For the last several years, Caplan, a psychologist and playwright, has been researching veterans and the treatment they receive upon returning home from service. Her play ‘WAR & THERAPY,’ making its debut at Fringe, stems from this work.

In 2004, Caplan wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post calling for the military to devote greater psychological resources to troops, both while deployed and once back home. The response she received from veterans moved her to write ‘WAR & THERAPY.’ The play tells the story of a female soldier who returns home haunted by her memories of war, but is unable to find relief. Caplan drew heavily upon the story of Michelle Dillow, a soldier she met over the course of her research.

Upon returning from Iraq in 2006, Dillow struggled to share her experiences of war. She didn’t want to talk about it with her friends and family. “I feel it’s easier telling a stranger than people you’re closest to,” she says. “You don’t want to hurt them.”

She didn’t especially feel the need to see a therapist, but she thought that it might be a good idea, just in case. She saw a counselor a few times, but didn’t find it particularly helpful.

It’s an experience that’s not unique. The treatments veterans receive following war are frequently unhelpful, according to Caplan. She has yet to see a veteran helped by psychotropic drugs. Giving a veteran anti-depressants is like “putting a cast on someone’s arm when what they’ve got is a broken leg,” she says.

Labeling veterans’ mental condition is also unhelpful. “Since Vietnam, we’ve been saying that people have post-traumatic stress disorder,” Caplan says. “That’s a mental illness. We’re pathologizing their experience. I’d like to know what a healthy response to war would be.”

Though veterans need to share their war experiences with someone, a therapist—even if they say all the right things—is inherently not the best person, contends Caplan.

“Even if a therapist says to you, you’re not crazy, or you’re being too hard on yourself, in some really important ways it means more if a member of the community says it,” she says. “It’s not their job to do that. They’re not getting paid to say that. If someone other than a therapist says that, a connection is formed. You break down the walls and begin the process of healing.”

After she returned from Iraq, Dillow spoke about her experiences to a few different college classes. “The first time I didn’t get a lot of response,” she says. “I shadowed my experience. I didn’t talk a lot about what I really went through. But then I decided it was more important for people to know the truth, what was really going on.”

Despite constant reports from the frontlines, most civilians are unaware of the realities of war. “I remember the date was Dec. 15, 2005, and we were in the chow hall watching the news,” Dillow says. “It was election time and cars were parked on the highway going into Baghdad. People were walking into town because cars couldn’t get through. On the news they were reporting that there was no violence. Well, that was kind of true. We found a 500 lb. bomb that day in a refrigerator. The news told the public that nothing bad happened, when something really bad could have happened.”

Dillow was struggling after Iraq. In addition to having a hard time talking to her friends and family, and meeting with a counselor without success, she wasn’t able to sleep due to nightmares.

Caplan was inspired by Dillow’s second experience in front of a college class. “She talked about how soldiers are told they’re supposed to be tough, focused, and without fear,” Caplan says. “She wasn’t able to do that, and she felt she hadn’t measured up. A student whom she never met before told her she was being too hard on herself. She went home that night and she slept for the first time.”

Though Caplan has spoken to many veterans throughout her research, Dillow’s story especially resonated with her. “I was writing an article for Tikkun, and I found I was quoting from her story a lot,” Caplan says. “The magazine story felt more like a play.”

Dillow had some reservations when Caplan first approached her about the play. “At first I wasn’t comfortable with it,” she said. “I asked her to change my name. But as time went on, I felt more comfortable about it.”

Dillow is presently working full time in the National Guard and preparing for her second deployment—this time, to Afghanistan. She’s finding the emotional support that she needs among other members of her company.

“Pretty much everyone here’s been deployed,” she says. “We talk about it in classes and it’s refreshing to know that we’ve all been through some really bad stuff but we’ve all survived. For a while there I was uncertain if I was going to be able to fulfill the goal I have of 20 years of service. But for the last year the military has been really good to me.”

Artist: Robert Shetterly

WAR & THERAPY appears tomorrow, July 20, and July 22-25 at the Bedroom at Fort Fringe. Call for times: (866) 811-4111. $15.

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?