Thanassis Cambanis

Fallujah, 2004, By Stefan Zaklin

How can theater grapple with America’s contemporary wars? What art can stem from the Global War on Terror, in its tenth year, and can artists make art out of war? More ambitiously can they make art informed by war but not necessarily set in the combat zone or among warriors?

This question propelled the organizers of a wrenching and thought-provoking night at the New York Theatre Workshop on Monday.

Emily Morse and Rachel Dickstein curated the evening, which featured short performances – extracts – from five plays, each of them engaging a question that arises from America at war (authors included Sophocles and the contemporary Pulitzer Prize winner Sarah Ruhl). All five creators (a blend of playwrights, directors, actors, classicists and documentarians) were attractively humble about their enterprise, and for the most part avoided didactic politics and manipulative emotions.

What it highlighted for me – as a reporter who spent four years focused almost exclusively on the ground level of America’s wars in the Middle East, and as a consumer of fiction, film and theater – was the absence of contemporary touchstones that can speak to and then transcend today’s American experience of war. The most powerful scenes on stage at the New York Theatre Workshop last week were set in Troy, three millennia ago. When we look for more recent works of art, we’re most likely to find something kindred, something that speaks across contexts, in the literature and film, or in Shakespeare.

Documentary has valiantly tried to fill in the gap, and has yielded some astoundingly powerful works – Waltz With Bashir and Restrepo leap to mind – but the first addresses Israel’s memory of Lebanon in 1982 and the second accomplishes much of its magic by staying close to the young men in the Korengal Valley and away from our complicated position here at home.

Guilt, or cloying sentimentality, has spoiled most of the Hollywood movies about this last decade of war; the best of the bunch as a war story was the fantastical “Hurt Locker,” which succeeded by mining combat for high drama and successfully composing psychologically compelling portraits of its twentysomething fighters. Broadway hasn’t done much better, although from across the Atlantic we got the fabulous “Black Watch” from the National Theatre of Scotland.

VETERAN VOICES

Monday night’s lineup in New York suggested that we’re growing past the first stirrings, and can soon expect some ripe, historically grounded, efforts to speak to our collective experience.

“ReEntry” presented the exact words of Marines interviewed after their return from Iraq and Afghanistan. The authors, Emily Ackerman and KJ Sanchez, both come from military families and ReEntry was clearly a personal labor, executed with love and without judgment. An officer speaks with dry military humor about what it takes to hold it together while fighting, or while waiting back home for a fighter; in one of the biggest laugh lines of the night, he tells people to keep their predictions to themselves “unless you’ve got a crystal ball up your ass.” A Marine raves about the dumbass kids in skater pants, all the stupid Americans who have no idea what’s happening in America’s war zones on the other side of the globe. A woman Marine notes that when she’s out at a bar with her male buddies, strangers buy them all shots – all but her, because they assume she must not be a fighter. A wife jumps into bed and her husband, dreaming of some distant threat, chokes her. He wakes up and apologizes, devastated. “It’s my fault,” she says.

These are telling snippets, scenes from a war, and they hover in a liminal zone between documentary, journalism and theater. They are performed with vigor and humanity, and they are true; they are engaging and socially useful, as a conversation with a real war vet would be. For those who never have met a contemporary American warrior or one of their immediate family members, these will be illuminating monologues – but I’m not sure they’re art.

Kia Corthron’s “Moot the Messenger” was harder to judge; it’s early in production, so we see seated actors read a dramatic physical scene, barely making eye contact with each other. This play brings a journalist and her brother together at the family house, somewhere in the American south; both have been working in Iraq, one as a reporter, the other as a soldier (or Marine, it’s unclear). The brother has lost his legs to friendly fire. He’s bitter and volatile, his sister seems muted with guilt. Their father – a Korea vet – fears telling jokes anymore, and never told his son a single thing about his own war. In a few minutes, the dialogue raised so many political questions, and veered into violence with plates and glasses smashing and the siblings screaming, that in this reading “Moot the Messenger” felt as heavy-handed and political as its title.

BACK IN TIME

Then the evening took a welcome turn; we do better at addressing our present, I suspect, when we look to the past, which felt more and more contemporary the farther we got from the present day. We began to get stories with war in them, rather than war awkwardly packaged into a story.

“Septimus and Clarissa,” adapted from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, gives us the madness of Great War veteran Septimus Smith. You say shell-shocked, I say PTSD. (The Ancient Athenians sometimes described a fog settled around the head of a warrior by a god, temporarily blinding him to reality; other times they referred simply to madness or rage.) All different tags for the same spoiled, ubiquitous ware of war; the battle psyche, scarred sometimes in the trenches, sometimes back at home, from afar. Septimus cannot see his wife, or London, because he hears birds calling in the voice of the friend who died in the trenches; the twitters are calling him to take his own life.

In Sarah Ruhl’s “Passion Play,” a Vietnam veteran returns to South Dakota and meets his three-year old daughter for the first time. He bumbles and fumbles, scares her with a game of airplane; he cannot touch his wife or let her touch him; finally he lays down for the night on the doorstep. He cannot cross his hearth. In a haunting piece of magical realism, his daughter comes to him in the night. He imagines that he controls the wind; she tells him she is a reincarnated soul who died in the last year. “There’s always the next war,” she tells him before instructing him, as a child would, “Now get that war out of your head.” “How?” he asks. No one knows.

AJAX, A MODERN MAN

Wisely, the curators put Sophocles’ “Ajax” last. The extracted scene portrays Ajax just after an insane rage has lifted. The armor of his great friend Achilles, slain on the plains of Troy, is the medal of honor of the time, and should rightfully have gone to Ajax. Instead the ever-political Greek generals rig a contest, and award the armor to wily Odysseus. To reclaim his honor, Ajax swears to murder all his superior officers. The goddess Athina blinds him and directs him to a fold of farm animals instead. He butchers and tortures the animals, only to realize at dawn that he not only has lost his honor but has exposed himself as insane before his men. Even more enraged, he threatens his wife, his son, himself, proposes suicide and mass murder. His wife browbeats him to equanimity, but barely; eventually she leads him to see his son, whom she had hidden lest his shell-shocked (scratch that anachronism: make it war-drunk) father unintentionally kill him in blind rage.

At root, this is a story of a man and his wife battling each other and finding accommodation; their marriage is tender and violent, not a love match but the fruit of an invasion and raid in which Ajax killed his future bride’s father. “I have come to love you,” she says, and goes on to force Ajax to see himself from the outside. His blind rage subsides, but by no means is neutralized. Which as humans might be the best we can do: keep anger at bay, limit the channels through which war can course.

Bryan Doerries, who directed Ajax from his own translation, is no anti-war polemicist. He described himself as a defense contractor, only partly tongue in cheek. The Pentagon has given him a grant to stage his ancient Greek plays 300 times so far at military installations; in a few weeks, Doerries will be performing for the jailers at Guantanamo Bay.

If you believe in God, this is God’s work. Ajax can speak to anyone in any context, entering dark corners of our psyche that perhaps a frothing US Marine in ReEntry cannot. According to Doerries, the military audiences feel an innate rapport with the classics, and have taught him – a classicist – a new reading of the works he has translated. Fighters and their families intuitively grasp ideas like honor, sacrifice, betrayal, Platonic love, and patriotism. A wife expecting her husband back from a fourth or fifth deplyment in Iraq or Afghanistan naturally sees Ajax’s wife as an intimate confederate. They’re both loyal spouses elevated by and trapped in a military society fighting a war that appears without end.

Doerries described a woman who after a performance said, “I understand how Ajax’s wife felt. Every time my husband comes home from a war he fills our house with a trail of invisible dead bodies.” The timelessness of the story and the abstraction of the place, ancient Troy make all the more tangible its timely essence: a proud man at a loss, fighting because we want him to, damaged by the fight, ashamed of the damage.

ATHENS AND AMERICA

Unlike Sophocles’ Athens, in which everyone shared the burdens of generations of continual war, America at war today is not a nation at war; we are a nation that has asked one community to carry on our battles for us. We have segregated our Praetorian class from society at large. Military families by and large live concentrated in scattered enclaves. The rest of America experiences little organic contact with military America. This split was engineered after Vietnam, as part of the professionalization of the military and the end of the draft. It’s not accidental. It helps preserve the warrior ethos and in some ways it allows the Pentagon to better serve the families that choose the engulfing commitment of military life. It also insulates the two parallel cultures from each other.

Conversely, Periclean Athens (Pericles and Sophocles, the great politician and playwright, also served as generals), like the United States in the time World War II, was a society in which everyone knew war intimately. They fought, or their close relatives had fought, or they had lived in or near a battleground. They felt touched by war, and responsible. Death and killing and the attendant pride and trauma accompanied all of them at their dinner tables. War, for them, could never be an abstraction, or only an abstraction.

An actress who spoke to me after the performances made reference to the need for story. That, I guess, is what we need as an audience, as a nation, as aesthetic beings: not a reaction to war, but a story – a work of art – that cleanses us or better arms us to comprehend our urge to make war and how those wars spatter and power our world. At its base, war is killing, but is also a spawning. A fire consumes wood, but creates heat. War consumes life, but creates new identities, cultures, rulers, nations, powers, wealth, elites. War creates death and sometimes freedom too, if mostly negative freedom.

Instinctively, people do not like to kill; military psychologists have carefully studied the reflex of a fighter not to pull the trigger, or to fire wide even at an oncoming enemy bent on killing first. (Dan Baum chronicles the history of the US military’s psychology of killing from World War II to the present in a 2004 New Yorker article called “The Price of Valor.”) We are trained not to kill, but train ourselves to kill we must. There is a price to pay for that necessary choice, even if we try to sanitize mainstream society by building a separate channel for our warriors. That price registers not only in the seared soul of Ajax, but in that of his entire community, his wife, his son, his soldiers, his subjects back home. So, too, with us; we Americans all have a stake in today’s wars, whether we fight in theater, oppose the war at home, and especially, if we ignore the entire affair.

STORIES FOR TODAY

Those who pay little attention that their names are attached to our collective American ventures oversees – those anonymous shareholders in our shared war enterprise – are the ones most in need of an intimate touch, and they won’t find it in on talk radio or at anti-war rallies, in a sanctimonious film or even an excellent work of narrative documentary. If they find it at all, it will be through art. These five creators have begun the thankless work of finding the stories that will tell us what is happening to our culture.

When I was still living in Iraq and covering the first phase of the war there, my friends and I wondered why there were so few contemporary cultural artifacts that spoke to our experience there – as reporters, as soldiers, even as failed statesmen – or of the experience of the Iraqis we were killing and governing and fighting. There was lots of journalism, some of it excellent; and a few halting attempts to engage the war in culture. The most successful were the documentaries – No End In Sight, Gunner Palace (and recently from Afghanistan, Restrepo) – and they benefited in part from their limited remit. They weren’t trying to tell us how or who or why on the individual psychological level that is the province of art; they were simply, if ambitiously, trying to tell us what was happening: a basic whodunit.

Alicia Anstead, the culture writer who moderated the theater evening, argues that documentary absolutely is art, even if it’s not what we conventionally think of as theater. Her view could extend to all the fine arts. “It’s a legitimate approach, blending aspects of journalism with aspects of theater,” Alicia wrote me, regarding documentary as a medium for addressing society’s relationship to war. “But it’s no less theater or art than a feature article or political cartoon or ‘Shouts and Murmurs’ is journalism.”

Ten years into this very long war – America’s longest now, officially, that we’re into the tenth year of occupying Afghanistan – we need the guidance of artists. We need a Tim O’Brien, a Slaughterhouse Five, an Apocalypse Now. I’d even settle for a Three Kings or a Jarhead.

Back in 2005, we thought it would take time for art to process these wars, and maybe a certain temporal distance is necessary; we can’t heal until the killing has stopped, or gone on hiatus; we cannot storify with grace until the story has come to an end. If these wars, however, shall extend without end, or at least no end anytime soon, we can’t wait until they’re over. We need our bards and their epic tales now.