Home Fronts
[Still Life premiered at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in 1980 and debuted Off-Broadway early the following year at the American Place Theatre. In the following highly favorable review of the latter production, Feingold praises the writing, acting, and staging of the piece.]
"As incredibly civilized as we are in this room," says the nice young man, "these things go on." The things he is talking about are murder, mutilation, child-killing, schizophrenic breakdowns, battlefield hysteria, and seeing his buddies with their heads blown off. In other words, he is talking about Vietnam. The young man goes on talking. He is such a nice young man—smiling, straight-forward, presentable, aware. We ought to like him, we think. Sure, he did time in jail on a drug rap after serving in Vietnam, but veterans don't have it easy, and drugs are universal. He has a wife and son, and another child on the way. Granted, he takes photographs that tend to feature people smeared with stage blood and stuck with prop weapons; say he's working out his Vietnam trauma, it can't be easy for him. He's still a nice guy. So why does he pound the table that way, and give his wife threatening looks? Why is he getting up menacingly and coming toward us?
The nice young man is the pivotal character of Emily Mann's theatre piece, Still Life, a jagged and arresting chunk of dramatic shrapnel that is now lodged permanently in my brain. I recommend it much the same way I would recommend open-heart surgery—the point being that, for the heart of America, such an operation is radically necessary right now. After all, as a nation, we created this nice young man, we sent him to Vietnam, and we caused what he did there. Since he came home, we have been studiously avoiding him; it is the easiest way conceivable of avoiding the part of ourselves that is like him. Under Reagan, we have officially decided that the war in Vietnam was justified and can be forgotten, and if the veterans whom we trained to enjoy killing have come home to kill, that is chiefly a problem for their wives and for the inner cities, which, it seems, are to be officially forgotten too.
The director and compiler of Still Life (it is assembled from interviews with three actual people) has of course not omitted dealing with our desire to forget. Lined up next to the vet, along a table which suggests a panel discussion or press conference, are his wife and his mistress. The wife is like a mythological monster composed of elements from different species, a fable-level compendium of compassion, masochism, Medea-like fury and sheer terrified confusion. The mistress, a would-be worldly-wise divorcee, with two adolescent daughters, is one generation off the farm, with a veneer of sophistication so thin it begins to crack and curl almost visibly under the stress of the discussion. The best educated of the three, she is in some ways the most appalling, with her glibly pitying pop-psych, pop-sociology "explanations" of this or that shortcoming in the man; forgiveness was never less divine. But the point which seems to have bypassed some of the daily reviewers is that the two women, like the man, are real people, not dramatic fictions, and the contradictions which Emily Mann has arranged and intercut to such terrifying effect are the contradictions of human beings, not clever little droplets of character writing; the critic who sneers at them—sorry, Frank—is giving a bad review, not to the writer, but to God.
All three, harping obsessively on the blight Vietnam hangs over their lives, trying desperately to analyze it out of existence, are horrible failures, disasters of humanity, but they are horrible in the way in which one's relatives or friends are horrible when they make disastrous mistakes in dealing with life; not accepting them as part of oneself, after getting a chance to look this deeply into their feelings, would be the height of inhumanity.
Mann, in shaping an art object out of her sad human materials, has very wisely kept the whole process cool and understated, making the musical and thematic linkage of these three monologues subtle, never forcing effects or overstressing repetitions, letting the violence and misery in the characters come out naturally at its own rate. The performance-art notion of setting up the evening to look like a flat discussion pays off handsomely: Just as the round-table format starts to lull or bore you, the tensions flare up, so that you are kept in constant expectation of having the whole bland arrangement torn to shreds by some physical outburst. All three actors are excellent; the two women (Timothy Near and Mary McDonnell) occasionally try a shade too hard to seem folksy and normal, a minor blemish on a picture otherwise complete in its horror, which is ours, and irrevocable: Heart of Darkness, with apple pie and vanilla ice cream on the side.
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