Dramatizing Iraq
I struggle with plays about the Iraq War. On Sunday, I saw Jack Gilhooley’s The Warrior, and it was probably the best Iraq piece I’ve seen. Still, I can’t say I enjoyed it, nor did I find it very dramatically compelling, and as I left the theater I realized that I have never seen what I consider to be a “well-made” or “good” play about the war in Iraq.
Before I go on, let me clarify a few things. As Tammy, the main character and documentary subject of the play, Marietta Elaine Hedges is quite remarkable. She gives an emotionally draining and extremely passionate performance. The play’s content is also dense, well-developed, and rife with conflict. The whole experience is very disturbing, and I left the theater unsettled, as I gather was the playwright’s intention.
But on the whole, I found The Warrior dramatically unsatisfying. I don’t expect to like or enjoy plays about the Iraq War. But I do expect a play to be a play, and in the various Iraq pieces I have seen, there seems to be a trend towards politically virulent, dramatically unsound playwriting.
At the moment, there are 3 works that come to mind besides The Warrior: Tim Robbins’ Embedded, Tony Kushner’s Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall be Unhappy, and Craig Lucas’ Prayer For My Enemy. I’m not going to compose a critical essay about all these plays here, but as I mull them over in the context of just having seen Gilhooley’s work (granted it’s been several years since I saw the first two), I am tempted to pose the following statement: it is über-difficult, even for talented theater-makers, to dramatize our disgusting debacle in Iraq.
All of these plays employ hackneyed devices to elicit anger and exposition: awkward tirades, disembodied voices, overextended phone calls (I’m of the opinion that prolonged use of a phone by a single character is one of the cheapest and most disappointing stage tricks, no matter how talented the actor), and purple language, to name a few. The most obvious similarity, however, is the overarching tendency to tell about the conflict rather than show it, and I mean this in regards to both the war and the inner struggles of the characters. I can understand the aversion to depicting combat on stage, for reasons of practicality and propriety. But take, for example, The Warrior, in which Tammy tells us at length about the awful disintegration of her marriage. She goes so far as to enact some of the episodes with puppets–which I admit was powerful, if not unnerving–but I would prefer to bear direct witness to the drama rather than a 75-minute reaction to the ghosts of a previous drama. I realize that Tammy is locked in a cell-like room, and that this is in some way a representation of her troubled mind; however, we do not need to leave the room in order to see, rather than merely hear about, the episodes that have so influenced her psyche.
Listen, I have no real answers here, only the seeds of a much vaster discussion. There are some things, at some points in time, that simply defy art, and right now the Iraq War may be one of them. Maybe it’s too soon, too real, too damn disappointing and frustrating. I have never attempted to write a play about Iraq, but I imagine that a lot of feelings flare as one sets out to do so. Perhaps those feelings are so strong–and, because of our historical proximity to the catastrophe, so fresh, so raw–that they obscure many of the normal necessities of the craft. This leads to characters that are less character and more author’s mouthpiece. I would like to see an Iraq play that embeds the pain of this war in the action of another drama, that weaves the atrocities into the subtext, and that doesn’t grate the audience’s emotions so severely. I know that we are dealing with war, and that there is nothing pretty or “well-made” about it. But I think that a play with some of the rigorous dramatic elements I just described–not to mention a little more subtlety–would be more powerful, and perhaps move me to more deliberate action, than the ones I’ve seen. Is there such a play (perhaps it is in this year’s fringe–I have not seen A Report of Gunfire, for example)? Does anyone think I am completely off-base here?
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3:25 pm
As the playwright, I’d like to invite you to come see “A Report of Gunfire.” We’ve got two more performances this week before the Festival ends, Thursday night and Saturday evening.
I agree with just about all of your comments about such plays, most of which were concerns as we developed this play. While I don’t know that this show will answer all of your questions–it is a one-man show about a journalist, framed in his reports and his video journal–I can say that we made a conscious effort to tell a story instead of a rant, to give the character a definite dramatic arc, and to tell this story–to tell all the stories in the show–with some subtlety.
The feedback we’ve been getting from our audiences has been wonderful. One comment that keeps coming back is that it’s refreshing to see a show that isn’t about politics, it’s about a couple of human beings trying to connect.
I’m actually going to be in town for these last two shows–I haven’t seen it outside of rehearsal yet myself–so if you’d like a ticket, Brian, please feel free to get in touch through our website and I can arrange one for you. I’d be curious to see what you think.
4:52 pm
Hi Brian, I enjoyed this blog piece you wrote. Did you see A Bright Room Called Day when the Dramat did it a few years ago? I wrote a review of it for the Herald and I remember several of the dramatic devices gnawing a bit at my sensibilities in a similar way to what you’re describing here (it was another Tony Kushner play, after all). What I’m referring to is the presence of a contemporary character who randomly appears as an observer of the conflicts and characters of a historical drama centered around a group of artists in Weimer Republic Germany. What’s troubling about this character is not her status as an observer of these ghosts of the past and historical atrocities (a role that I found thought-provoking and effective), but the appropriation of her character as the author’s political mouthpiece. If you haven’t seen or read this play, however, I think it would be worthwhile, since I believe it is at least an attempt at producing something like you’re yearning for in your post (both the atrocities of war and the consequences of personal decisions being far-reaching and profound, the “embedding” of the historical drama in the context of other conflicts in the lives of actual characters). These laudable attempts at character-driven complexity come solely within the 1930’s era within the play; the intrusion of the modern character breaking with the temporal continuity of the action and addressing the audience directly was to my mind an unfortunate choice. It’s been a long time since I saw the play, but I believe it at least made a stab in the direction you are indicating (how successful it was at it is not something I’m willing to vouch for). In any case, it would make for an interesting comparison if you ever decide to do a critical essay on the subject of Iraq plays. While it’s not ostensibly about Iraq (being about WWII), there is a concerted effort by the playwright to link the two conflicts.
9:40 pm
Interesting that you were not into it while your fellow reviewer was a huge fan. Guess there’s a place for all of us, eh?
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/fringe/2008/07/21/the-warrior/
11:51 pm
[...] Palace of the End – Judith Thompson Beast – Michael Weller In Conflict – Yvonne Latty/students The Warrior – Jake Gilhooley Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall be Unhappy – Tony Kushner Prayer For My Enemy – Craig [...]
12:13 am
The problem with these thoughts as they end is that you’re grasping at straws – maybe we don’t need this approach, maybe we need that approach; maybe this can’t be done, only that.
Polemic (and many other approaches) about the Iraq war can be done well or poorly, now or in the future, whether as play, movie, novel, story, etc.
If something is or is not working, you should be able to come up with likely reasons why or why not, rather than guessing at writing off various approaches at various times.
12:21 pm
Mr. Loehr: I will certainly do my best to see your show before the end of the festival. I would very much like to, and I am glad to hear that other dramatists are thinking about these things. Thanks for the invite.
Mr. Swett: No, I have not seen nor read A Bright Room Called Day, though I have a passing familiarity with it. I considered addressing dramas about other wars–of which there are many successful ones–in my post, but I thought it would be too unwieldy. The first thing that comes to mind when I think of plays about other wars speaking to our current situation–and in some instances more poignantly than plays actually about our current situation–is Frank Rich’s interesting Times column about Lincoln Center’s recent production of South Pacific, which he calls “the most unexpected cultural sensation the city has experienced in a while.”
Mr. Christini: I guess my point was that I find the Iraq pieces I’ve seen to be grasping at straws, specifically in terms of form, structure, and device. Of course various approaches can be executed well, or they can be executed poorly–and I’m not even saying that I’ve witnessed that much poor execution (The Warrior was executed quite well, actually). What I am saying is that, in the limited number of Iraq-related pieces I’ve seen, and not necessarily because of any shortcomings on behalf of the artists, I’ve noticed a trend towards dramatic techniques that I think fall short. I identified several of these in my post–including the telephone sequence as well as the over-reliance on single-person, monologic narrative–and I also offered a few thoughts as to why I think they do not succeed. As I said, this topic merits a much larger discussion than I have instigated here, and one that requires a more complete breadth of knowledge on the topic than I can currently claim to have.
Which is why I ask you to chime in. So thank you for doing so.
12:23 pm
Oh, and Trevor–here is the link to that Frank Rich column (from May 25).