The Theater and the War
Hughes, Catharine
The Theater and the War by CATHARINE HUGHES Almost three years to the day after Lieutenant William Calley and his troops entered the Vietnamese hamlet of Mylai, a play called Pinkville, opened at...
...Like Pinkville, it is not a good "play" by conventional standards...
...It reminds them they are individuals capable of individual acts, not merely folders of an Internal Revenue Service or Justice Department file...
...They capture a terrified Vietnamese girl, brutally slay and dismember her and the village's children—the symbolic rag dolls—and toss them into the ditch provided by the trap door...
...The Theater and the War by CATHARINE HUGHES Almost three years to the day after Lieutenant William Calley and his troops entered the Vietnamese hamlet of Mylai, a play called Pinkville, opened at the Off Broadway American Place Theater...
...Tabori's play, with music by Stanley Walden and directed by Martin Fried, could as easily be called The Making of a Murderer 1968...
...In time they step on the dolls, kick them about and sweep them through a grilled trapdoor in the platform...
...By the time of their assault on the village they have been turned into killers who have learned to "look without seeing" at their victims...
...There is barbed wire overhead and soldiers stand silently, arms folded across their chests...
...In dramatizing personal commitment and insisting on the rights of conscience, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine challenges its audiences to reclaim what they have long professed are their ideals...
...They have accepted the credo that "the first hundred murders are the hardest...
...In condensing such a mass of material, it was predictable that a qualitative change would occur, almost by the law of nature, as the form emerged," Daniel Berrigan says in a program note...
...At their trial in Baltimore they were convicted of destroying government property and obstructing the operations of the Selective Service System...
...asks Philip Berrigan...
...The Trial of the Catonsville Nine is tendentious and at times even simplistic...
...Only the simulated violence—stylized, often symbolic movement created by dance choreographer Anna Sokolow—occasionally breaks through to another level...
...As each of the defendants recalls how he arrived at his personal moment of decision and the "four or five minutes when our past went up in flames," and the judge regularly reminds them they are not trying racial injustice in America, the Central Intelligence Agency, open occupancy, the United Fruit Company, the history of the world in the Twentieth Century, the air war in Vietnam, or the American Catholic hierarchy, Berrigan and the play's resourceful director, Gordon Davidson, carefully build their indictment of the forces and the individuals that brought about and perpetuate our involvement in Vietnam, "the land of burning children...
...With television cameras recording the event, they then looked on, praying, as they waited for the arrival of the police...
...It builds its case slowly and irrevocably, admits that good men may differ, but insists that conscience makes not cowards but at least symbolic heroes of a few...
...CATHARINE HUGHES is a free lance critic...
...One may believe in what the anti-war Protestant theologian Robert McAfee Brown calls "the allegiance one is called upon to give to a structured fabric in our society," and be convinced that the Catonsville Nine were engaged in an effort to rend that fabric...
...It, too, is polemical, but vastly more resonant and moving theater...
...Whether one terms Daniel Berrigan a "self-righteous fanatic" leading a collection of "protesting rabble," as another prominent American writer-priest does in a recent article, or considers the war in Vietnam "a criminal assault on the people of Indochina," as Noam Chomsky contends in an answering essay, has become almost a question of rhetoric...
...Like much of the play his question is drawn from the transcript of the trial and the documents surrounding it...
...How much time is left this country...
...In any case, it seems impossible to deny that, at Catonsville, nine men and women acted in terms of their consciences—consciences ruled irrelevant in an American court of law—and that Berrigan's play challenges us to examine ours...
...By employing a bludgeon rather than a rapier Tabori ensures that he will be listened to only by the already converted and that, regrettably, is a little like speaking only to oneself...
...In a time when the specter of "repression" is often cited, it is perhaps worth a moment's meditation...
...Peter Brook, the play's influential (British director, has observed that the theater "should be necessary—like a bank or a grocer's shop...
...It is quite a bad play, but it is symbolic of the new political activism now making itself felt in almost precisely the place where one would least expect to find it: theaters that rely for much of their revenue and in some instances for their very survival on the foundations and the national and state arts councils...
...One also might consider it an effort to mend it...
...The jury, however, had been told—to its apparent satisfaction, perhaps also to its relief— that "the law does not recognize political, religious, moral convictions, or some higher law, as justification for the commission of a crime, no matter how good the motive may be...
...unlike it, it ultimately becomes a powerful political statement and an extraordinary theatrical experience...
...George Tabori's Pinkville is more polemic than play...
...The Trial of the Catonsville Nine does not make Judge Roszel Thomsen an ogre...
...One, in particular, protests: "I wasn't born a killer and nobody's gonna make me one," says Jerry the Naz...
...he is presented not as an unthinking or unfeeling man but as one dealing with a situation neither his training nor his apparently real sympathy and compassion have prepared him for...
...Perhaps at the moment it must be...
...Rather, it suggests the impossibility of not doing so...
...The elements of the charge and trial of the Berrigan brothers and the others who made up the Nine are well-known...
...On May 17, 1968, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, David Darst, John Hogan, Thomas Lewis, Marjorie and Thomas Melville, George Mische, and Mary Moylan removed 378 records from the files of the Catonsville, Maryland, Draft Board, after which they poured homemade napalm on them and set them on fire...
...A quartet of young recruits is taken in hand by a crude and aggressive sergeant named Two Ton Tessie...
...It should provide something that people can't get anywhere else...
...The audience enters the second-floor theater to find Raggedy Ann dolls strewn about on central walkways...
...It took only a half-hour for the jury to reach its decision...
...This squad is going to be a great gung-ho outfit," he assures them as he goes about a brutal and brutalizing indoctrination process...
...Inevitably, the deck is stacked...
...But the regimen is thorough and irresistible...
...Less in evidence is the skill, depth, or power that might lift Pinkville above heavy-handed polemic into the realm of evocative or convincing theater...
...The would-be rebel is by now their leader...
...In doing that, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine offers an overdue reminder that the American theater may on occasion rise to an occasion...
...It does not suggest the possibility of taking a stand against our involvement in the war in Southeast Asia...
...A voice intones, "I sent them a good boy and they made him a murderer...
...By contrast, there is The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, by Daniel Berri-gan, S.J...
...Tabori once compiled an evening entitled Brecht on Brecht and his debt to the master of didactic drama is much in evidence...
Vol. 35 • May 1971 • No. 5
