I saw In Conflict tonight at Temple. Part of the Philly Fringe right now, it’s making its off-Broadway debut later this month (you NY people, check it out). A play based on actual interviews with Iraq war veterans, this was one incredibly powerful piece of theater.
The actors addressed the audience as though the audience was the journalist, and video clips of Yvonne Latty, the actual reporter who collected the interviews, were interspersed throughout. Each actor took on a character or two and with minimal props, became that person, that veteran, that Marine or Army Sergeant or National Guard medic or doctor or Medevac pilot. They switched accents and folded up limbs to become amputees. They adopted the nervous habits and the drunken slurs, the body language and most painfully, the tears of the veterans.
These were student actors, mostly undergrads, and they impressed the hell out of me.
One played a gay Marine, who spoke about wanting to reenlist but being afraid that he would be outed and he would lose everything. He was working at a TGI Friday’s rather than going back into the army, and the frustration was palpable.
Another was a Russian immigrant. He took on the accent and the politeness, offering the audience a tray of cookies and smiling, knocking on his prosthetic and bragging about having met President Bush. Then after the intermission, he was a National Guard volunteer who got sent to Iraq. You could feel the tension in his arms, through his back as he shouted his frustration at being sent to a war for no reason.
One of the more wrenching ones was a man drinking away his pain, with the best line in the play: “Some guys came back amputees. Well, I’m a mental amputee. Can’t give me no prosthetic mind, though.” A few people in the audience laughed at his slurred words at first, but his horrifying story had them regretting their laughter quickly.
This was the closest many people have come to talking to a real veteran, I think. The closest anyone has come to hearing those stories. We all may have our own feelings about the war and even about those who fight, those who sign up for the military, the very existence of the military itself. But I think whatever your feelings on the subject, you should be confronting the reality of what these people–these young people, ten years younger than I am and I certainly don’t feel old enough–go through. What they put themselves through, since we do still have an all-volunteer army. We should see the funerals on the news and hear the people’s stories who come back, and aside from the occasional This American Life story or feature article, we just don’t.
I have a few friends who have come back from Iraq. Thankfully, everyone I know has come back physically in one piece (there’s one who’s still over there, and I pray that he’s OK) but mentally, emotionally, the scars are there. Some people hide them better than others, but knowing that it’s all in there…it’s hard. It’s hard to know what to do, but listening is a good start. Not trying to ask stupid questions like “did you kill anyone” or “what was it like” but really letting them say whatever it is they have to say. Really listening. It can be hard to do, but it’s something I strive to be good at.
I came away from the play feeling silly, like the problems I’d been complaining about earlier in the day were just so much petty bullshit. I don’t want to be angry at friends or argue about things. Right now I just kind of want to tell everyone I love that I do love them, and that I will listen if they ever need to talk. I want to do something to help people who are coming back from this war scarred and hurting and unable to get help and feeling like no one cares enough to listen.
Sometimes the best thing I can think of to do is go volunteer for campaigns, to try to fix these problems. It drove me out to volunteer for Kerry–one of the stories told in the play was about a vet who actually got a phone call from Kerry, during his presidential run, and who felt that Kerry actually cared about him–it made me glad over again for my volunteer hours even if we did lose that time. It’s driven me out to volunteer for Obama, and will again despite many things I disagree with him on. I have to do something.
One of the things brought home by this play was how class-based the military system is. How the people fighting this war are immigrants, people of color, people who needed the money the military offered, people who didn’t have a lot of options and who have even fewer when they come back and get out with trauma. People whose apartments don’t accommodate their wheelchairs. People who don’t live near a VA hospital. People who don’t get treatment for PTSD. They’re forgotten about. They don’t appear on TV because they aren’t Jessica Lynch.
This wasn’t “fun” to watch. It hurt. It made me cry, and more often made me bite my lip until I realized I was doing it, and want to reach out and hug the people onstage, even though they’re just actors playing a part. They’re telling a story over and over again that it might be too hard for the people who lived those stories to repeat again. They’re making a new audience each night look into the eyes of the veterans and confront the reality of war, not in bloody violence like war movies, but in the aftermath, the trying to move on and live with what you’ve seen done and what you’ve done.