goldberg wrote big emotional scenes in her Good Thing (Center Theatre Group, 2001), here she appears determined to keep the anger that accompanies most discussions of Iraq from going over the top. Chris Fields’s staging honors that goal. But the closing scene breaks the conversational style, with haunting results.
At one point, the screenwriter refuses to accept the captain’s contention that she, as a taxpaying American, is partially responsible for America’s policies in Iraq. She replies that her Jewish relatives in Europe weren’t responsible for their fate in the Holocaust.
In The Accomplices, at the Fountain Theatre, Bernard Weinraub examines which Americans were responsible back then, and points the finger at an array of top-level bigwigs who thwarted efforts to admit more refugees.
The chief villain was State Department assistant secretary Breckinridge Long (Brian Carpenter). But Weinraub argues that Long’s efforts were abetted by some Jewish leaders who feared that floods of refugees would encourage anti-Semitism, including Rabbi Stephen Wise (Morlan Higgins) and presidential aide Sam Rosenman (Gregory G. Giles). President Roosevelt is charged primarily with neglect. James Harper’s FDR has a gripping moment when he suddenly – and mostly silently – begins to understand the ramifications of that neglect.
The opposition to Long was led by several recent Jewish immigrants. Weinraub focuses on Peter Bergson, a.k.a. Hillel Kook (Steven Schub), a charismatic but hot-tempered agitator, as well as his cooler pal Sam Merlin (William Dennis Hurley). They achieved prestigious help from screenwriter Ben Hecht (Dennis Gersten) and, eventually, from Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau (Gersten again).
Weinraub brings a seldom-dramatized chapter of history to vivid life. Director Deborah LaVine navigates the docu-dramatic details in a consistently lucid and fast-paced production.
After seeing these plays, I’m not certain what we citizens should do during a war. But I’m pretty sure that shopping isn’t the top priority.
Body Politic, Zephyr Theatre, Melrose district. (800) 413-8669. echotheatercompany.com.
Closes August 24.
The Accomplices, Fountain Theatre, east Hollywood. (323) 663-1525. FountainTheatre.com. Closes August 24.
For more reviews, go to lacitybeat.com and click on LA&E and Stage.
Published: 07/30/2008
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