Theater Review: "In Conflict"
(four star review)
By Joyce McMillan
EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND--ON BOTH sides of the Atlantic, the escalators of social mobility have slowed to a snail's pace over the last two decades. We no longer have many young working-class playwrights emerging, to dramatise life as they see it; which is perhaps why verbatimADVERTISEMENT drama has become so important, as a way of giving a voice to millions of people whose experience might otherwise remain largely unheard – not least on the subject of war and peace and of how it feels to be an ordinary soldier in these times.
Temple Theater of Philadelphia's In Conflict, at the Assembly Rooms, is a show that occupies precisely the same territory as the National Theatre of Scotland's Black Watch, and is a blood brother of British shows like Deep Cut and Motherland, playing on this year's Fringe.
Based on a powerful book of interviews by New York journalist Yvonne Latty, this compelling 100-minute show offers brief but utterly vivid and convincing sketches of 17 US servicemen and women with experience of the war in Iraq. The huge range of characters they represent – from Russian migrant in New York to Native American in Arizona – comes as a reminder of the huge diversity of America itself; and it also enables the expression of every shade of opinion about the war, from pride and unquestioning commitment, through anger on behalf of troops not given the tools to complete a difficult job, to furious opposition.
In Conflict is not always an easy show to watch, and its pace sometimes flags slightly. But the quality of the acting from this young university company is simply breathtaking; and this is a show that commands attention from everyone who cares about the true story of the Iraq War, and about the real life of ordinary US citizens today, in the world's wounded superpower.
If I could make one small wish, for the women whose experiences make up the text of Motherland [a similar Edinburgh Fringe production], it's that they could all be scooped up and brought along to the next performance of In Conflict; at least then they would know just how much they are not alone, in their pain, trauma and grief.
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Tuesday, July 15, 2008
By Stephan Salisbury
Inquirer Culture Writer
Nothing like it had ever happened to Temple University theater students, at least as far as anyone could remember. But that was before the Iraq war, and the voices it summoned up for journalist Yvonne Latty.
Now In Conflict, the play based Latty's book of the same name, has blossomed from a Temple student production, first staged last fall, to an international phenomenon that has stunned and inspired just about everyone connected with it.
On Aug. 1, the play will open - with all 11 members of the original student cast portraying Iraq war veterans - at the super-charged Edinburgh Fringe Festival for a run through Aug. 25. On Sept. 3, it returns to Temple's Randall Theatre for 12 performances as part of the Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe.
And when that ends, the set comes down, is loaded on a truck and rolls up to New York City's Barrow Street Theater in the West Village, where previews begin Sept. 18 for an open-ended off-Broadway run.
"It's unbelievable," said Latty, a former Philadelphia Daily News reporter whose collection of interviews with Iraq war vets inspired and guided the show. "I feel like I'm in a state of shock. What these kids have created, and the number of lives they've been able to touch - young lives - is incredible."
The students are a bit discombobulated themselves.
"I don't think it's hit any of us yet," said Stan Demidoff, a Temple senior. "It's surreal."
Demidoff, 22, portrays Cpl. Alex Pressman, a Brooklyn native who took a smoking break one day and lost his foot to an improvised explosive device.
Joy Notono, 22, who graduated this year, portrays Maj. Tracey Ringo, a medical officer in Baghdad who Notono said approached her duties "with compassion" for soldiers and civilians alike: "That's her unique perspective in the play, a really strong sense of compassion. She worked with women, civilians working in the clinic that she worked at, and you can hear that in her voice, her gentleness and also her faith."
"I feel very privileged," Notono said of her participation in the play. "I'm feeling more and more responsiblity towards the vets. . . . And I'm actually very serious about volunteering my time with them."
Douglas C. Wager, artistic director at the Temple School of Communications and Theater and head of the graduate directing program, adapted In Conflict for the stage, directed the production and, by all accounts, urged countless out-of-town theater friends to come in for a look during its October run at Temple.
Normally, with a student production, that would have been that. But Wager felt the students' work was so good, and the production was so powerful, that In Conflict deserved a longer life before a broader audience.
Drawing on his contacts from more than two decades at the acclaimed Arena Stage in Washington, and years in film and television, Wager interested producers in New York and elsewhere, including New Haven, Conn., where the company performed the play at the Long Wharf Theatre in January.
Allan Buchman, producing artistic director of the Culture Project, a New York theater organization focused on social and political projects, decided In Conflict presented both an intense dramatic experience and a mine-strewn moral landscape. He told Wager that he wanted it for New York - and that he wanted the original student cast members, who created it, to reprise their roles.
Those actors who are still at Temple will receive academic credit for their off-Broadway appearances, and university officials said their financial aid and scholarship status will not be adversely affected during the run. (New York living arrangements are still being worked out, and actors will receive stipends from the Culture Project; officials said union issues with Actors Equity largely have been resolved.)
"It's unprecedented," said Wager, who at the moment is trying to raise funds to get his students to Scotland for the weeks of the Fringe Festival, a costly enterprise.
Temple is providing some funding for the trip, but not all, and while students have raised money on their own, the company still needs about $20,000 to cover its costs. Whatever else it may be, Edinburgh during the Fringe is not cheap.
No one is backing off, however.
"We're moving into brand-new territory with what it's turning into," said Wager. "It's basically amazing. The students will also be involved with the Culture Project in arranging constituent talk-back programs involving gays in the military, women in the military, Latinos in the military, PTSD [post traumatic stress disorder] vets, wounds, injuries - all kinds of things that raise the question of how do we bring these people home and care for them for the rest of their lives."
In Conflict speaks to such issues with the raw and often matter-of-fact voices of actual veterans.
"The core ethos [explored by the play] is, what is the nature of service and patriotism in America in the 21st century," said Wager. "I've come to really admire and honor these people. Some had horrific experiences. Some had moving experiences and feel good about what they did. Some were broken by the experience."
It all comes down, he said, to "what does America stand for?"
At a meeting with his actors last week, Wager tried to focus their energies on the main mission.
"There's a lot of moving parts to this thing - financially, emotionally, spiritually," he said. "You've got to remember why we're doing it. It is embracing the idea that as citizen artists you are seeking to raise awareness and help ease the transition of veterans who have served."
That is a point that speaks directly to Demidoff.
"All I wanted to do was change people's lives - and I can't believe I have the opportunity to do that at 22," he said. "Support of the troops, that's what the show is based on. Not the war. The troops. I don't think I'll ever be this lucky again."
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says:
IN CONFLICT is the "BEST NEW PLAY OF THE YEAR!" and one of the "TOP 10 PRODUCTIONS" of the Philadelphia Theater Season 2007-2008!
*J. Cooper Robb, Philadelphia Weekly
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Thursday, October 4, 2007
In Soldier's Shoes
Temple theater students, acting out the recollections of U.S. troops in Iraq, learn some uncomfortable truths
By Stephan Salisbury, Inquirer Culture Writer
They are, for the most part, in their early 20s, and by turns passionate, impulsive, idealistic, serious, funny, inquisitive.
What could distinguish these Temple University theater students - humping from class to class, hanging out, diving into bull sessions - from their doubles hunkered down in Baghdad, staring down a blasted Fallujah street, gulping a Coke on a shadeless day?
The answer could be as brief as a gunshot, as long as a memoir, as cryptic as fate. But beginning with tonight's opening, at 7:30 at Temple's Randall Theater, these 11 students will crawl inside the skins of actual Iraq war veterans in a difficult effort to convey on stage the real deal of death and life in the desert.
They will bring the voices of war home.
The play, In Conflict, is a world premiere adapted from former Daily News reporter Yvonne Latty's book of the same name, a collection of interviews with Iraq veterans. Directed by Temple's resident artistic director, Douglas C. Wager, In Conflict runs through Oct. 13. [EDITOR'S NOTE: In Conflict was extended due to critical and popular demand through Oct. 19.]
"When the war started happening, I was living in Virginia, which is a very military area, and I heard about it constantly. And after a while you hear about it less, and then it's just this thing that's still going on," recalled senior Ethan Haymes, 22. "But one thing that I really admired about both of my characters is that they were both men of action - Army Capt. Jon Soltz and Patrick Murphy, who's now a congressman. Doing this is different from bringing a normal script to the stage because we have a duty to these people, and I feel that it's part of our calling as college students to say what they say, to have their story heard. There are certain things, and you're reminded about this more and more as you try and think about the war and solutions; there are certain things we just don't know because we haven't been there."
None of the students has been a soldier. None has been on a battlefield. But they have entered the war and these voices of the war by literally listening to the raw audio tapes from Latty's interviews. They absorb the disjointed cadences of adrenaline-laced action, the broken sentences of rationalization, the terseness and lassitude of disappointment.
One of the characters portrayed by Damon Williams, 20, is Herold Noel, a vet who came home to not a little hostility and mammoth indifference. He quickly found himself homeless and fending off devouring memories.
"He was on patrol," Williams said, trying to wrap his own mind around the story. "There was a tank that was flipped over. It was in a ditch. . . . A crowd of onlookers was surrounding them. They were just onlookers, but it's a civilian war, you don't know if one of them has a bomb or anything. Everybody's telling them to back up. Back up. Back up. Back up. And this one lady started walking toward them very slow. So they don't know. And she was holding something in her arms. They don't know what it is. Could be a bomb. Could be anything. Tell her to back up. She's not listening.
"So Herold ends up firing and shoots the lady in the head. And what was in her hands falls, rolls, and ends up being a baby. And while the baby is on the ground, Herold is stuck. He's just shot this woman who was holding a baby thinking that it was something that it wasn't. Goes to pick up the baby. Another convoy rolls over the baby. Multiple times. And that's something that he describes, he still has nightmares about it every day."
What do you do with such an experience? Where can you put it?
"People constantly say the soldiers are doing horrible things," said Stan Sinyakov, 21, a senior. "You go to war, it's a different life and it's a different lifestyle. There's a very fine big red line between society, civilians, the laws and the rules you abide by, and what happens in war. You will kill when you go to war. You will shoot someone. You are trained for these things. . . . Then you come back to society and there's no room for you. You're too different now. They come back and it's like, 'Well we don't kill here. We don't blow things up. Are you crazy?' It's like, 'I'm sorry. I was trained that way. My mind works like that.' And that's why nobody wants to talk about that stuff, who they killed."
For the students, entering the cloaked worlds of these veterans has worked a transformation on their own lives. They pay attention to the news. They read the newspapers. They have become linked to the larger political universe.
"That was something I struggled with a lot at the beginning of this process," said junior Amanda Holston, 20, who portrays Kelly Dougherty, leader of the Philadelphia-based Iraq Veterans Against the War. "I had a lot, and still hold a lot, of guilt that I didn't look into pursuing all of the facts about the war and really educating myself about what's happening over there and really caring about it. Until now. Until I had to do it. I'm sure all of us feel that. And now that I recognize it, I'm trying to make up for lost time. I'm really trying to know everything I can and keep up to date. It's changed my viewpoint and life in that way. Because I'm certainly not going to be apathetic about the war after this. You get a glimpse of what it actually is and you can't stay the same."
Senior Sam Paul, 21, said the critical part of the performance lay in letting the voices of each individual soldier breathe, no matter what the content of the story told.
"You draw your own conclusions," he said. "We're not saying the war's bad. We're not saying the war's good."
Sean Lally, 20, a junior, broke in: "It's about the truth."
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Wednesday, October 10, 2007
'In Conflict' Gives Voice to Iraq Veterans
by J. Cooper Robb
In the potent new drama In Conflict, a young marine sergeant (the intense Sam Paul) talks about an incident in his hometown shortly after his return from Iraq.
“They put signs with pictures of me on every telephone pole, inviting people to the party. And then these kids from a very liberal school ripped all of them off. It’s cool if they didn’t believe in the war, but it takes their credibility away. To me, that’s not protesting. That’s hate, and I am out there risking my life. They should have respect for that. Maybe not for what I’m doing, or why we are over there, but respect for the fact that I am a person, just like they are.”
Adapted by Douglas Wager (who also directs) from Yvonne Latty’s book of the same name, In Conflict (currently having its world premiere at Temple Theaters) is a searing new drama about the American men and women who find themselves fighting an increasingly unpopular war.
Structured as a series of monologues, the play introduces us to 19 veterans, including Bucks County congressman Patrick Murphy. Many are no older than the show’s student performers, and the young actors’ natural portrayals are compelling and poignant.
With a mix of race, gender and sexual orientation, the veterans offer diverse perspectives on both life in Iraq and their experiences upon returning to the U.S.
Some see their time in Iraq as well-spent, a chance to serve their country in a just and important cause. For others (especially those with posttraumatic stress disorder), Iraq is a nightmare that never ends.
Wager’s powerful adaptation neither condemns nor condones the occupation of Iraq, but the idea that there’s something particularly troubling about this war comes through clearly.
“I don’t regret anything I’ve done in the services until this last war,” says longtime reservist Lisa Haynes (the disarming Danielle Pinnock).
“It’s friggin’ insane!” Dave Bischel (the astounding young actor Stan Sinyakov) states emphatically, a statement echoed by other soldiers who tell of decapitated babies and helicopters brimming with blood.
Initially eager—or at least willing—to fight in Iraq, many of the veterans express outrage at an administration they feel no longer supports them either in Iraq or at home.
“I was a bullet catcher,” says one of the soldiers, and time and again we hear stories of units lacking adequate body armor and equipment. Even more disturbing is the indifference shown to the veterans who return home only to find VA hospitals shuttered and medical claims routinely denied. “I expected to come back the hero, not the zero,” says serviceman Herold Noel (the superb Damon Williams), a sentiment echoed by several others.
A powerful drama that leaves you deeply shaken and also strangely proud, Conflict concludes with images of the real-life soldiers projected on two screens. The audience’s applause is as much for them as for the talented cast that gives life to their words of pride, sacrifice and sorrow.
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Thursday, October 4, 2007
Temple Students Bring the Iraq War Home in New Play
by Regina Medina
Her legs are gone, blown off when insurgents in Iraq threw a rocket-propelled grenade inside the helicopter she was traveling in.
The female Iraq War vet's right arm was also severely damaged in the explosion, but most of it remains intact.
Still, she sits in the wheelchair and manages to smile, a real smile.
"I am so grateful to be alive," says Tammy Duckworth, played by actress Suyeon Kim, early on in the Temple University production of "In Conflict."
"I should be dead."
Duckworth wasn't dead. Neither were thousands of other veterans who returned from Iraq, some struggling to pick up right where they left off, before the war.
Former Daily News reporter Yvonne Latty tracked down Duckworth and others around the country for face-to-face interviews, taping their accounts of serving in Iraq and returning home. She spoke with mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, both straight and gay, representing the diverse ethnic and religious swath that is the United States of America.
The resulting 25 interviews make up Latty's 2006 book "In Conflict: Iraq Veterans Speak Out on Duty, Loss and the Fight to Stay Alive." Now, Doug Wager, artistic director of Temple University's theater, has written and directed it as a play.
The production, which opens tonight and runs through next Saturday at the Randall Theater, focuses on 14 vets played by 11 Temple student actors. "In Conflict," they say, has not only transformed their acting, but also expanded their insulated college lives.
Amanda Holston says she and her fellow actors now pay more attention to the war in Iraq.
"One of the hardest things in this process was to look at my own life," said Holston, 20, who portrays Kelly Dougherty, a vet who co-founded Iraq Veterans Against the War. "I felt extremely guilty to know that if this project had not come along, I would not have educated myself to what was going on in Iraq."
These days, "I pick up a newspaper every day and watch CNN every day," said the Bel Air, Md., junior, who like most of her cast members, is a theater major. "I have this need to know what's happening over there."
Sophomore Danielle Pinnock, of Teaneck, N.J., says she used to look at the war in a political way, but not anymore. "I don't like [President] Bush, but it's not even about him," said Pinnock, who at 19, is the youngest member of the cast. "It's not about being pro-war or anti-war. It's about being pro-troops."
"In Conflict" has made her "very aware of my surroundings, especially the news," Pinnock said. "That has changed me a lot."
Junior Stan Sinyakov, 21, said he's "far more aware of the war . . . It's a lot more personal now."
Ethan Haymes, who portrays two veterans, including U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-8th, said he previously ignored the war. "In Conflict" changed that.
"I had put it on the back burner like many other people," said the 22-year-old senior. The play "brought up the question, 'what is my duty as an actor and as an American?' "
Writer Wager wanted more than the book's abridged interviews for "In Conflict's" material - Latty provided him with her original audio tapes.
"The goal of this was to find a way to teach the actors how to embody the interview material primarily from the audio source with the written source actually being the kind of backup," said Wager.
The actors studied the cadences of their respective vets' voices and, even transcribed their words onto paper. The ensemble also danced to the interviews, and sang to them.
The resulting monologs includes many more "ums" and "ahs" and "likes," recreating the way the vets actually spoke.
Wager also put author Latty in the play. He videotaped her recalling the conversations she had with the vets, and this interview is shown on two flat-screen TVs flanking the stage.
"Yvonne, as a character, introduces the material and a few of the vets," Wager said. Her inclusion, besides Iraq war photos taken by Daily News photographer Jim MacMillan that are featured in the play, "works to provide a documentary landscape in an artistic way," Wager said.
The play provides the full context for Latty's interviews. "The words are only one piece," Wager said. "By turning ['In Conflict'] into theater, the audience will not just meet the words, they'll meet the people."
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Monday, October 8, 2007
War in Their Own Words: Vets Speak on Life and Loss
by Wendy Rosenfield
Congratulations to Temple Theaters and director Douglas C. Wager for creating In Conflict, a collection of former Philadelphia Daily News writer Yvonne Latty's interviews with Iraq war veterans that first appeared in book form, and has now been adapted for the stage.
There are many triumphs in the piece, not the least of which is the sheer variety of vets and war experiences represented, 19 in total: a Vietnam-vet officer who "bleeds red, white and blue"; an unabashed liberal enlistee who says he was sent to Iraq to be a "bullet catcher"; a triple amputee who shyly admits, "I miss my body"; a lost 26-year-old who spits, "I gave up my soul - can't nobody give me a prosthetic soul." Each story is fascinating, heartbreaking, heroic or all three, with insights as original as the individuals who generously share them. It is remarkable that with such a wide range of voices, the same themes emerge in most of their testimonies. They want the Veterans Administration to help care for their wounds, both physical and psychic, but tragically, they have mostly been abandoned. They wonder why exactly they were sent to Iraq. They wonder if civilians even care that they've nearly died defending our right to order a hot latte.
If I have any quarrel with the show it's that it could be shortened by a few narratives - not because they're irrelevant or dull, but because by including so many, they risk losing their individual impact to a sense of overload. However, I also wouldn't want to be the one to choose whom to cut and whom to keep.
So why see this version of Iraq veterans' stories instead of staying home and ordering up HBO's? Because In Conflict's most arresting feature is the irony that suffuses the whole endeavor. Latty recalls, in one of the filmed segments that appear between monologues, the disorientation she felt upon entering Walter Reed Medical Center and seeing men and women, the same age as her Villanova students, wearing the same baseball caps with shredded brims, the same t-shirts that declared their affiliations, but all missing limbs or faces. It is a similar feeling watching these uniformly excellent Temple students reciting the soldiers' tales and adopting their mannerisms. Perhaps they're so good because essentially, they're playing themselves, inhabiting a parallel universe where their doppelgangers are, instead of runnng to Wawa for a Coke, driving a booby-trapped road into hostile territory for that same Coke.
Based on the book by Yvonne Latty, adapted and directed by Douglas C. Wager, scenery by Andrew Laine, costumes by Marian Cooper, sound by Christopher Cappello, lighting by J. Dominic Chacon, video by Warren Bass.
The Cast: Tim Chambers, Sam Paul, Suyeon Kim, Sean Lally, Tom Rader, Stan Sinyakov, Danielle Pinnock, Ethan Haymes, Damon Williams, Amanda Holston, Joy Notoma.
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Sunday, January 20, 2008
Long Wharf Theatre's 'In Conflict' Gives Iraq Soldiers a Voice
by Donna Doherty
The war in Iraq is providing source material for some thoughtful, and even satiric, theater offerings over the last few years, such as David Hare’s “Stuff Happens” and “The Vertical Hour.”
Long Wharf Theatre on Tuesday brings another entry into that community conversation about the out-of-sight, out-of-mind conflict which has caused great debate among citizens, but made hardly a dent in the real lives of most of them.
“In Conflict,” a play adapted by Douglas C. Wager from then-journalist Yvonne Latty’s book, “In Conflict: Iraq War Veterans Speak Out On Duty, Loss and the Fight To Stay Alive,” will be performed at 8 p.m. Tuesday on Stage II by Wager’s Temple University drama students, who worked with him to bring Latty’s first-hand accounts of soldiers in their own words to the stage.
The stories are real. The names are real. Some are returning veterans, some are still engaged in the conflict.
It’s based on the same book which last year prompted Wilton High School principal Timothy H. Carty to cancel its play, “Voices of Conflict,” which used parts of Latty’s book as well as documentaries and blogs from Iraq soldiers.
Wager is firm that this is not an anti-war piece, because all voices are represented.
“It sounds like an anti-war play, but when you come out, you find you’re not even thinking that,” he says. “It’s not about the war. It’s about the people in the war. When you’re able to connect on some level with the person in the war, you get to understand why they joined a volunteer army and what they get out of it, whether it was for health insurance for their children, to help get citizenship, to avenge 9/11.
“The reasons were all atruistic, and in some sense, patriotic, in some sense believing in and protecting the American dream, and that’s something we can all relate to whether you’re an armchair liberal or as neoconservative.”
Ironically, the process used by Wager, the artistic director of Temple’s drama program and a former colleague of Long Wharf Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein, is the same methodology Anna Deavere Smith uses in her work, the latest “Let Me Down Easy” playing concurrently on Long Wharf’s mainstage.
Wager was quite familiar with Smith and her work, having collaborated with the actress-writer-author at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. After he read Latty’s book he was struck by the parallel between Latty’s interview process and Smith’s, convinced of its “theatrical possibilities.” He called her up to share his thoughts.
“When I met her, and she talked about how the interview process changed her in ways she never expected, I realized there was real dramatic potential in the story of both the vets’ stories and how she was changed by them,” Wager said by phone from Philadelphia. “Her journey through the interview process kind of reflected my journey in a way (through the book), but much less in the experiential way hers did.”
Wager felt that Latty’s viewpoint had to be a part of the work. It would add yet another voice, more depth, more texture, to what Wager felt was the book’s already “broad-based and diverse point of view.”
“The book really covers the spectrum from the disenfranchised to the privileged, from African American, Asian American, gays, straights, male, female. It’s as consciously a cross section as you can find,” says Wager.
“Because Yvonne was there for all the interviews, by interviewing her, we could get all the details of each interview — what clothes they were wearing, what the weather was like — everything to recreate the actual experience of the actual interview.”
Latty was “immediately excited by the idea.” She not only turned over all her raw research, but also helped the students and Wager get in touch with the vets, and stayed through the creative process from research to writing to the auditions to choose the 11 students who play 17 different soldiers.
Wager cut the 190-page book down to a 90-page script, using what he calls the “biophysical approach to excavating the psyche,” with Smith’s mantra firmly planted in his mind: “As Anna says, ‘By singing the song of the character, you reveal the soul of the character.’”
His students had their own assignments: They transcibed all the tapes, adding some pieces that had been left out of the book. They matched the audio sections to sections of the book and then “translated the exact sounds of the tape,” from hesitations, elisions, dialect, accent” which are necessary for a stage performance, but left to a reader’s imagination. They watched countless documentaries, interviewed vets, from a Temple ROTC general to a brain-damaged soldier and visited a recruiting center.
The process took a year for Wager, six weeks for the students, who started with workshops with abstract exercises without context to embody the timbre and pitch and rhythm of the voices on the tape, and then rehearsals to bring them to life.
Word got to New Haven that there was something exciting going on down at Temple. Eric Ting, Long Wharf’s associate artistic director, and resident dramaturg Beatrice Basso went to Philly to see the play and “were remarkably moved by it,” said Ting, recommending Long Wharf become its first professional venue. “Any small part I can contribute to giving this a bigger voice, I’m happy,” Ting added.
“There are what I would define as extreme views and views that would fall between the two. There are soldiers who are clearly struggling with what they’re doing and why. ...They are sublime meditations on these people. The other really fascinating thing about the piece is that Doug has used college students. These are actors in training, not professionals. These are college students who are the age of these soldiers, which is really remarkable.”
Wager credits the dean of the School of Communications, Concetta Stewart, for supporting the project, which Temple continues to do with this production and a recent one at the American College Festival Theater in Pittsburgh. But the dream is to take it to other venues.
Wager hopes that the work can answer as many questions as it raises. “If we motivate one person to do something, it’s made a difference. This is why you get up in the morning. If the play does that, you’ve improved the quality of the day for someone you may never meet. You’ve brought somebody’s soul to life by singing their song.”
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Thursday, January 17, 2008
'In Conflict'
by Christopher Arnott
The show is in many respects unique, and comes here direct from Philadelphia, but there are a couple of neat local precedents for the appearance of Temple University's In Conflict at Long Wharf Stage II this Tuesday.
The ensemble-based work is constructed from interviews with Iraq war veterans, and is cast entirely with undergraduate college students. As it happens, Stage II has already been established as the regular stomping grounds of Quinnipiac University's Theater in Community program, whose often war-themed shows included an adaptation of Antigone studded with filmed interviews with local war vets.
In a stylistic coincidence, In Conflict was developed using a detail-intensive research-and-rehearsal methodology developed by Anna Deavere Smith. She's currently appearing on the Long Wharf mainstage with her first theater piece in seven years, the medically themed Let Me Down Easy.
In Conflict's director, Douglas Wager, is the resident artistic director at Temple and has been a leading light of the American regional theater movement for a couple of decades. Besides a production of Shaw's Pygmalion in the '80s, Wager's work has been unseen in Connecticut, and more's the pity. His wide-ranging resume has included political farce such as Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist and such mirth as the landmark stage revival of the Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers, plus many more somber works. The Anna Deavere Smith influence on In Conflict came from Wager's collaboration with Smith on House Arrest, one of the rare pieces where the multi-threat writer/performer/compiler worked with actors other than herself.
You'd think such an involved show, with such novice talent, would be granted extra preparation time, but as it was Temple's first show of the fall semester, its rehearsal period was actually shorter than many of the school's mainstage shows—a mere five weeks.
Wager adapted In Conflict from Yvonne Latty's book In Conflict: Iraq War Veterans Speak Out on Duty, Loss, and the Fight to Stay Alive. This is the same text that inspired Voices in Conflict, the Fairfield County student show that gained national attention when Wilton High School abruptly cancelled its premiere. In that case, the administration was shying away from potential controversy, but Wager feels his project is as even-handed as possible. "It is not an anti-war story. It's a diverse and sometimes disturbing conjunction of views. All the people interviewed had altruistic reasons for joining the military."
Wager brought some of his own views to the general topic of military enlistment, having done some serious soul-searching in his youth when, during the Vietnam war, he spent 18 months officially justifying his decision to be a conscientious objector. He speaks of the "personal conflict this notion of citizenship is when it clashes with your own values. It's easy to be against the war. It's harder to trace back your sense of duty and responsibility."
The student cast has been praised for its professionalism and credibility, and Wager didn't consider recasting the show when the opportunity came to tour it to other cities. He's even spoken to producers about a New York run. The topicality of the piece is a strong selling point, but Wager argues that it's about greater and longer lasting issues than whatever today's headlines are regarding the Iraq conflict. "I think the surprise is that the play is not about the war," he says. "It's about people in war."
The other surprise for those expecting an earnest recitation of recorded interviews is that this isn't one of those bland sitting-on-stools affairs. The cast takes the stage dressed as a platoon, and several characters undergo full costume changes. "The experience is theatrical," Wager explains. "It's the frame that is more surreal. It's a surreal and imagistic storytelling frame in which hyper-realistic events take place."
