War Stories

I say that Telling changed my perspective because when I attended Julie Marie Myatt's Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (yep, I'm still writing about that weekend), I felt a visceral objection to the ways the playwright paralleled one vet's trauma with the mental illnesses and oddities of "freaks" around her.

I know there were veterans in the audience at Jenny Sutter because during the play, there was a half-amusing, half-poignant rendition of the Marines' Hymn, and several quavery voices from the audience sang along. Everyone, especially the 50 high school students from Sacramento, stood up to applaud at the end of the play. After the play ended, it became clear that several people in the audience had friends or family serving with one branch or another, or knew someone who hadn't made it back from one of the wars or police actions of the past half-century. The OSF set up a "remembrance tree" in the lobby of the New Theatre, and people were writing names on the "leaves" and attaching them to the "tree."

So it's entirely possible that I am wrong, wrong, and more wrong, and that the playwright, who did a lot of research, gets it all right. As I said in my former post, my freelancer and I disagreed strongly about two of the plays, one of which was Jenny Sutter, so just as I wrote a short response to with her review of The Clay Cart, she wrote one for Jenny. (Read all of that and more here.)

I did think, based on talking with the veterans and the writers for Telling -- and based on war books I've read, like Louise Steinman's Souvenir -- that Myatt made quite plausible Jenny Sutter's aimlessness, shock at being in the U.S., reluctance to talk about her experiences and quick physical reactions to noise or stress. But the main emotional portion of the play focuses on the wacky/poignant woundedness of the characters around Jenny Sutter, the drifters who end up in Slab City, Calif., hurting and needing others to help smooth some rough edges and fill in some missing stories.

Comparing their lives to Jenny Sutter's experiences in Iraq, where the U.S. asked her to offer up her flesh and her future, seemed wrong to me. Perhaps it seemed wrong because she's freshly returned and everything for her is so raw, and then in the action of the play, her trauma has to become a catalyst for the healing of those wacky/poignant folk around her. That felt not only cheap but also rather insulting to veterans -- we'll take your service, your time, your energy, your blood, your limbs, possibly your life, and if you make it home, you can serve as a touchstone for the pain of others.

Er, blech.

(Also, and I pointed this out in my review, the trauma that Jenny sustained, the story she has to tell, is one of those "These Iraqis aren't human! They'll strap bombs to anything!" types of tales that turn out to be fairly unverifiable. The relative weight of Jenny's experience could easily have come from a more usual, if not at all normal, event in Iraq: the IED.)

But. Maybe I misread the play (I snagged a hot-off-the-presses script at the OSF's shop to check out some of the stage directions and sound design suggestions). I would like to know how recent veterans respond to this play. Also, I haven't seen any other  new plays that directly address the war or veterans of it, and I'm sure there are others out there -- Black Watch, for instance, or George Packer's Betrayed -- that deal with some of the gazillion issues related to the war(s) and that have garnered excellent reviews. But I wonder if the nonfictional strength of the veterans' stories in Telling trumped fiction so strongly that the fiction felt offensive. Or perhaps just this fiction.

*Photo of student veteran/actor by Lisa Forster, hosted by ImageShack.