Arts of War on the Web

The limited-run play, “The Steadfast,” which is on view at the TGB Theater in New York City through February 3, is based on a painting called “Legacy” by Steve Alpert. The painting depicts seven men and one woman in U.S. Army military uniforms from the Continental Army, the War of 1812, the Civil War (Union), the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, the Vietnam War and the present day.

The play—written by Mat Smart, directed by Wes Grantom, and co-produced by Alpert—travels rapidly through time to look at each of the eight soldiers and their eight wars.

“The stories are linked, sometimes by family—the descendant of a Buffalo Soldier becomes a Vietnam draft dodger walking toward Canada—but also by this thematic question:  What does it take to decide to kill and risk your life for your country?” Jason Zinoman wrote in his favorable New York Times review of the play.

The play, Zinoman says, doesn’t “waste time trying to simulate fighting, does not glorify it. Nor is the play a harsh critique. Instead it is a celebration of soldiers that understands that their courage does not diminish or burnish those who decide not to fight.”

The Vietnam War play “Tracers” was created by a group of Vietnam veterans in Los Angeles in 1980. The play—a collage of interrelated scenes that follows the lives of a group of infantrymen from basic training through their combat in Vietnam and then to their homecoming—is a powerful one that has resonated with audiences in the many productions that have been produced throughout the nation in the last thirty-two years.

Now comes “The Long Way Home: Reflections on the Tracers Journey,” an inside-baseball look at “Tracers”  by one of its creators, John DiFusco, who also directed the play in 1980. The piece is a multimedia mix of poetry, projections, story-telling, and music. It opens on Saturday, November 3, with performances on Fridays and Saturdays through November 24 at the United States Veterans’ Artists Alliance Theater in Culver City, California.

Veterans will be admitted to the performances free of charge.

Brian Delate is an actor, playwright, and director who served as a draftee infantry sergeant in the Vietnam War. His play, Memorial Day, centers on a Vietnam veteran on the verge of suicide during a Memorial Day celebration. Delate stars in the most recent version of this one-man play in a three-run performance run next week (Oct. 2, 3, and 4) at The Drilling Company Theatre in New York City (236 W. 78th St.)

“This time, we are presenting Memorial Day with some subtle and powerful changes,” Delate told us in an email. “Earlier this year, a 20-minute version of the play was presented twice in Vietnam. The response was amazing. In fact, I’ve been invited to return to Vietnam to present the show in its entirety later this year.

“If I had not seen it with my own eyes, I would not have believed that the Vietnamese veterans and civilians who attended the performance would have been interested in the American point of view. It was a life changing experience for all of us.”

For reservations, call 212-924-1154. Veterans receive free admission.

Pat Sajak, the famed long-time host of “Wheel of Fortune” who served a tour of duty in Vietnam during the war as a radio deejay with AFVN, occasionally steps out from the “Wheel” set to do other show biz work. That includes this week, as Sajak is co-starring in a production of the famed Neil Simon comedy “The Odd Couple” through July 7 at the Harriet S. Jorgensen Theater on the University of Connecticut campus in Storrs. It is a summer production of the University’s Connecticut Repertory Theater.

Anyone who knows the play (or the movie or TV show) won’t be surprised that Sajak is playing Felix Unger, the obsessive-compulsive half of the quite odd couple. Oscar Madison, the slob sportswriter, is played by Joe Moore, who served in Vietnam with Sajak. These days Moore’s day job is news anchor on KHON-TV in Honolulu.

It’s not every day that a play with a strong Vietnam War theme opens on Broadway. One of those days is tomorrow, Wednesday, April 25, when the drama “The Columnist,” written by Pulitzer Prize winner David Auburn, opens at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on West 47th Street. The play is a fact-based, fictionalized look at the life of the now largely forgotten American newspaper columnist Joseph Alsop. It features his strongly hawkish views on the Vietnam War in the 1950s and 1960s.

John Lithgow stars as Alsop, who died in 1989 after a long, influential career as a political columnist for the New York Herald-Tribune. “A fervent New Deal liberal with an obsessive anti-Communist streak, he urged an all-out push for victory in Vietnam and attacked those who disagreed as cowards, Communists or both,” Eric Alterman wrote of Alsop in The New York Times.

“At one point during the Vietnam War, President Lyndon B. Johnson was reported to have commented, when he decided to deploy another 50,000 troops, ‘There, that should keep Joe Alsop quiet for a while.’”

Alsop, Alterman wrote, “would drop by the United States Embassy in Saigon every so often to be chauffeured around the war zone by Army helicopter and confer with the top military and diplomatic brass over fine wine and French fare. Inevitably he would return to report that the war was proceeding swimmingly, save for a few misguided ‘young crusaders’ and Communist sympathizers among the American press corps there.”

One of the play’s characters is David Halberstam, the former New York Times Vietnam War correspondent and author (The Best and the Brightest, et al.) who was one of the most prominent ”young crusaders” who was highly critical of the U.S. war effort.

Halberstam, for his part, harshly criticized Alsop, as in this passage in The Best and the Brightest: “He had never quite forgiven the State Department for allowing the United States to stand idly by while Chine went Communist. China had fallen despite his warnings, but he was still a forceful advocate of the domino theory, a man skilled in the ways of Washington, well connected politically and socially, and while he would not stoop to the kind of tactics which had marked McCarthyism, he nevertheless could make the case for holding the line in a way which implied that manhood was at stake.”

“The Columnist”  will have limited run on Broadway. The show is slated to run until June 24.

Citrus College history professor Bruce Solheim’s new play, “Bronze Star,” based on the life of his friend, Vietnam veteran Carl Ferguson, an Army draftee who received a Bronze Star and who committed suicide in 2002, will be one of the plays  showcased on November 8, 9, and 10 at 8:00 p.m. at the Hough Performing Arts Center at Citrus College in Glendora, California. The staged reading is part of the “Emerging American Voices: Stories for the 21st Century” series.

“We use some of our veteran students as actors and others as behind-the-scenes technicians,” Solheim told us. “The play touches on many contemporary issues while taking us back to the Vietnam War era.”

The play he said, deals with the Vietnam War, as well as today’s wars inIraqandAfghanistan. “It’s about a heroic, young, gay soldier looking for acceptance, peace, love, and purpose who is traumatized by war and rejected by his family and an uncaring and intolerant society.”

For ticket info, call the box office at 626-963-9411.

Citrus College history professor Bruce Solheim has written a new play, “Bronze Star,” based on the life of his friend, Vietnam veteran Carl Ferguson, an Army draftee who received a Bronze Star and who committed suicide in 2002.  “We use some of our veteran students as actors [above at a staged reading] and others as behind the scenes technicians,” Solheim told us. “The play touches on many contemporary issues while taking us back to the Vietnam War era.”

The play he said, deals with the Vietnam War, as well as today’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “It’s about a heroic, young, gay soldier looking for acceptance, peace, love, and purpose who is traumatized by war and rejected by his family and an uncaring and intolerant society.”

On tap is a more formal staged reading in the fall and then a full production in Fall 2012.

What’s being bill as the “Pre-Broadway World Premiere” of the play, “A Time To Kill,” based on John Grisham’s  first novel, begins May 6 at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. Adopted for the stage by Tony Award winner Rupert Holmes, the 1989 book (and the 1996 film) and the new play deal with a Vietnam veteran’s reaction a horrific crime perpetrated on his daughter and the racially charged aftermath, played out in a Mississippi courtroom. The Arena Stage production runs through June 19.

Here’s our brief review of the heavily promoted movie (which featured a slew of stars, including Samuel L. Jackson, Sandra Bullock, Matthew McConaughey, Ashley Judd, Kiefer Sutherland, Donald Sutherland, Kevin Spacey and Patrick McGoohan), which appeared in the in-print “Arts of War” column in the September 1996 issue of The Veteran. (Spoiler alert: read no further if you don’t want to know details of the crime.)

As all viewers of summertime TV movie trailers know, the Hollywood version of John Grisham’s first novel A Time to Kill (1989), deals with the racially charged trial of a black man in Mississippi. In the novel Grisham makes it plain that the defendant, Carl Lee Hailey, is a Vietnam veteran. Hailey even uses an M-16 to shoot and kill the two evil white men who had brutally raped his 12-year-old daughter.

In the movie, written by Akiva Goldsman, the word “Vietnam” is not mentioned, and it isn’t until well into the trial that we hear of Carl Lee Hailey’s “service during the war.” The movie, which opened July 24, stayed faithful to Grisham’s sympathetic portrait of Carl Lee (played supremely well by Samuel L. Jackson, above, right) as a family man with a steady job who is driven to act in extreme anguish after the horror that befalls his daughter.

Despite his one act of violent vigilantism, Carl Lee can be put into the positive category in Hollywood’s not-so-hot history of portraying Vietnam vets on the screen. On the other hand, it’s a good bet that the movie’s one phrase relating to Carl Lee’s military service will not even register with many viewers.

Back in 2001 newspaper columnist Tom Philpott wrote a compelling book called Glory Denied: The Saga of Jim Thompson, America’s Longest-Held Prisoner of War, the amazing, true story of Col. Floyd James “Jim” Thompson. The former Special Forces officer was captured by the Viet Cong in March 1964 and not released until 1973, giving him the dubious honor of being held longer than any other Prisoner of War in U.S. history.

Thompson suffered greatly during his nine years of captivity, physically and emotionally.  To add to his troubles, while he was being held by the Viet Cong, Thompson’s wife moved with their four young children into the home of an Army sergeant.

The Thompsons reunited after his release, but their marriage soon dissolved. Thompson later suffered a stroke that diminished his mental capabilities. In his book, Tom Philpott told Jim Thompson’s story mainly through the verbatim testimony of his family, friends and colleagues. Much of Thompson’s own contributions came from interviews he gave for another book prior to his stroke.

The Jim Thompson story intrigued the composer Tom Cipullo, who sat down a few years ago and wrote a contemporary opera based on the tale. The Chelsea Opera in New York City put on several performances of Cipullo’s Glory Denied in November. The Boston Metro Opera will present a fully staged production with piano accompaniment in Jamaica Plain, Mass., on February 25 and 26. UrbanArias will offer six performances in Arlington, Virginia, beginning April 1.

New York Times critic Allan Kozinn called the Chelsea Opera Veterans Day performance, produced by Lynne Hayden-Findlay,  “a spare, affecting production.”

Instead of presenting the Thompsons’ “wrenching history as a straight narrative,” Kozinn said, “Mr. Cipullo tells it as a dialogue between past and present, with actions and their implications shown almost simultaneously.” Although the musical has only two characters, Cipullo has four singers play the two roles, as the younger and older Thompsons.

The University Theatre at North Carolina State University in Raleigh is presenting six  performances of the powerful Shirley Lauro play, A Piece of My Heart, which tells the stories of six women who served in the Vietnam War, beginning on October 28th.

The play is based on stories from the the oral history book of the same name by Keith Walker which was published in 1986 and still is in print.  The play will be presented at the Kennedy-McIlwee Studio Theatre in Thompson Hall from, Thursday, October 28, to Sunday, November 7.

Lauro will take part in a reception with the cast and crew that is open to audience members before the opening night performance on October 28, and will hold a post-show discussion following the October 29th performance. The show’s producers are putting together a  display of photos and memorabilia from the Vietnam War in accompany the performances.

Part of the proceeds will go to the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Foundation in Washington D.C. For more info, including show times and ticket prices, go to the  theatre’s web site or check out the press release.  Or call 919-515-1100.