University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Vietnam War drama 1966-2008: American theatrical responses to the war and its aftermath

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Vietnam War drama 1966-2008: American theatrical responses to the war and its aftermath

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Content VIETNAM WAR DRAMA 1966-2008: AMERICAN THEATRICAL RESPONSES TO
THE WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH

by

Erin Toth Caron

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

May 2010

Copyright 2010 Erin Toth Caron

ii 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am very grateful for the opportunity to have worked with the members of my
dissertation committee: Leo Braudy, John Carlos Rowe, Viet Nguyen, and Velina Hasu
Houston. It was an honor to learn from such fine scholars, and I feel lucky to have
benefitted from their participation in and support of my project.
Thank you to Flora Ruiz, the graduate secretary at USC, who helped me through
paperwork and was always kind, even when I imposed upon her during hectic times.
I am also grateful to playwrights John Di Fusco and David Berry, who granted me
interviews and spoke candidly about their experiences both in Vietnam and during the
production of their plays. Speaking with them was the highlight of this long and solitary
process, and I am glad to be able to include their personal comments in my work.
My friend and colleague Amy Braden was a helpful reader, a role model, and
constant source of support during my many years of graduate school. I have also relied
on dear friends Susan Wiggins, George Hart, Phil Griego, Dan and Barbara O’Connor,
Ann Esteban, Darrell Brand, and Gary Bollman in times of doubt and stress. I am happy,
now, to be able to celebrate this accomplishment with them.
I send my love to my son Carter, now three years old, who, during this whole
process and especially during the last few months, did without me a good deal more than
he should have had to. He is a beautiful, creative little boy and has brought more joy to
my life than I imagined possible.
I appreciate the research assistance and sound advice my husband Tim provided.
As I worked to finish this project, Tim also became primary caregiver, sole breadwinner,
iii 
and hunter-gatherer. His dedication to Carter and me in recent months made it possible
for me to reach this goal, and I am touched by and grateful for his selflessness.
My parents, Lou and Jill Toth, are the ones to whom I owe the greatest debt.
They bought me the computer I used to write this dissertation; they paid my tuition when
my funding ran out; they babysat Carter at least twice a week (and a great deal more in
the final months of this process) to give me extended writing time; and they never let me
give up, even when I felt entirely overwhelmed. I could not have finished this project
without them. They have always provided me a foundation of support and love, even as I
took the scenic route through school and life. I thank them with all my heart for the life
they made possible for me.

iv 
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ii
Abstract v
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: The Late 1960s 28
Chapter 2: The 1970s 95
The War Ends, But the Drama Continues 122

Chapter 3: The 1980s, 1990s, and Afterward 170
The Veteran Experience 172
“A Noble Cause”: Conservative Voices in Vietnam War Drama 189
The 1990s: Reimagining Vietnam and Recognizing the Forgotten
Veterans 205
The Twenty-First Century: The Ghosts of the Vietnam War 218

Conclusion 226
Bibliography 232

v 
ABSTRACT

Vietnam War drama in the United States spans four decades of American history,
from the first theatrical discussion of the Vietnam War in 1966 with Megan Terry’s Viet
Rock to a provocative examination of the war’s legacy in American culture with Steven
Dietz’s Last of the Boys (2004). However, critical studies of Vietnam War drama are
few, and too often those that do exist examine Vietnam War plays without sufficient
consideration of their historical moment. The historicity of the plays tends to be
overshadowed in academic studies by structural or thematic interrogations, resulting in
the grouping together for analysis of plays that actually respond to very different cultural
contexts. Subsequently, comparisons are made among plays with similar content or
structure, for example, but with decidedly dissimilar agendas and tactics, resulting in a
hierarchy of artistic achievement and the marginalization of plays that have much to
contribute both to America’s theatrical history and to a better understanding of the ways
American society at large has grappled with the Vietnam War and its aftermath.
This dissertation examines Vietnam War drama in light of each play’s specific
historical moment, emphasizing that it is not enough to acknowledge generally the
widespread unrest of the Vietnam Era and the effect of that unrest on the creation of
drama; rather, careful attention must be paid to the particular sociopolitical issues
occurring as the play under examination was written and first performed because those
issues influence (and in part are influenced by) the messages and techniques of the
playwrights. This dissertation divides the plays by decades: the 1960s, the period of
heaviest active combat; the 1970s, the war’s end and immediate aftermath; and the 1980s
and after, the resurgence of interest in Vietnam. Each of these periods produced plays
vi 
that engaged with the Vietnam War in ways determined by their historical moment,
plays that reflect, initially, the culture’s concern with the immediate dangers of the war;
later, the damage done to the country’s self-image and reputation in the world; and
finally, the difficulties experienced by returning veterans and their families. This project
engages the arguments of the three key critical works dealing with Vietnam War drama:
Nora M. Alter’s Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War Onstage, J. W. Fenn’s
Levitating the Pentagon: Evolutions in the American Theatre of the Vietnam War Era,
and Toby Silverman Zinman’s “Search and Destroy: The Drama of the Vietnam War.”
Specific attention is paid to the issue of genre and to the relevance of Vietnam War drama
in the post-Vietnam War era.
1 

INTRODUCTION
Vietnam War drama, although receiving little discussion in academic circles and
rare performances outside of educational theatre, is a rich, compelling body of work—
important both artistically and culturally. It spans four decades of American history,
from the first theatrical discussion of the Vietnam War in 1966 with Megan Terry’s Viet
Rock to a provocative examination of the war’s legacy in American culture with Steven
Dietz’s Last of the Boys (2004). Several plays have earned critical and popular
acclaim—Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July and David Rabe’s Sticks and Bones, for
example—and others have been the vehicles for exciting theatrical innovation and
provocative political commentary. Academic studies of Vietnam War drama are few, but
those that do exist contribute much to the acknowledgment of these plays as a genre of
their own and to the understanding of the powerful ways in which individuals and
theatrical communities responded to the Vietnam War era in America.
However, too often these studies examine Vietnam War plays without sufficient
consideration of their historical moment. All scholars of Vietnam War drama are aware,
of course, of the complexity of the turbulent period and the divisive impact the war had
on American society through the 1960s and 70s, but this historicity tends to be
overshadowed in their studies of the drama by structural or thematic interrogations,
resulting in the grouping together for analysis of plays that actually respond to very
different cultural contexts. Subsequently, comparisons are made among plays with
similar content or structure, for example, but with decidedly dissimilar agendas and
tactics. All the plays of the selected group, then, are examined against a single set of
2 
criteria—character development, structural coherence, breadth of political
consideration, or the like—regardless of whether or not those criteria are the goal of that
specific play. For instance, some playwrights deliberately utilize relatively flat character
“types,” easily recognizable to audiences, in order to foreground their political message;
other playwrights may use heightened sentimentality to reach audiences entrenched in
conflicting perspectives, sacrificing ambiguity for affective influence. When critics
compare such plays to others that conform more closely to the dominant aesthetic criteria,
they inevitably create a hierarchy of artistic achievement, which marginalizes plays that
have much to contribute both to America’s theatrical history and to a better
understanding of the ways American society at large has grappled with the Vietnam War
and its aftermath.
I propose, then, to examine Vietnam War drama in light of each play’s specific
historical moment. I emphasize that it is not enough to acknowledge generally the
widespread unrest of the Vietnam era and the effect of that unrest on the creation of
drama; rather, careful attention must be paid to the particular sociopolitical issues
occurring as the play under examination was written and first performed because those
issues influence (and in part are influenced by) the messages and techniques of the
playwrights. The American theatre responded quickly and directly to the rapidly
changing events of the Vietnam War and to its representations in television and film with
varying messages, techniques, and degrees of urgency and confrontation, depending on
what was required at the time. The conversation was necessarily different in both content
and tone as the war progressed—as it escalated in the 1960s, as it drew to its ignominious
end in the mid-1970s, and as the country attempted to come to terms with it in the 1980s.
3 
The theatre was an active participant in this shifting political dialogue—serving,
variously, as counterargument to popular opinion, corrective to perceived
misrepresentation, recuperative of maligned reputation, healer of damaged souls, or
advocate for rights and justice.
My dissertation divides the plays by decades: the 1960s, the period of heaviest
active combat; the 1970s, the war’s end and immediate aftermath; and the 1980s and
after, the resurgence of interest in Vietnam. My decision to use the turn of decades as
dividing lines for my chapters may appear overly general, but these dates mark shifts
both in playwrights’ political focus and in the theatrical techniques of Vietnam War
drama. Each of these periods, I argue, produced plays that engaged with the Vietnam
War in ways determined by their historical moment, plays that reflect, initially, the
culture’s concern with the immediate dangers of the war; later, the damage done to the
country’s self-image and reputation in the world; and finally, the difficulties experienced
by returning veterans and their families. To neglect the plays’ historicity, then, as most
academic studies of Vietnam War drama do, is to overlook the vital dialogue that
occurred between the theatre community and American society during the Vietnam War
era.
A primary concern in discussions of Vietnam War drama is how to determine
what exactly constitutes a Vietnam War play.
1
Must the play take place in Vietnam
during actual combat missions? Must it deal exclusively with the politics or social issues

1
 Two plays considered in my study—Arthur Kopit’s Indians and Joseph Heller’s We
Bombed in New Haven—include no textual mention whatsoever of the Vietnam War and
thus their status as Vietnam War plays could easily be challenged, especially if their
historical context is overlooked. 
4 
of the war? Should it be written by or about veterans? As a rule, critics of Vietnam War
drama do not attempt to establish specific criteria by which plays should be measured for
their inclusion in the genre. Instead, bibliographies of Vietnam War drama are extremely
inclusive: plays having even remote Vietnam connections are grouped alongside those in
which the war is the main dramatic conflict.
2
In addition, many of these works come
from non-professionals; in his bibliography, David De Rose includes unpublished,
unproduced works and readings from veterans’ theatre workshops alongside plays by
well-established playwrights, acknowledging as part of the genre works that may not
stand up to critical scrutiny. De Rose’s work is indicative of the general willingness to
accept into the genre of Vietnam War drama any play with the war or the war’s effects as
its subject matter, regardless of the play’s form or literary merit. Generic parameters tend
toward inclusivity, I suggest, because the war had such far-reaching consequences that
determining conclusively what has to do with the Vietnam War and what does not is both
a tricky and culturally sensitive issue. To deem a play “not enough about Vietnam” to be
a member of the genre would be, perhaps, to decide arbitrarily whose claims to the war
are the more legitimate, whose voice is the more authoritative, or how far the ripple
effects of the war extend. Thus, the boundaries of the genre stretch to include just about
any drama in which the Vietnam War figures, even slightly.

2
 For example, David De Rose has compiled a bibliography of 152 plays dealing with the
war and its consequences to varying degrees, and he cites a number of other works
known only by reputation. De Rose includes in his bibliography “playscripts […] which
either explicitly or implicitly deal with the Viet Nam War, or with American veterans of
that war. Some pieces deal with the families of soldiers who never returned. Others are
plays in which there is simply a character (or mention of a character) who is a Viet Nam
vet.” 
5 
One negative consequence of this democratic approach, however, is that it
results in the homogenization of the genre, suggesting that any play in the group is
dealing with the Vietnam War much the same way as any other, which is clearly not the
case. In many plays, the war is the primary source of conflict, but that conflict may be
the immediate survival of combat situations, or it may be the ideological conflict of
“hawks” and “doves.” In other plays, the war may appear as little more than character
background, and even then, a character’s veteran status may be only a minor element in
the drama. A useful work, unique in its attempt to create subgenres within Vietnam War
drama, is Bradley Jon Wright’s American Theatre about the Vietnam War. Wright has
produced a taxonomy of Vietnam War drama, in which he aims to “provide a method of
describing the works that make up the Vietnam Dramaturgy” (italics Wright’s) (659).
Including in his study “the whole trajectory of theatrical reaction to the Vietnam War,
ranging from early anti-war works to very recent dramas,” Wright creates three major
categories of plays: “Protestational Dramaturgy,” “Non-Protestational Dramaturgy,” and
“Liminal Dramaturgy.” “Protestational Dramaturgy,” as the name suggests, includes
those plays written and performed “in either direct or indirect protests against the war”
(22). In general, these are works from the war years (1966-1973) that call for audiences
to engage in political action to stop the war. The plays opt for “stock characters in simple
plots,” eschewing psychological complexity in favor of clear political messages. “Non-
Protestational Dramaturgy,” next, is Wright’s category for those plays that address social
concerns for the returning veterans and their families, generally works that appear after
the war ended or perhaps in the final years of combat. In these plays, the war itself is not
the primary dramatic conflict; instead, “they are ‘about’ other issues, such as racism,
6 
violence, or reintegration into society” (23). These plays tended to be more traditionally
staged than the protest plays, which utilized radical and experimental means to shock
audiences out of complacency.
Wright’s third category—“Liminal Dramaturgy”—includes plays that do not fit
into either of his first two groupings, specifically those works that take place in Vietnam
or with characters preparing to be sent there. Although Wright’s terminology suggests
that they occupy a kind of middle ground between two more solid categories, these are
the plays that most obviously belong in the genre of Vietnam War drama, for the war
figures as the drama’s main conflict. His choice of “liminal” to describe these plays
evokes the common opinion of the American GI that Vietnam was a kind of “nowhere”
(GIs would refer to the United States as “The World,” suggesting that Vietnam was
someplace else entirely) and emphasizes the strange, transitional existence the GI
experienced in Vietnam—outside the rules and morality of civilian life, forever changed
by the experience of combat, unsure of a return home.
Wright’s work is useful in giving structure to a large, and perhaps too-inclusive,
canon of Vietnam War drama, which varies widely in its politics, tone, techniques, and
content. His categories help to differentiate which plays deal with the war as a central
conflict and which use it as the background for discussions of other, more or less related,
concerns. The categories also begin to separate the plays into their historical periods:
“Protestational Dramaturgy” generally appears during the war years, “Non-Protestational
Dramaturgy in the post-war years. However, Wright emphasizes thematic similarities in
the plays—blindness, father/son relationships, disease and poison, mental illness—rather
than historical specificity, resulting in many of the same problematic groupings of plays
7 
as are found in analytical works. The thematic approach makes comparisons among
plays that respond to different social and political concerns, and it results in
interpretations that fail to consider the particular nuances those themes take on in light of
historical specificity—nuances that, I argue, are of particularly relevance in Vietnam War
drama.
An historical approach also helps to illuminate Vietnam War drama’s evolutions
in both form and content. Because they all include the war as part of their dramatic
conflict and because many share stylistic and structural similarities, it makes sense to
define Vietnam War drama as a genre of its own. However, because the plays also differ
widely in technique, tone, and subject matter, especially as they evolve through the war
era, they resist coalescing and developing into a unique genre in the way other genres
have done. The plays of Vietnam War drama share a common topic, but that topic is
addressed through a number of different theatrical styles. For example, Wilson’s Fifth of
July is a domestic drama, Kopit’s Indians an historical drama, Mc Lure’s Lone Star a
comedy, Heller’s We Bombed in New Haven a tragicomedy, Terry’s Viet Rock an
experimental “celebration,” Cole’s Medal of Honor Rag a documentary play, and Hair a
blockbuster musical. In traditional discussions of theatre genres, one is more likely to
group Hair with other musicals—Les Miserables or Rent, perhaps—regardless of the
plays’ subject matters, than with straight plays that deal with the Vietnam War, like Fifth
of July or Lone Star. They resemble each other in having the war as a part (to greater or
lesser degree) of their plots, but they are unlike one another in many more ways than they
are similar.
8 
Genres also tend to develop from a innovative work that forms a basis for future
imitation and modification, and Vietnam War drama does not develop along these
predictable lines. In Kinds of Literature, Alastair Fowler describes genres as building on
a particularly successful forerunner, not necessarily entirely original in all its
components, but a work of such quality and creativity that it becomes the paradigm of the
genre that will develop from it. Fowler uses Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” as his
example, claiming it began the genre of the country house poem:
Because of its high value […] it had an almost paradigmatic function.
This status is not a matter of formal value only, but of content and
personal worth. Such a work becomes institutionalized and leads to
change: it generates not only faithful imitations but original works that
nevertheless relate to it rather than to its predecessors. (154)

Genres tend to develop, then, from a paradigmatic text, later works adding original
elements to the core form but drawing heavily from that original work. Bram Stoker’s
Dracula, for example, serves as the foundational text for the large number of vampire
stories and films that have followed it. In American culture, one thinks of The Virginian,
perhaps, as the genesis of the Western, or The Maltese Falcon as the paradigm of the
hard-boiled detective novel. The crucial point here, I believe, is that a coherent text of
some kind (poem, novel, film, legend, or play) serves as the foundation for the genre that
develops. Later works will necessarily modify that core text to suit their particular goals
of expression, but the antecedent is recognizable in those later works and, despite the
popularity or success of new pieces, remains the paradigmatic example of the genre.
In Vietnam War drama, this does not seem to be the case. There is no clear
paradigmatic example of the Vietnam War play. There are a few particularly successful
works and others that deal in such specifics of the war that they become the ones most
9 
often studied or performed, but there is not one that serves as the foundation from which
the genre developed. I propose a few reasons for this aberration:
1.) The Vietnam War has no coherent story or myth on which artists could base
their individual works. The nature of the war itself defied dramatic construction. The
war conformed to no traditional understanding of warfare, nor were its roots in an
honorable ideology that would bear retelling and modification. Militarily, there were no
fronts, no acquisition of territory, no lasting, honorable victories. The initial reason for
America’s entry into the war was to reinforce the imperialist occupation of Vietnam by
the French, a fact that utterly contradicts the historical claims and the foundation of the
United States as the promoter of freedom throughout the world. Thus the “story” of
Vietnam does not support the American mythology and does not lend itself to becoming a
legend or model for reproduction and imitation. In fact, the Vietnam War disrupts almost
every myth Americans have of themselves and their nation, and every person involved
with the war experienced it differently.
3
Many plays (and other literature) similarly
emphasize the random nature of the war’s events—no cause-and-effect lessons to learn,
no karmic retribution, no predestined sacrifice or heroic triumphs. Instead, people die for
being in the wrong place at the wrong time; capable men are killed, and fools live.
Survival in Vietnam was achieved more through luck than through ability or doing the
right thing.

3
 The inclusivity of Christian G. Appy’s book Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered
From All Sides attests to how many divergent stories about the war exist: there are 138
personal narratives in his collection, a combination of Vietnamese and American voices,
veteran and civilian. 
10 
2.) There is nothing definitive to say about the war, no easy lesson or moral to
take from it. Most traditional theatrical genres end with a satisfying sense of closure.
Comedies end in marriage or unification of lovers who have struggled to find their
appropriate matches; tragedies end in the death of the troubled main character(s) and the
purging of destabilizing forces from society; at the end of a farce, the complexities of plot
and mistaken identities are ironed out; musicals end in community and a big, show-
stopping number. Vietnam War drama, on the other hand, does not offer tidy
conclusions. Toby Silverman Zinman argues that this ambiguity is a failing of the plays,
which leave the audience without closure; however, ambiguity is characteristic of the war
itself, and the plays reflect this inability to offer a definitive statement about the war or to
relegate it entirely to the past.
3.) The plays about Vietnam have vastly different approaches and intentions.
Because Vietnam War drama is so diverse, it is challenging to see the plays as
comprising a particular group and perhaps even more challenging to discus them as a
genre. Despite the fact that they are all dramas, Kopit’s Indians or Heller’s We Bombed in
New Haven, which are suggestive of the Vietnam War but do not contain any specifics
about it, are problematic to discuss alongside Shaw’s Iowa Stories or Mann’s Still Life,
which are direct transcripts of interviews with veterans, full of specifics of the war, edited
for staging. The four plays differ in function and politics; they utilize different dramatic
techniques; they value different voices (the artist v. the veteran); and as productions, they
would not all successfully transcend their historical moments. They share the Vietnam
War as a defining component of the dramatic action, but they have different, even
conflicting, political and artistic goals.
11 
4.) Vietnam War drama responds as a corrective voice or counterargument to
popular cinematic representations of Vietnam, which, because of film’s need for mass
appeal, distort the war experience for storytelling purposes. In order to give Vietnam
War films the satisfying sense of completeness required by mainstream film audiences,
filmmakers tend to re-contextualize the war within familiar mythologies and traditional
narratives, imposing cultural meanings on the war experience where none exist. Because
the Vietnam War does not have a coherent story of its own, these films recast the
Vietnam War into palatable narratives of American exceptionalism and examinations of
human nature. For example, The Green Berets (1968) was specifically made as
propaganda for the war effort, an attempt to tell the story the government wanted told
about Vietnam, and thus the war in the film resembles World War II, the last American
War to have enjoyed widespread public support. Apocalypse Now is a retelling of Joseph
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness set in Vietnam; Platoon’s structure is reminiscent of Herman
Melville’s Billy Budd, a “good v. evil” battle between two men in which a younger man
becomes the victim; and The Deer Hunter depicts Robert De Niro’s character as a
modern-day Natty Bumppo, uniquely skilled to survive brutal conditions. These films
superimpose familiar narratives onto the “story” of Vietnam in order to recast the war
into comprehensibility, to give it a sense of the tragic rather than absurd. However, doing
so distorted public understanding of the Vietnam War in such a way that compels
rebuttal, and Vietnam War drama responded by returning to traditional theatrical staging
techniques, privileging language over spectacle, and emphasizing the experience of the
individual over that of the nation.
12 
I do not mean to say that Vietnam War drama does not cohere as a genre at all.
On the contrary, there are a great number of similarities among Vietnam War plays, from
recurring scenes and images to common structural elements and themes. For example,
many plays contain scenes of combat or of initiation, in which the rules of survival in
Vietnam are taught by seasoned soldiers to “newbies”—newly arrived recruits—and thus
to the audience as well. Scenes of resurrection of the dead appear in a number of plays,
as do images of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Thematically, the plays are largely
critical of the war, even if that criticism is only implicitly expressed, and all show the
destructiveness of military training and warfare on the psyche of the individual.
However, the genre essentially divides into subgenres as years pass and Vietnam
War drama evolves to engage with newly emerging political concerns. Plays of the
1960s resemble one another politically and stylistically much more than they resemble
plays of the 1980s. Plays of the 60s engage with the war as an ideological issue, arguing
against America’s imperialism and the disregard for human life. They often speak of
Vietnam obliquely rather than directly and stage protests through abstraction and
allusion. Barbara Garson’s MacBird is an example of this decade’s plays; it takes a stand
against the Johnson Administration by comparing President Johnson to Shakespeare’s
treasonous Macbeth. Plays of the 80s, on the other hand, emphasize the war’s impact on
the individual over ideological issues. They are full of specifics about Vietnam, military
jargon, and profanity, and they aim not for political action but for cultural recognition of
the veteran. John Di Fusco’s Tracers serves as a model for many representations of the
veteran experience in the 1980s and afterward. These generic changes are a result of the
culture’s changing understanding of the Vietnam War and from the playwrights’
13 
changing dramatic goals, not simply the products of typical generic modification. As I
suggested, the genre does not develop from foundational texts within the genre but from
outside stimuli: contemporary representations of the war and the political urgencies of the
moment. Thus, it is vital that one consider Vietnam War drama in its specific historical
context in order to appreciate fully the passionate responses of the theatrical community
to this troubled era.
In the late 1960s, as the Vietnam War escalated and opposition to it grew, graphic
images of the war were broadcast nightly on the television news, overwhelming
Americans with disturbing scenes of combat and reports of the day’s body counts.
Theatre companies at this time aimed to incite audiences toward political action but could
not achieve those goals by depicting onstage the horrors of war, for they could not
compete with the real horrors seen on television; thus they did not attempt to do so.
Rather than approaching the war head-on as television did, theatre came at it from other
directions. Theatre artists utilized radical new performance techniques and innovative
styles they had been developing to give voice to political protest in ways that would
break through the potentially desensitizing effects of television’s unrelenting realism.
Vietnam War drama written during the late 1960s tends to deal with the war in the
abstract, eschewing the realism of the previous decades in favor of theatricality. The
particularities of the Vietnam War (its politics, geographic locations, battles, etc.) are
usually absent from the plays of this period; instead, the subject of the drama tends to be
war in general—sometimes past wars America has fought, sometimes an absurd, made-
up war. This circuitous approach to the subject of the Vietnam War allowed audiences to
experience the plays’ messages without bringing to bear heavily on the drama whatever
14 
preconceptions and opinions about the war they may already have had. Speaking
about Vietnam directly at such a politically divided moment would likely have polarized
audiences immediately and prevented them from absorbing the effects of the
performances. By approaching the political debate through abstractions, though, theatre
companies could challenge the American institutions and cultural mythology that helped
to create the Vietnam War, steering audiences toward critical thought and re-evaluation
of loyalties, rather than provoking knee-jerk responses to politically and socially sensitive
particulars. Thus, the plays mounted during the worst of the fighting in Vietnam often
avoided mentioning Vietnam by name at all. In this period, Vietnam War drama could
imply treason within the Kennedy/Johnson Administration by comparing it to
Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Barbara Garson’s MacBird); it could use the Brechtian
“alienation effect” to impress upon audiences a sense of their responsibility to and for
those who were serving in the military (Joseph Heller’s We Bombed in New Haven); it
could opt for sentimentality and dream-like shifts in time and place reminiscent of Death
of a Salesman in order to awaken audience sympathy for soldiers and their families (Ron
Cowen’s Summertree); it could remind audiences of the nation’s disreputable past
treatment of Native Americans and linked their genocide to the vast destruction of
Southeast Asia (Arthur Kopit’s Indians); it could disrupt popular beliefs of American
military behavior (both institutional and individual) as righteous and honorable and
instead showed military personnel to be ill-prepared, foolish, naïve, and bumbling or,
contrastingly, callous, self-serving, dehumanizing, and self-destructive (John Guare’s
Muzeeka, and Terrence McNally’s Botticelli).
15 
In no other period do playwrights engage with the war through such varied
theatrical endeavors as they do in the 1960s. The plays are almost all written by non-
veterans, a trend that will pass as the war does. At this point, any playwright could argue
persuasively against the war; it would not be until much later that the veteran voice
would claim to be the primary authority. The plays of this era emphasize the costs of
war: the destruction of families, of the Vietnamese, and of the American trust, but each
play takes a unique approach to these similar messages. They range from the sentimental
to the shocking, from the tragic to the comic. They all have a confrontational quality that
aims to spark audience action, and thus critics have frequently deemed them inferior
works because of their lack of subtlety or their experimental approaches. If these plays
are a bit heavy-handed, however, it is because they could not afford subtlety in their
political moment
4
; attempts to stop the war arguably required overstatement in order to
move audiences in the desired direction.
In the late 1970s, after the war is over, Vietnam War drama becomes about
coping, rebuilding, and moving on, both for individuals and for the nation. The theatre
sees a return of traditional theatrical staging and techniques, as if the country were tired
of the experimentation of the 1960s and yearned for familiarity. Realism is embraced
once again; plays are taken out of the streets and put back on proscenium stages; family
dramas return and replace radical “happenings” of the previous period; and politics are
put on a back burner in favor of a focus on the individual. These dramatic trends reflect

4
 In this way, they resemble the politically minded theatre of the 1930s, of which Clifford
Odets’s Waiting for Lefty (1935) is a model; Odets’s play ends with calls of “Strike!
Strike! Strike!” that openly urge audience members to support the unionization of taxi
drivers. 
16 
the disillusionment, grief, and exhaustion felt by a nation experiencing its first loss in
war and seeing its president resign in disgrace. The drama is quiet and contemplative,
aiming for cultural re-evaluation and empathy rather than social action.
In the previous period of Vietnam War drama, David Rabe stands out as the sole
playwright with actual Vietnam experience. Most others were civilian playwrights
engaging with the war’s issues rather indirectly (recall that 1960s drama tended to treat
Vietnam in the abstract) in order to make political or social statements from their
perspectives as artists and citizens. In the late 1970s (and in the 1980s, as will be
discussed later) those individuals writing plays about Vietnam are more frequently
veterans themselves. The voice of the veteran gains a legitimacy it did not enjoy during
the turbulent combat years; specific details about the war and about individual veterans’
experiences abound. The comprehension of Vietnam as an entirely unique war
experience in American history is dawning, and playwrights imply that abstractions of
the war or attempts to universalize the experience will both ring hollow and do an
injustice to the stories of those who were there.
Thematically, these plays emphasize navigating the wounds of Vietnam, both
physical and psychological. Lanford Wilson’s 5th of July, considered among American
drama’s best plays on any subject, draws from Chekhov in creating an ensemble cast
attempting to deal with the disillusionment of the postwar era. The lead character, Ken
Talley, is a disabled veteran attempting to decide how he will proceed with his life and
career after Vietnam. This re-evaluation of the American identity (wounded, perhaps, but
still capable) appears in many plays of the late 1970s. Sometimes the Vietnam combat
experience is thrust far into the background of the plays, serving mostly as character
17 
history (James McLure’s Lone Star), and other times the in-country experience makes
up the majority of the action (David Berry’s G.R. Point, Amlin Gray’s How I Got that
Story). Streamers, the final play in David Rabe’s Vietnam trilogy, wrestles with the
violence among Americans the war in Vietnam engendered.
Finally, after the long silence of the regrouping period of the late 1970s, the 1980s
and President Ronald Reagan’s assessment of the Vietnam War as “a noble cause”
brought forth a renewed cultural interest in the war and in its veterans, resulting in a great
number of accounts of the war—histories, memoirs, personal narratives, films, and even
more plays. Some of the representations of the war are revisionist, attempts to reinterpret
America’s involvement in Vietnam as idealistic rather than imperialistic, and as a series
of poor strategy decisions rather than a failure or an outright mistake. Richard Nixon’s
memoir No More Vietnams (1985), for example, argues that much of the blame for the
United States’ unheroic withdrawal from Vietnam lies with America’s own anti-war
movement, whose actions, he claims, undermined the troops abroad and forced Congress
to pull support for the war, making it impossible for the United States to finish the job.
Most of the Vietnam War drama from the 80s and 90s, however, cares little for such
political issues and instead aims to express the personal impact of the war on the men and
women who served in it.
This is not to suggest that either 1980s theatre in general or Vietnam War drama
of the period in particular was apolitical. On the contrary, a large number of plays tackle
political and social issues in the 80s, and the politics of identity becomes the basis for
plays from previously marginalized groups (women, gays and lesbians, African
Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans). A few examples: Larry Kramer’s The Normal
18 
Heart (1985) confronts the AIDS crisis; Marsha Norman’s ‘night, Mother (1982)
explores the issue of women’s autonomy; August Wilson’s Fences (1986) examines the
effects of history and social oppression on African American men. Due in large part to
the determined efforts of the veterans’ movement, the Vietnam veteran becomes
recognized as an identity of its own; having endured marginalization, silencing,
misrepresentation, and a widespread lack of attention from the American government and
fellow citizens, veterans draw together, forming support groups, activist groups, and
artistic collaborations in order to gain attention for their particular concerns. They also
countered revisionist accounts of the war that represented its events and players
inaccurately. The Vietnam War drama of this period, then, generally disregards the
politics of the war itself (why the United States was there, why it lost, etc.) and focuses
instead on the politics of the Vietnam veteran’s identity.
Vietnam War drama of the 1980s and 90s is sharply focused on the specifics of
the experience. Gone are attempts to treat the war as a metaphor or in the abstract; it
becomes of primary importance to be true to the facts. To do otherwise is deemed an
injustice to those who served. Some plays (John Di Fusco’s Tracers, Shirley Lauro’s A
Piece of My Heart) attempt to portray the full range of the veteran experience, from
initiation into the military, through the tour of duty, to reintegration into American
society. Others depict the effect of particular incidents in Vietnam on veterans when they
return home (Sean Clark’s Eleven-Zulu). Still more dramatize the struggles faced by
veterans to re-assimilate into their families and communities and give voice to civilians
who never went to Vietnam but who also suffer from the physical and psychological
damage done to their loved ones (Stephen Metcalfe’s Strange Snow, Marilyn Shaw’s
19 
Iowa Stories: The Vietnam Experience, and Chris Ellsbury & Jennifer Terry’s
Vietnamese Chess). Plays take on a non-linear, episodic structure to emphasize the
disorientation and fragmentation of the Vietnam experience. There is a strong emphasis
on authenticity—in voices, language, costuming and props, which are all rendered as
truthfully as possible. Playwrights do not necessarily value realism, because the surreal
experience of Vietnam is often better represented stylistically, but truthfulness is crucial.
No longer is it acceptable to speculate about the war, to generalize about it, or to depict it
in the abstract, as was commonly done in the 1960s. In the 1980s, the plays and the
veteran voices expressed in them are helping to form the cultural memory of the Vietnam
War, and the dramatic works are written and performed with that goal in mind. In this
period, they are dealing with Vietnam as an historical event, and they are claiming the
right to dictate how it, and they, will be remembered.
My dissertation will engage the arguments of the three key critical works dealing
with Vietnam War drama: Nora M. Alter’s Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War
Onstage, J. W. Fenn’s Levitating the Pentagon: Evolutions in the American Theatre of
the Vietnam War Era, and Toby Silverman Zinman’s “Search and Destroy: The Drama of
the Vietnam War.”
Alter examines the responses of both American and European theatrical
communities to the war during the time it was actually being fought. She addresses
primarily works produced before 1975, although she does offer brief consideration of
later plays in order to expand her thesis. Her work is focused on examining the efforts of
theatre companies to offer provocative images and stimulating theatrical experiences to
audiences who were saturated with information and scenes of the war from television.
20 
Alter’s discussion of European productions of Vietnam War drama results in
particularly valuable insights about how America’s involvement in the war was perceived
by other countries. She does not, however, engage significantly works that appeared after
1975 and thus those that dealt with veterans’ homecomings or the political aftermath of
America’s defeat.
Fenn’s book casts a broader historical net by examining theatrical responses to the
war well into the 1970s. He tracks the evolution of 1960s theatre and categorizes
Vietnam drama of the 60s and 70s both stylistically (experimental, radical, documentary)
and thematically (plays of initiation, experience, homecoming). His attention to the
influence of the sociopolitical atmosphere on changing theatrical trends utilizes the
historical approach I favor up to a point. However, I argue that by discussing the plays
thematically, as he does in the second section of his book, he groups together plays
written and produced too many years apart to be as similar in their messages as he
suggests, and his analyses would benefit from a more nuanced consideration of the plays’
specific historical moments. For example, one category—“Plays of Homecoming”—
includes the following works:
Adrienne Kennedy’s An Evening with Dead Essex (1973)
Tom Cole’s Medal of Honor Rag (1975)
Emily Mann’s Still Life (1980)
Terence McNally’s Bringing It All Back Home (1969)
Ronald Ribman’s The Burial of Esposito (1969)
David Rabe’s Sticks and Bones (1969)

While Fenn makes valuable comments in his analyses of these plays about the depiction
of the challenges the returning veteran faced, his general disregard for the plays’
particular dates ignores a number of salient issues that enhance our appreciation of these
21 
texts. In other words, recognizing the specific sociopolitical atmosphere into which
the soldiers are returning, which was very different in 1969 from what it was in 1975,
helps to inform the playwright’s choice of style and content; knowing the forces he or she
is struggling against informs the tactics used in that struggle.
For instance, David Rabe’s Sticks and Bones (1969) was written as the body
counts in Vietnam and the controversy over the war at home were reaching their peak.
American culture was divided racially on the topic of civil rights, as well as politically in
its support for the war, and young people were everywhere rebelling against their parents’
generation and the “establishment.” The war was raging at home and overseas, and the
theatre was an active participant in the cultural dialogue on this emotionally charged
subject, generally seeking to influence public opinion toward bringing the war to a quick
and decisive end. Rabe’s piece, which is energetic, confrontational, violent, and profane,
explicitly challenges American values and culture and responds directly to this cultural
climate with a commensurate intensity. Sticks and Bones exposes white America’s
racism and the complicity of the nuclear family in reproducing national values of
conformity, consumerism, and military service. However, the play treats the war in the
abstract, utilizing the Ozzie and Harriet Nelson television family as the vehicle for its
social criticism, and thus avoiding many of the specific political issues of the Vietnam
War. This is typical 1960s technique; playwrights critical of America’s involvement in
Vietnam wrote against war in general rather than against the Vietnam War in particular
and challenged audiences to re-examine their conditioned beliefs about the national
mythology and its concomitant sanctioning of death in its name.
22 
Emily Mann’s Still Life (1980), on the other hand, takes a very different
approach to the soldier’s homecoming. Her play is comprised of interweaving
monologues, in which the three characters speak of one another but never to one another.
It is a tense, language-driven piece, devoid of any trace of spectacle or theatricality,
aiming to elicit from the audience more sympathy for the veterans than direct political
action. Appearing well after the war had ended and well into the highly publicized
political and emotional struggles returning veterans faced, the play is filled with specifics
about the Vietnam War experience. In it, a veteran speaks of his combat traumas and the
anger he has carried home from the war and subsequently displaced onto his wife, who
tells her own story as a battered woman. Rounding out the conversation is the veteran’s
girlfriend, who serves as his confidant and prides herself on never being shocked by his
tales of violence and death. Mann’s play is about the Vietnam War’s impact on the
individual and the way the war changed the personalities and lives of those who fought
and of those who waited for them. In 1980, the politics of the war action are no longer
the issue of the day; instead, the political concern is for the veteran, who has suffered
social discrimination and misrepresentation in films and on television, as well as for the
families of veterans, who also struggle with their loved ones’ physical and psychological
war wounds. Mann’s play, then, dramatizes transcripts from interviews with actual
veterans and their families, privileging truthfulness and forceful testimony over the
popular appeal of theatrical abstraction of the war.
Sticks and Bones is a critically acclaimed piece whose theme of America’s willful
blindness to its prejudices and sense of entitlement transcends the Vietnam Era and
allows the play to maintain its relevance in later decades. Still Life, by contrast, deals
23 
with the Vietnam War so specifically it feels dated to contemporary audiences. When
compared side-by-side, then, as a thematic analysis does, Still Life necessarily pales in
comparison to Sticks and Bones, and thus is marginalized. However, when the two plays
are examined historically, Still Life proves a much more appropriate response to its era
than Sticks and Bones would be. The angry energy of Rabe’s play would seem out of
place as a response to the cultural atmosphere of the early 1980s in which the country
was regrouping from its devastating challenges to its identity. Similarly, Still Life’s focus
on the individual would likely feel self-indulgent in 1969 when Sticks and Bones
appeared, for it would be seen to neglect the bigger picture of the war. Grouping these
two plays into one thematic category without considering their dissimilar styles, content,
or goals results in a less productive reading of both.
Zinman’s approach is similarly problematic. She gives attention to almost all of
the important works of the genre but treats the corpus of Vietnam War plays as more or
less homogenous, highlighting the distinction between plays written by veterans and
those written by civilians but generally disregarding the significance of publication and
performance dates. Zinman focuses attention on a structural trend in these plays in which
the action appears to be following traditional dramatic construction—rising action
leading to a climax and denouement—and then undercuts its own coherence by repeating
earlier scenes and/or destabilizing the narrative established up to that point. This
deliberate undermining of dramatic construction in the plays’ final moments, she argues,
reflects the incommunicability of the war but results in a “moral and artistic inadequacy
of the plays themselves” (5). Zinman finds that the plays’ failings are not merely due to
the fact that the Vietnam War consisted of suffering too great to be depicted onstage—for
24 
“unspeakable themes” have always been the subject of art, especially drama—but that
Vietnam War drama treats these themes (as well as the particulars of the war and its
aftermath) “without clarity, without catharsis, without […] coming to terms” (5). She
uses the label “Search and Destroy” as an expression of “the loss of access to substantive
meaning as well as to an aesthetically satisfying form” she sees as common to all her
selected plays (6). Zinman’s observations are useful in recognizing a key problem many
critics have with much Vietnam War drama—a generally unsatisfying sense of closure
and enlightenment—but because she evaluates the plays according to traditional aesthetic
criteria rather than in light of the sociopolitical climates to which they are responding, she
reads the “non-conclusions” as artistic shortcomings rather than as provocative
challenges to contemporary audiences.
I argue that these indeterminate endings are rich in meaning when considered in
historical context. Zinman is correct in noting that the endings fail to offer satisfying
answers to questions about the war, but it is not reasonable to expect any play—or
collection of plays—to provide closure to such a politically and morally complicated
issue. Vietnam War drama, instead, provides a dissenting voice to the dominant
viewpoint expressed in mainstream media, refusing tidy endings that suggest a putting-to-
rest of the traumas American society continues to endure. The plays do not presume to
answer the questions of the war but rather inform the conversation with their unique
perspectives. Instead of finding Vietnam War drama “inadequate” because it does not
provide closure, I suggest we are offered the opportunity to contemplate what the lack of
dramatic closure might suggest at different historical moments.
25 
Like Fenn, Zinman groups together for comparison plays that were written in
very different social circumstances from one another, and even though they share the
structural similarity of a lack of closure, it is unlikely that their ambiguous conclusions
mean the same thing. At the beginning of her essay, Zinman compares the final scenes of
Megan Terry’s Viet Rock (1966), David Rabe’s The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel
(1969), and John Di Fusco’s Tracers (1980), all of which end uncertainly, determining
that the endings leave the plays “without shape and without resolution” (7). Her reading
is accurate: the plays do not end with satisfying resolution; each ends with scenes that
undermine audience expectations for a meaningful final statement. However, rather than
interpreting that lack of resolution as the failure of the playwrights, as Zinman does, it is
more productive to recognize that the endings are informed by the plays’ social agendas
or commentaries, and the indeterminacy encourages the audiences’ critical, engaged
responses.
In the late 1970s, for example, the indeterminate endings Zinman points out
suggest a general cultural uncertainty about the nation’s identity and future path in the
light of the social and political turmoil just endured. Zinman claims of Amlin Gray’s
How I Got That Story (1979) that “the play stops rather than ends” (12), a fact she feels
leads to the “artistic inadequacy” she sees in all the plays. However, awareness of
America’s untidy and indecisive exit from Vietnam (pulling troops out in 1973 but still
promising support to the government of South Vietnam despite Congressional
opposition) richly informs the reading of the play’s “non-conclusion.” The war for
America stopped, in a way, in 1973, but it did not end until May 1975 when President
Gerald Ford terminated wartime benefits for veterans and announced to the country,
26 
“America is no longer at war” (Fenn 258). It can even be said that the war never
ended for those who struggled with physical injuries, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and
other assimilation difficulties. Rather than deeming Gray’s play inadequate for its
unsatisfying conclusion, then, Zinman might have recognized that ending’s powerful
reflection of the United States’ unceremonious withdrawal from South Vietnam and the
zeitgeist of postwar America—confused, resentful, stunned.
From her observations of the plays’ structural similarities, Zinman broadly
concludes that “the theater of the Vietnam War is a theater of exhaustion and strain” (7).
This interpretation, however, reads the whole genre of Vietnam War drama as having the
same message, regardless of historical moment or artistic agenda. Even though there are
notable similarities in many of the play’s structures, it would be reductive to assume that
that similarity should be read identically for every play. Certainly “exhaustion and
strain” enter into Vietnam War drama, but it is not accurate to say that those emotions
embody the entirety of the genre. Instead, the plays of “exhaustion and strain” appear
most pronouncedly in the late 1970s, when America proved “sick to death” of the
Vietnam War, the shock of the Watergate scandal, and the deepening recession. In the
1960s, however, theatrical responses were anything but exhausted. On the contrary,
theatre responded with great emotion and energy to the escalating war, seeking to effect
real social change. Similarly, plays from the 1980s and early 1990s find renewed energy
when Americans take up the issue of Vietnam once again. In these plays, traces of the
exhaustion Zinman argues for can certainly be found; indeed, a great deal of suffering
was endured before these voices were finally heard. However, treating the plays of these
decades as no different from any other ignores the theatrical techniques and personal
27 
themes determined by the particularities of their historical moment. In order to
appreciate the role drama played in affecting political attitudes during the war years and
to acknowledge its contribution to America’s cultural memory of the Vietnam War, it is
necessary to take a closer look at the plays in their historical contexts; doing so
illuminates each play as a powerful theatrical response to the sociopolitical provocations
of its moment.
28 
CHAPTER 1

The Late 1960s

The United States’ military involvement in Vietnam began in 1956, when a group
of American advisors were sent to replace French advisors training the South Vietnamese
Army. By 1966, when American intervention in Vietnam became a topic for theatrical
productions, approximately 185,300 Americans were serving there (Layman 196). The
ten years in between were among the most turbulent and divisive of American history.
During that time, the nation endured a growing civil rights crisis fueled by the Supreme
Courts decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which declared that separate
public schools for blacks and whites were “inherently unequal.” School desegregation
sparked violence in the South, culminating in race riots throughout the region and the
assassinations of civil rights leaders Medgar Evers and Malcolm X. The countercultural
group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) produced their revolutionary political
document, The Port Huron Statement, in 1962. In November 1963, John F. Kennedy
was assassinated in Dallas, leading to Lyndon B. Johnson’s assumption of the presidency.
In August 1964, after only nine months as president, Johnson urged the passing of the
Tonkin Gulf Resolution, authorizing “all necessary action” against Vietnamese forces, a
decision that served as the legal basis for the quick escalation of the Vietnam War (Fenn
239-249). That escalation sparked an increase in anti-war sentiments around the country.
Student demonstrations arose on college campuses; draft cards were burned; a few
individuals even resorted to self-immolation as their final, dramatic protest. By the time
the war was represented on stage, the American public was already distinctly divided in
its support of it.
29 
Vietnam War drama generally always takes an anti-war position, but the
theatrical productions of the 1960s express particularly heightened opposition. Using
innovative acting techniques and taking artistic risks, theatre artists made bold political
statements by challenging the American public’s complicity in what they saw as an
unlawful, immoral war. Interestingly, though, those statements are often made more by
implication than through clear attack. That is, despite their clear opposition to the
government’s actions, few playwrights in this period mention Vietnam by name or argue
against specific military policies or actions in Southeast Asia. Instead, they expose
aspects of American culture they regard as responsible for creating the war; the national
mythology, cultural elitism, and the “military-industrial complex” Eisenhower warned
against are all targets of the playwrights’ criticism.
Because of the raw, deliberately provocative nature of these plays, critics have
found much to object to in 1960s Vietnam War drama. They have found fault with the
myopic perspective of plays focused on only one aspect of the war, experimental
techniques that detract from the play’s political statement, statements that are too heavy-
handed, and statements that are not made clearly enough. Often, the intensity of emotion
in the anti-war movement resulted in immoderate statements of opposition (plays,
demonstrations, “be-ins”) that the mainstream could fairly easily discredit as radical and
thus not politically compelling. In addition, a few plays are so closely linked to particular
individuals or events they may seem irrelevant to audiences today except as historical
documents. However, because they tend to deal with the Vietnam War in the abstract,
several plays of the 1960s have the ability to transcend the Vietnam Era and to apply
more broadly to a generalized society at war. Significantly, 1960s plays, more so than
30 
the works of any other decade, challenge large-scale, cultural beliefs and practices.
Whereas later plays will take as their subjects issues specific to the Vietnam War—
individuals persecuted for their protests, the unique experience of the Vietnam “grunt,”
particular political developments—plays of this period examine the American identity in
ways that remain relevant after the war years.
In the academic study of Vietnam War drama, the primary value of Megan
Terry’s Viet Rock (1966) is that it is the first engagement of war issues onstage, and thus
it begins the dialogue between the theatre community and the American public on the
topic of the war in Vietnam, a dialogue that continues for almost forty years. The play
was developed in workshops conducted by the Open Theatre, an experimental theatre
group in New York City that adapted its practice of theatrical innovation to address the
rising concern over the war.
5
Viet Rock is unanimously acclaimed for its groundbreaking
contributions both to Vietnam War drama and to theatrical innovation; critics refer
admiringly to the Open Theatre’s development of “transformation,” an acting technique
in which actors switch from one character and situation to another without any logical
transition; they simply change into another character at a given point in the action.
Richard Schechner, founder of The Performance Group, another experimental theatre
company, describes transformation in the following way:
The actor no longer plays out a continuity but a set of interrelated (and
sometimes unrelated) actions, each of which is self-contained. He gets
from one action to the next not by establishing for himself a logical,
motivational connective but by following the ‘rules of the game’ which

5
Terry co-founded the New York Theatre Strategy, a playwright-centered workshop, in
1973 with Maria Irene Fornes and several other playwrights (Dolan 489). Today, she
continues to develop experimental theatre as the playwright-in-residence at the Magic
Theatre in Omaha, Nebraska.
31 
say that at a certain time, on a certain cue, action A ends and action B
begins. (11)

In Viet Rock, actors change character from adults to infants, from women to men, from
Americans to Vietnamese, as quickly and seamlessly as the theatrical moment changes,
resulting in a continuous shifting of reality that attempts to show both the widespread
horrors of the war and the possibility of communion among the divided American public.
In short vignettes, actors portray mothers waiting for their sons at their induction physical
examinations, Senators and witnesses in a Senate hearing about the war, Vietnamese
mothers mourning their dead children, a sadistic Drill Sergeant and his GIs, Hanoi
Hannah, and many other varied characters. These characters espouse divergent views on
the war, expressing, alternately, support for the soldiers and the war effort, compassion
for both the Vietnamese and American dead, violent opposition to a war that “stinks,”
and hope for unity among all those who want an end to the violence. The play provides
an exciting challenge for actors who must shift between characters, motivations, and
emotional states in an instant.
However, the unique emotional effect felt by actors practicing transformation
does not appear to have translated into a similarly powerful experience for the audience.
The mission of the Open Theatre, in the words of its director Joseph Chaikin, was “to
redefine the limits of the stage experience, or unfix them. To find ways of reaching each
other and the audience” (qtd. in Schechner 9). The stated order of the goals here is
telling: the group aims to reach “each other” first, and the audience second; if the
audience is reached, they are to be pulled into the communal experience of the actors, an
experience that is likely more emotional than politically critical.
32 
This is not to say that Viet Rock is ignorant of the political situation, for Terry
reminds us in her notes that “one should never lose sight of the fact that [the play] grew
out of, and is, ultimately playing against world events” (23). The Vietnam War had
escalated dramatically since Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964.
Operation Rolling Thunder, the repeated bombing of North Vietnam, was launched in
1965, fomenting rising antiwar opposition across the United States, opposition that grew
to include the self-immolations of two Americans in November of that year. However,
the politics of Terry’s play are unclear, and while Viet Rock draws attention to a number
of issues relevant to the war, it makes no clear attack on or support for any of them. A
spectator is not urged to leave the theatre on a mission; rather, he is simply exposed to a
series of contrasting voices and images, presumably intended to move him emotionally
but toward no specific end. The pro-war sentiments are expressed as sincerely as the
anti-war sentiments, but because both are delivered with such a heightened theatricality,
it is difficult to know if either is being held up for admiration or for ridicule. Schechner
recognizes that “for most of the play Miss Terry represents, and disparages, all points of
view” (17), which as an unfortunate result, does not endear the work to anyone.
While these qualities of Terry’s play make it less effective as a political statement
than later Vietnam War drama, it is perhaps appropriate that the first theatrical attempt to
discuss Vietnam should be thus unfocused. In 1966, public attitudes toward the war were
taking shape, but neither side was yet as organized or as active as they would become.
The purpose of Viet Rock, then, is not necessarily to spark direct political action, but
perhaps to force audiences to feel for all sides of the war, inspiring compassion even for
those with whom one disagrees and demonstrating the interrelated nature of global
33 
events. Being thrust into contrasting scenes with actors spouting contradictory
opinions of the war would likely move audiences, if not necessarily suggest a coherent
political message. Terry exhorts directors to “keep in mind that the visual images here
are more important than the words” (21), and by doing so she draws upon the theories of
Antonin Artaud, who also valued images over language in theatre. Artaud’s intention
was to create for audiences shocking emotional experiences that would appeal to their
senses instead of their understanding. Believing that people think first with their senses,
Artaud professed that the way to force an audience to re-evaluate their preconceptions
was to use images to act upon their senses rather than using text to influence their critical
thought. Mainstream theatre audiences (and critics) are so accustomed to expecting a
theme or message from a piece it is likely that Terry’s experimental approach was never
given much of a chance.
The play does aim to connect with its spectators, though, especially in the final
moments as the actors leave the stage and enter the audience. As they move through the
house, each actor touches an audience member in the spirit of communion. The stage
directions specify that this gesture is meant to unite actors and spectators in “a celebration
of presence.” Terry writes, “In no way should the actors communicate superiority. They
must communicate the wonder and gift of being actually alive together with the audience
at that moment” (104-105). Presumably this interaction is intended to inspire audience
members into some kind of social participation, whether it is anti-war protest or merely a
renewed sense of community. Schechner describes it this way:
The final gesture throws the problems of the war, its cruelty, inanity,
horror, and political shortsightedness directly at the audience. But this
34 
final gesture is also elegiac and gentle, a real, physical contact between
the quick and the dead, the theatre world and the worldly world. (17)

Rather than articulate a clear mission for the audience, the play aims to touch them
emotionally, to excite feelings that Artaud believed were desensitized by everyday
existence. However, New York Times drama critic Walter Kerr had a very different
reaction to the actors’ physical interaction with the audience, claiming that, instead of
communicating spiritual unity, “the gesture is patronizing and presumptuous” (qtd. in
Weales 240). Kerr’s reaction seems quite reasonable given that Terry has spent the
duration of the play “disparag[ing] all points of view,” for an audience is not likely to feel
that they are being compassionately included in a communion of souls when they have
seen their views mocked onstage with no suggestion of an alternative. Kerr’s response
may also be indicative of his position with the mainstream press, which has historically
been less receptive to experimentation than have independent publications. Gerald
Weales comments, “My suspicion is that, like so much of Miss Terry’s work, [Viet Rock]
is for the actors rather than the audience” (240), an assessment that acknowledges that
many experimental groups were concerned with their own theatrical innovation first and
war protest second (Fenn 24). The war was certainly of concern to Terry and her
contemporaries, but Viet Rock resists the war effort rather generally; it does not take any
particular side in the Vietnam War debate. Solipsistic rather than proactive, Viet Rock
seems simply too scattered to influence the public significantly in any political direction.
Nevertheless, the importance of Terry’s play should not be underestimated, for it
is the forerunner of its genre. Vietnam War playwrights coming after Terry will not
emulate her expressive, inclusive approach; they will not attempt to show all sides of the
35 
war or to allow audiences to interpret for themselves the meanings of the images
onstage. Instead, they will select clear targets for their criticism and will make direct
appeals to their audiences for intervention into the war effort. However, a number of
Terry’s scenes will find their way into other playwrights’ work. If Viet Rock as a whole
does not serve as the paradigmatic basis for generic development, it does provide a
number of key elements to be found in later Vietnam War drama, and even in Vietnam
War films of the 1970s and 1980s. In Terry’s play are the now-familiar induction scene
in which a seasoned Drill Sergeant aims to break down the egos of incoming recruits,
confrontational scenes between American GIs and Vietnamese soldiers and civilians,
scenes of camaraderie among servicemen, scenes of death and mourning, and scenes of
resurrection and renewed community. In attempting to give voice to all sides of the
discussion, Terry may have diluted her own political message, but Viet Rock provides a
foundation of generic elements that would give life to an extremely diverse collection of
plays.
Perhaps partially influenced by criticism of Viet Rock’s nebulous expression of
generalized rebellion rather than clearly articulated protest, later playwrights focused
their protests more narrowly, aiming at specific institutions and social constructions they
saw as perpetuating the sociopolitical environment responsible for creating the Vietnam
War. The purpose of much 1960s Vietnam War drama was to spark public involvement
in anti-war activities, and thus the drama needed to direct the energies of audiences
toward specific issues and concerns, not merely to foster a vague disapproval of the war.
In the following plays in this chapter, playwrights challenge audiences to examine the
roles of the government (MacBird), the military (We Bombed in New Haven), the nuclear
36 
family (Summertree), the national mythology (Indians), and the media (Muzeeka) in
fomenting and sustaining the Vietnam War. They ask audiences to rethink established
values and traditions, and they present their political arguments in provocative, often
radical, ways. These methods suit the 1960s, a period in which previously accepted
ideologies were questioned and social boundaries were crossed. The Port Huron
Statement, drafted by SDS leader Tom Hayden, was a foundational document of the
1960s counterculture, a detailed articulation of the youth movement’s values and goals.
Those values—fraternity, democracy, self-actualization—were set in contradistinction to
the conformity, capitalism, and fierce anti-Communism of mainstream 1950s society, and
the tension between the two ways of life created a contentious, sometimes explosive,
cultural atmosphere. One of the results of this cultural tension was drama that made bold
challenges to tradition, both artistically and politically. It was born from the heightened
passions of the period, and because it expressed those passions through commensurately
heightened techniques, it also actively fed the social tension.
One such play is Barbara Garson’s MacBird (1967), which Garson began writing
in 1965 after “a slip of the tongue” in which she “quite accidentally referred to the First
Lady of the United States as Lady MacBird Johnson” at a Berkeley, California antiwar
rally (Garson ix). Garson and her husband were members of the Berkeley Free Speech
Movement and active in some of the largest antiwar demonstrations of the 60s, including
the march at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The play is an adaptation of
Macbeth in which, after hearing the prophecy of three witches (played here as social
activists) that he would become President, MacBird (Lyndon B. Johnson) and his wife
arrange to have John Ken O’Dunc (John F. Kennedy) killed during a parade while he is a
37 
guest at the MacBird ranch in Texas. Critics reviewing the play after its publication in
1967 voiced mixed feelings about it. They applauded Garson’s attempt at satire and her
writing ability (she writes in verse), but they called the play itself “seditious,”
“shocking,” and “irresponsible,” and took pains to distance themselves from its
implications. Notably, the critics’ objections center around the play’s suggestion that
President Johnson orchestrated John F. Kennedy’s assassination, a theory for which they
note there is no evidence, rather than around Garson’s messages about the Vietnam War.
In fact, Alter notes that only one critic even mentions Vietnam in his review of the play:
With the exception of Richard P. Cooke’s observation in the Wall Street
Journal that ‘the author attacks him [Johnson] on Vietnam, particularly,
but the thrusts are less well aimed than those of other critics,’ there is not a
single mention of the war in any of the reviews I have surveyed. (36)

MacBird’s intimations of treason seem to have largely overshadowed Garson’s protest
against Johnson’s war efforts. This polarized reception may be attributed to the
audaciousness of Garson’s suggestion, but it is likely compounded by mainstream critics’
ingrained respect for established institutions like the office of the presidency. The
counterculture generation, bent on revolution, did not consider those institutions
sacrosanct and, as a result, voiced its objections in such inflammatory ways it may have
occasionally undermined its own purposes.
In any case, the boldness of Garson’s allusion highlights the younger generation’s
mounting distrust of the government and its intense objection to the Johnson
Administration’s handling of the Vietnam War. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution of August
1964 granted to Johnson the power to use force against North Vietnam, but the incident
in the gulf was itself questionable. Conflicting eyewitnesses attested that North
38 
Vietnamese troops both did and did not fire upon the destroyer USS Maddox, but
Johnson pressed Congress to pass the resolution in spite of lingering uncertainties, and he
used the resolution as his authorization to escalate the war. The result of this
controversial decision was that war opponents believed Johnson ordered troop buildups
and bombing missions without a solid military or moral imperative. The Tonkin Gulf
Resolution, combined with the fact that Johnson was president only because he had
succeeded the slain President Kennedy (not because he had been elected by the American
people), called into further question the legitimacy of Johnson’s war efforts and—
although it was a scandalous suggestion—supported Garson’s theatrical comparison of
him with the ambitious usurper Macbeth.
Alter’s main criticism of MacBird is its limited scope, the fact that Garson
appears to see government individuals alone as personally responsible for the war:
Since everything is centered on the political scene in Washington, the
Vietnam War has no independent existence of its own, no ideological
sources outside ‘the beltway.’ Its cause seems to lie in a corrupt
government and in its individuals, themselves an outgrowth of a corrupt
Establishment. There are no indictments of imperialism, racism,
patriarchy, or economic interests in Garson’s play—all of which arguably
were part of the overdetermining origins of the war. (40)

This kind of “hindsight” criticism underserves Garson’s play and many others like it.
Alter, writing in 1996, seems to have very particular expectations about what a successful
Vietnam War play should do, and she finds MacBird wanting because it fails to meet
those expectations. However, Alter has the benefit of hindsight in her understanding of
the Vietnam War, and at the time of her writing she knows that the war stemmed from a
confluence of destructive ideologies and national hubris. Unfortunately, she criticizes a
39 
play from 1967 for not recognizing those same historical and political complexities
and for not commenting on them with the kind of sophistication available only in
retrospect.
Garson’s own words about her play offer insight into what she set out to do: “My
play MacBird is my personal means by which to protest against the immoral climate
which made the war in Vietnam possible. Many members of the American government
are against the war in Vietnam but they are not thinking of resigning” (quoted in Alter
36). The “ideological sources” Alter would have liked to see engaged in MacBird, then,
were not the target of Garson’s attack, and her goal was not comprehensive political
analysis. On the contrary, Garson takes direct aim at political leaders, including those
who claim to oppose the war but refuse to remove themselves from active participation in
the institution that keeps it going. Garson makes no scattershot attempt to address every
issue relevant to the Vietnam War, as Terry did in Viet Rock; instead, her purpose is to
criticize what she sees as a specific and targetable issue: institutional corruption
stemming from the personal ambitions of individuals in the American government. By
challenging audiences to see their leaders as acting to benefit themselves rather than the
nation, MacBird encourages organization among the public to divest of power a
government that no longer operates to protect its citizens.
Garson’s transformation of MacBird into a despotic President without nuance or
compassion is a commentary on the corrupting influence of power. In the following
passage, she depicts his refusal to respond to demands from minority groups and social
activists, a direct contradiction to Johnson’s envisioned Great Society (a plan for
sweeping reform of domestic issues including economic and racial inequality), which was
40 
largely overshadowed by the war efforts. Rather than act in the interest of underserved
groups, MacBird quashes any opposition to his authority, regardless of issue:
MACBIRD: Spit out your spiteful news.
CRONY: Peace paraders marching.
MACBIRD: Stop ‘em!
CRONY: Beatniks burning draft cards.
MACBIRD: Jail ‘em!
CRONY: Negroes starting sit-ins.
MACBIRD: Gas ‘em!
CRONY: Latin rebels rising.
MACBIRD: Shoot ‘em!
CRONY: Asian peasants arming.
MACBIRD: Bomb ‘em!
CRONY: Congressmen complaining.
MACBIRD: Fuck ‘em!
Flush out this filthy scum; destroy dissent.
It’s treason to defy your President (73-74)

MacBird clearly has no interest in engaging any of the groups’ specific concerns or
working with them toward an acceptable compromise; instead, he aims only to safeguard
his own position, to consolidate power, and to eliminate any threat to his presidency.
Here, Garson shows American audiences that their government is openly hostile to any
dissenting voices and seeks only blind adherence to its policies and unqualified
cooperation in its goals—a direct contradiction to the concept of democracy upon which
the country was founded. This depiction highlights the growing opinion among war
supporters that the anti-war movement was actually another enemy, undermining
America’s resolve to win the war and proving to the rest of the world that the United
States could not even establish support for its war efforts among its own people.
Alter may be correct when she says that Garson neglects discussing important
ideological issues as they directly relate to Vietnam, but indictments of racism,
patriarchy, and economic interests are quite obvious in the play. Garson is not blind to the
41 
issues Alter raises; she simply focuses her critique primarily on how the issues
manifest themselves in the United States, not as they relate to Vietnam. It is important to
recognize that the counterculture sought to remake American society, and thus what may
be perceived by later critics as a problematically narrow focus on American issues is
actually a politically necessary targeting of needed reforms. The play attests to Garson’s
concern for America’s domestic environment, and her criticism of the Johnson
Administration holds politicians accountable for injustices beyond the obvious war
issues. The three witches are representatives of domestic concerns—a female student
activist, an African American militant, and a Socialist—set in clear contrast to the
politicians, who are all elite white men—and they speak of specific events of which
contemporary audiences would be acutely aware: the 1965 Watts riots, racist attacks
against African Americans, the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk protesting the
corrupt Diem government in South Vietnam, the destruction of Vietnamese civilians seen
on the television news:
2
ND
WITCH: Round the caldron chant and sing,
Arson, rape, and rioting.
Bombed-out church and burning cross
In the boiling caldron toss.
Club and gas and whip and gun,
Niggers strung up just for fun.
Black men beat and burnt and shot,
Bake within our melting pot.
ALL: Bubble and bubble, toil and trouble,
Burn baby burn, and caldron bubble.
3
RD
WITCH: Taylor’s tongue and Goldberg’s slime
MacNamara’s bloody crime
Sizzling skin of napalmed child,
Roasted eyeballs, sweet and mild.
Now we add a fiery chunk
From a burning Buddhist monk.
Flaming field and blazing hut,
42 
Infant fingers cooked and cut,
Young man’s heart and old man’s gut
Groin and gall and gore of gook
In our caldron churn and cook. (78-79)

Garson invokes these violent images as testimony to the chaos created by self-serving
politicians who remain indifferent to their constituents’ concerns, and MacBird aims to
incite audiences toward action against those politicians.
MacBird also attests to the strength of the opposition to the government’s
tyrannical actions. As the government became harder to affect through traditional
protests, anti-war protestors in the 1960s turned to more and more drastic means.
MacBird’s indifference to the rising tide of opposition against him is underscored when
Lady MacBird reports to him the horrifying sight of a self-immolation (thought to be a
reference to the suicide protest of American Quaker Norman Morrison outside Secretary
of Defense Robert S. McNamara’s office):
A human being set itself ablaze.
It blazed and cursed thy name and blazed and cursed,
And then it dimmed, and yet they saw it still.
Although ‘twas dark, the flames had seared their eyeballs.
They say they see it still. It blazed and cursed.
It cursed thy name. O God, O God, forgive us! (75)

Although his wife is quite shaken by this sight, MacBird dismisses the suicide as
evidence of the superstitions of the American “folk” and decides to organize a day of
prayer “to ease their doubts and foolish fancies” and to build confidence in his leadership
(Garson 76). Again, Garson draws this picture of MacBird to highlight the disconnection
between the anti-war movement and the government. She argues that the leaders simply
do not take the public seriously in their protests, that the government sees the protestors
only as troublemakers who can be appeased with a ceremony, not as citizens with
43 
opposing political viewpoints genuinely worth considering. MacBird gives later
readers valuable insight into the intensity of emotion that the antiwar protests engendered
on both sides. It attests to the lengths to which the protestors would go to make their
points to an increasingly unsympathetic government, and it begins to reveal the distaste
felt for those protestors by politicians who saw them as a growing obstacle to the war
effort. The tensions between the antiwar movement and government forces would
escalate through the 60s in increasingly violent confrontations; the riots between police
and demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the
shooting of four students by National Guardsmen at Kent State University would
ultimately reduce antiwar activism by showing war opponents the potential price of
speaking out. MacBird documents the rise of this antagonism between the government
and its citizens.
Alter finds Garson’s narrow focus indicative of a youthful naïveté that detracts
from the play’s protest power: “Sharing the idealistic hopes of the rebellious generation
of the 1960s, Garson appears to trust that changing old establishment values will solve all
problems” (40). However, I argue that this understanding of Garson’s perspective is
exactly what is valuable about MacBird, not what lessens its worth. The play is a
testament to the passions of the anti-war movement, a document that expresses the
extreme dissatisfaction of the younger generation with the leaders they saw as
dangerously ambitious and indifferent to the consequences of their actions. We cannot
look to a play written amid the passions and urgency of the early war years for a
measured and comprehensive analysis of political policies. Vietnam War drama,
especially that written during the combat period, has immediate social and political goals;
44 
it must be examined for what it teaches us about its time, not for how it fails to tell us
what we know now. The goal was to stop the war by any means necessary, not to reflect
on its meaning and implications. Portraying Johnson as Macbeth was an inflammatory
choice—one can see by the way critics distanced themselves from the play that they did
not want to be aligned with such treasonous suggestions—and this choice illuminates for
later audiences and readers the depth of feeling with which the younger generation was
protesting. They were willing to make audacious accusations against the leaders they
saw as responsible for the war, and they were not afraid of the backlash they might incur
as a result of their provocations.
While Alter finds MacBird problematic for what she sees as its narrow focus and
its reductive understanding of the war, she does recognize that the play attempts a
genuine, unmitigated criticism of the government, something rare in the theatre and
generally unappreciated in mainstream American society:
The performance of the play received lukewarm reviews: it was praised by
some for its energy and potential, but dismissed by others as offensive and
childish. James Davis summed up his negative critique in the Daily News:
‘The chief problem is that it is more nasty than funny.’ He might have
been pointing to a problem of American theatre generally, namely, that it
is always expected to be funny rather than nasty, which can never entail
being radically critical of prevailing ideologies. (35)

Here, Alter takes Garson’s side against the harsh criticism of Davis, whose opinion
reflects the expectations of many theatre audiences that plays should go only so far in
satire. The suggestion of treason, of Johnson’s responsibility for Kennedy’s assassination
(orchestrated to further his own ambition), was simply too much for audiences to accept,
and it was likely easier for mainstream audiences to reject the play than to consider
seriously the discomforting challenges to national institutions and political figures Garson
45 
was suggesting. Garson’s boldness may have gone underappreciated as MacBird was
staged, but reading it in later years, one must value the great length to which she was
willing to go to make audiences rethink their obedience to their government.
While Garson focused her critique on government corruption, Joseph Heller took
aim at the military, juxtaposing the reality of death against the rhetoric and the business
of war. Premiering at Yale School of Drama Repertory Theatre, Heller’s first play
6
We
Bombed in New Haven (1967) resembles his famous world War II novel Catch-22 (1961)
in its characterization of the majority of service personnel as “types”: self-serving
careerists, gung-ho recruits, blind followers, or hapless victims. Set in contradistinction to
these flat, often ridiculous characters are a few rational men who struggle to stay alive
and sane within an indifferent system. Both Catch-22 and We Bombed in New Haven
expose the dangerously irrational decisions often made by high-ranking military officials
and the suffering, even death, experienced by the average rank-and-file serviceman as a
result. In New Haven, however, Heller embraces the medium of the theatre and opts to
express his criticism of military behavior through Brechtian theatricality, creating a meta-
drama that likens war to a theatrical production. In it, Heller highlights war’s fabricated
nature—its “design” and “direction” from superior authorities—and underscores the
absurdity of sending men to die for such a cause.
In New Haven, actors play the roles of airmen engaged in a battle against
Constantinople, a city that no longer exists. Heller destabilizes the comforting fictional
nature of the theatre-going experience by having actors directly address the audience, use

6
Heller’s other plays are Clevinger’s Trial and a dramatized version of Catch-22, both
published in 1973.
46 
their real names, and refer to past acting projects from their resumes. Then, he
challenges generic expectations even further by giving his play-within-a-play life-and-
death consequences, as certain actors sent on bombing missions are “scripted” to die,
despite their vehement protests that no one really dies in plays. His purpose is to impress
upon audiences the actual consequences of a war that, due to its daily-televised
spectacles, probably seems more staged than real, and by doing so, he encourages
audiences to rethink the validity of military action in Vietnam.
The audience is asked to make a very large and intellectually demanding leap to
go along with Heller’s premise, and critical reaction indicates that audiences were
generally unable to do so. Gerald Bordman notes that the “loose, enigmatic” quality of
the play left Broadway critics cold and resulted in a production that “struggled on for ten
and a half weeks” (428). Gerald Weales dismisses the play as “more impressive in
conception than in fact” (206), and Fenn claims that the play’s “style of exaggerated
theatricality detracts from both its dramatic and thematic value” (124). While many
critics recognize Heller’s debt to Pirandello (in his rejection of realism and emphasis on
man’s control by external forces) and acknowledge Heller’s strong antiwar sentiment, no
review calls Heller’s play a success; they all find the production falling short of its
intended goal. The play’s meta-dramatic form appears to overwhelm the play’s antiwar
message, confusing, even irritating, audiences and critics more than it moves them. Fenn
argues, “The audience is so constantly reminded that it is in a theatre that the aesthetics of
performance can never be fully realized” (125). The heightened theatricality—the
broken fourth wall, the acknowledgement of actors’ real identities, the extreme
suspension of disbelief required by the premise—seems to disrupt generic expectations so
47 
dramatically that audiences and critics have not been able to give themselves over to
the experience of the performance for which Heller hoped.
This reaction is unfortunate because We Bombed in New Haven offers a genuinely
thought-provoking challenge to the institutional logic of war-making, and Heller’s
theatrical approach creates a powerfully varied experience for the audience: it includes
comedy, absurdity, emotional identification, and tragedy—not unlike the experience of
war itself. In 1967, Heller encourages audiences to see the escalating Vietnam War as a
battle staged to perpetuate the national military complex, not as a war to protect
America’s land or national ideology, as official rhetoric claimed. The play attempts to
force audiences to rethink the entire military endeavor in Vietnam—and by extension, all
military action—and to reject it as unworthy; the absurdity of the bombing missions in
the play forces a reevaluation of the merit of bombing North Vietnam. To achieve this
large-scale paradigm shift, Heller destabilizes the audience’s expectations of their
theatre-going experience by drawing upon Brecht’s theories of the Epic Theatre. Rather
than present his radical challenge to the traditional understanding of war in an easily
digestible form, Heller distanced audience members from automatic emotional responses
by creating an obstacle to their identification with the characters. This technique—
Brecht’s “alienation effect”—allowed the audience to remain “outside” of a production
enough to think critically about the message of the play, to engage in a kind of inner
dialogue with the production as it was being performed instead of losing themselves
within the action of the play.
Thus, the “aesthetics of performance” Fenn finds unrealized in We Bombed in
New Haven were not intended to be there in the first place and would almost certainly
48 
undermine the hoped-for ideological transformation among the audience if they were
achieved. The power of Heller’s play is its challenging premise that war is not the
political imperative it is made out to be, but rather an elaborate production staged to
perpetuate the military industry and to flex American muscle abroad. The Vietnam War
was sold to the American public as a battle in the war against Communism, a necessary
action to stabilize the region of Southeast Asia and to keep South Vietnam from
becoming the first in a (theoretically inevitable) series of countries to fall under the
control of the Soviet Union. Although many Americans in 1967 resisted this official
characterization of the war and saw the action in Vietnam instead as an imperialist,
capitalistic effort, many others, accustomed to the United States’ historical role as self-
appointed global protector, more readily accepted the war as a regrettable necessity. By
forcing audiences to see the conventions of the theatre that are usually taken for granted,
Heller works to make obvious the ideological assumptions about war he wishes to call
into question.
New Haven aims to achieve this transformation by utilizing postmodern self-
reflexivity to draw attention to the fabricated nature of events that require the collective
acceptance of conventions and behaviors to succeed—likening the theatrical production
the audience has come to see with war itself. Sending young men to war requires large-
scale public support of the war effort, not only a belief in this particular war effort but
also a belief that war is often necessary in general. It requires a certain level of
rationalization on the parts of those who serve and those who send them to serve: all must
believe that the sacrifice is worthwhile, based on duty to country, to ideology, to family,
or the like. On a much smaller scale, theatre audiences buy into conventions of theatrical
49 
performance, resting assured that despite the appearance of violence or danger
onstage, no one is actually hurt. By destabilizing the latter conviction, Heller hopes also
to destabilize the former. The play should force spectators to reconsider their inaction
toward the war’s events: “We sat and watched while that actor died,” Heller hopes the
spectator will think. “Are we not doing the same thing every day as we watch the
television news?”
The action of New Haven centers on Captain Starkey, a dedicated “lifer” in the
Air Force who follows orders without questioning his superiors. He is not one of the
dangerously self-centered or gung-ho military characters common to Heller’s works, but
neither is he one who will challenge the system in any way, even when he is faced with
sending his own son to certain death. He has been uncritically committed to the military
for so long that he is profoundly troubled by the characters of Sinclair, Henderson, and
Ruth, who urge him to go against orders in order to preserve life. In the play’s final
scenes, when his son asks him for help in avoiding a fatal mission, Starkey cannot defy
the military even then and admits that he will probably not mean it when he claims later
that he would have traded places with his son if he could.
Through the character of Starkey, Heller represents the passive acceptance of
institutionalized war-making and the refusal of the average American to resist a system in
which he finds himself relatively safe and comfortable, even though that safety and
comfort comes at an intolerably high price to others. Starkey’s theatrical foils are those
characters who resist the dehumanization of national institutions and who hope for a
more fulfilling existence. Several characters attempt to counteract the absurdity of their
condition by delivering speeches from Henry V and King Lear, rituals they see as uniting
50 
their causes with those of heroic literary figures. At one point, Ruth enters
unexpectedly, hoping to deepen her role by saying “something beautiful” and thus
establish herself as more than the “donut dolly” she is in the play. She offers a quote
from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and is frustrated by Starkey’s discouragement of her
attempts:
RUTH. But they might remember you, they might care more about us,
they might understand us all a lot better if you came down to the front of
the stage—right now—and said something simple and beautiful and true
about the kind of people we are and the way we live.
STARKEY. (Shakes his head sadly.) This is the way we live. This is the
kind of people we are. (73)

In this brief exchange, Heller makes a sharp distinction between the kind of people
Americans think they are and the kind of people their actions determine them to be. Ruth
urges Starkey to demonstrate their collective goodness by making an eloquent speech, to
argue for a sense of honor that may not be obvious, but Starkey recognizes that the
Americans’ behavior testifies to their character more than their words would do. Ruth
hopes that rhetoric will convince others of the hidden pure nature of America, but Starkey
sees American nature coming through quite clearly in the irrational action of the play.
Thus, the play exposes the difference between the myths we use to make sense of our
world and to justify our deaths and the reality of the war being fought.
7
Characters in
New Haven want to locate themselves within a tradition of heroic literature, giving their

7
This disparity is perhaps best articulated in veteran Ron Kovic’s Vietnam War memoir
Born on the Fourth of July (1976), which describes Kovic’s disillusionment in the
American mythology after serving and being paralyzed in combat in Vietnam in 1968.
Kovic explains how American rhetoric in politics and films (especially John Wayne
Westerns and World War II films) indoctrinated him to believe that military service was
an honor and a duty. That foundational belief prompted him to enlist to serve in
Vietnam, where the true nature of the war dispelled his earlier patriotism.
51 
actions and sacrifices purpose and meaning, but they are reminded constantly that their
missions are absurd rather than noble. Similarly, the Vietnam War was being sold to the
American public as another necessary war in America’s storied history of spreading
democracy throughout the world, but a growing number of citizens could not reconcile
the devastation they saw on television with official rhetoric and invocations of the
national mythology.
One of Heller’s most forceful challenges to his audiences comes when Ruth
cannot find Sinclair, a character who was “scripted” to die on a mission in the first act.
She does not believe that Sinclair could actually have been killed, for no one actually dies
in plays and certainly not in front of an audience full of people who presumably would
intervene if any real danger were about to befall an actor. When the reality of the
situation becomes clear to Ruth, she is stunned that no one would have acted to help an
individual in need:
RUTH. (speaking to the audience) He was killed, wasn’t he? And all of
you just sat there. It happened right now. Didn’t you care? Didn’t it
mean anything to you? Didn’t you even—
(Starkey strolls in while Ruth is speaking and halts with a look of stunned
surprise, as though taken aback to see her so deeply moved.)
STARKEY. Hey, Ruthie! Ruthie! Take it easy, will you? What do you
want from them? This is only a show…a comedy. They never heard of
this character Sinclair before. He’s a stranger to them. He’s like a name
in the newspaper.
RUTH. (to Starkey) What difference does that make? He’s dead, isn’t he?
(38)

To Ruth, the audience’s inaction is as much a factor in Sinclair’s death as the Major’s
direct order to send him on a dangerous mission; both the audience and the Major knew
Sinclair would die, and neither did anything to stop it. Starkey attempts to excuse the
audience for doing nothing to help Sinclair because, after all, he was a stranger to them—
52 
“a name in the newspaper,” like so many real young men about whose deaths in
Vietnam civilians would read. Ruth, however, refuses to let the audience off the hook,
noting that responsible individuals should attempt to prevent the death of any person, if
possible. Heller has his characters accost the audience with the news of Sinclair’s death
in order to impress upon them their complicity in the thousands of deaths occurring in
Vietnam. More action to end the war is required of everyone, Heller argues with this
scene, and those who do nothing—or who go only as far as attending anti-war theatre—
must bear a measure of the responsibility for the deaths that will certainly occur.
In the play’s final scene, Starkey learns that his own son is going to be sent to the
war. The son pleads with his father to do something to save him from death, but Starkey
cannot bring himself to defy military protocol or to jeopardize his position in the
institution:
STARKEY’S SON. What were you doing when all this was happening?
STARKEY. I was working. I was doing my job.
STARKEY’S SON. You had nineteen years to save me from this. When I
was born, why didn’t—?
STARKEY. It didn’t seem possible.
STARKEY’S SON. When I was a little boy—when I was growing up—
you must have loved me then. Didn’t you know they would take me into
the army some day if I just kept growing?
[…]
STARKEY. …so it’s not my fault.
STARKEY’S SON. It is your fault! You were doing your job, weren’t
you?
STARKEY. Shut up! You’re my son!
STARKEY’S SON. You shut up! You’re my father! (After a pause.)
Pop… Dad… Father… Stranger—won’t you help me? (As Starkey
remains silent, hesitating). Are you really going to let them take me away
now to be killed? (92-93)

Throughout his career, Starkey has placed duty to the military over duty to family or to
the greater society; he has met the expectations of his commanding officers without ever
53 
taking seriously the human consequences of the orders he has given. Heller
underscores the responsibility borne by every American citizen for the Vietnam War:
some are responsible directly, but most are responsible through passive acquiescence and
willful ignorance, as if they were audience members watching an elaborate production
and felt they could not break the fourth wall to intervene in the action. With Starkey’s
Son’s plea to “Stranger,” Heller tries a final time to reach the audience members and to
ask for their help to save young men who are doomed like Starkey’s Son and the other
actors to die for a questionable cause.
The emotion of this final scene is somewhat unexpected in a farcical play that
otherwise aims for “alienation.” However, rather than destabilize the effects achieved by
the action thus far, Starkey’s emotional exchange with his son redeems the play from
being entirely farcical and allows it to address the weight of the subject of war. It leaves
the audience sufficiently affected to carry the experience with them from the theatre
without undermining the critical distance achieved by the rest of the action. Fenn
concludes that “the wide swing from farce to tragic consequence in the work threatens the
aesthetic homogeneity of the piece” (125). However, Fenn is placing upon New Haven
expectations of a traditional theatrical experience, one in which “aesthetic homogeneity”
might have been a real goal, while Heller is presenting an experience that more faithfully
reflects the war atmosphere of 1967. “The wide swing from farce to tragic consequence”
is precisely the experience of the new soldier, who would go from civilian life to basic
training to the surreal environment of combat in a matter of weeks, and it also
summarizes a number of the counterculture’s efforts, which ranged from the wild
theatrics of the Yippies to the ill-fated protest at Kent State. That the play ends with a
54 
genuinely moving scene between Captain Starkey and the son he is sending to war is
not an undermining of the theatrical trope Heller has created; on the contrary, it impresses
upon the audience the reality of the war situation—for all the manufactured drama of the
war’s events, in the end, young men will die, and we will have let them.
Both Garson and Heller have faced accusations of immaturity based on
MacBird’s and New Haven’s strongly expressed political opinions and heightened
theatricality. Martin Gottfried, senior drama critic for Women’s Wear Daily from 1963 to
1969 writes, “The legitimate and important political complaints of the adult intellectual
community are dealt a real blow by the ludicrous attitudes taken by MacBird, and
Johnson’s position is only strengthened when the criticism of him is so absurd” (307).
Walter Kerr claims that Heller “simply cannot abide the thought of patiently writing a
play. He feels too keenly and is in too much of a hurry for that” (Nagel 226). These
comments are evidence of the split in values between the older generation in the 1960s
and the youth revolution, between mainstream theatre and Vietnam War drama.
Gottfried’s review implies the existence of two separate discourses about the war: the
“legitimate,” “important,” and “adult” conversation, and by contrast, the illegitimate,
trivial, and childish conversation (in which he suggests MacBird belongs). Similarly,
Kerr’s assessment that Heller feels “too keenly” suggests that New Haven is yet another
immoderate war protest that can be easily dismissed for its lack of subtlety. I argue,
however, that Garson’s and Heller’s plays display the conviction of passionate opponents
of the war and that their boldly stated resistance to institutionalized war-making is a
testament to the bravery of playwrights during this period.
55 
The challenging Brechtian theatricality of New Haven is Heller’s attempt to
break through to a desensitized audience and to remind them of their ability—their
responsibility, even—to act upon social events, rather than merely watching those events
unfold before them. John Guare’s Muzeeka (1967) takes up the subject of that cultural
desensitization, with specific attention to the media he sees as exacerbating it. The play
suggests that popular culture—mainly television—is largely responsible for creating a
culture of simultaneous isolation and homogenization: one in which its members are
isolated from one another but receive identical messages about how they should behave
and what they should buy. Thus, Muzeeka echoes the sentiments of the New Left and
other factions of the 1960s counterculture movement, which largely rejected the emphasis
placed on conformity and capitalism by mainstream society. The theme of desensitization
to life is common to all of Guare’s plays; Gene A. Plunka notes, “The existential
dilemma that Guare poses is how individuals can possess a sense of dignity and
humanism in a world that is essentially fraudulent” (231). The plays in Guare’s oeuvre
consistently represent a culture that discourages real connection among individuals, a
culture in which people care little for one another, or for people from other nations. In
Muzeeka, Guare’s criticism of the Vietnam War is clear, but it is secondary to his
criticism of the larger American identity. In this way, his work resembles most of the
1960s Vietnam War playwrights, whose plays aim for large-scale reevaluation of social
values and institutions in the United States and see the war as a symptom of a
problematic American way of life.
Guare, who is best known for his award-winning plays The House of Blue Leaves
(1971) and Six Degrees of Separation (1990), wrote Muzeeka while he was studying at
56 
Yale University and active in anti-war protests (His 1969 play Cop-out deals with an
incident from one of those protests.), and the play criticizes American society for its
deadening influence on its citizens. Guare explains, “’I wrote Muzeeka about all those
undergraduates I saw around me, so free and happy but wondering what in adult life
would allow them to keep their spirit and freedom? How do we keep any ideals in this
particular society?” (qtd. in Plunka 54). He recognizes the struggle faced by individuals
motivated to challenge the system but forced to work within it to survive. Guare’s
protagonist Jack Argue (a name that many critics recognize as anagrammatic for Guare
and thus a character the playwright based on himself) struggles to maintain his idealism
and his desire for a rich, interconnected life in a society that requires him to earn a living
in the corporate environment. In an aside to the audience, Argue expresses his deep
admiration for the Etruscans, an ancient people whose drawings on artifacts always
depict them as dancing and exuberant. He says, “If I could’ve been born anybody in the
world ever—a Kennedy or Sinatra or Henry Ford or the King of Greece—I still would’ve
picked out of that whole hat of births, picked Etruscan” (54-55). The celebrity status of
the men Argue mentions does not hold the appeal for him that the joyful lifestyle
expressed in the Etruscan drawings does. However, despite his desire for a rich life,
necessity forces Argue to seek a job with the Muzeeka Corporation, a piped-in music
company based on Muzak, which Guare uses as a metaphor for the flat, homogenized
lives encouraged by American mainstream culture. Argue claims to have a plan to work
for the company, helping to lull the masses into passivity and complacency, until the day
he decides to replace Muzeeka with his own provocative musical arrangements, which
will inspire those listening to live with enthusiasm and abandon.
57 
Like Heller, Guare eschews theatrical realism in favor of Brechtian alienation
techniques in order to draw audience attention to their own numbing and self-isolating
habits. The characters go through the motions of daily actions and life events—including
sex and childbirth—without forming genuine attachments, and Guare portrays their need
for human connection by having them regularly break the fourth wall and thus
dramatizing the desire to transcend social barriers. Stagehands introduce each scene with
placards explaining the scene’s setting and action, and special effects are deliberately
recognizable as stage effects, forcing audiences to see the constructed nature of the play,
and likening the fabricated stage environment to the “real world,” which Guare aims to
show is just as fabricated as the theatre. The action of the play occurs in a series of
unconnected scenes, each depicting failed physical or emotional connection and thus
emphasizing isolation, until finally Argue finds himself in the middle of the Vietnam
War.
The second half of the play takes place in Vietnam, but the thematic emphasis
remains on the desensitizing nature of culture in the United States. Rather than being a
difficult or traumatic experience for Argue, the war gives him the first genuine
experience of his life. He tells the audience:
I am drafted. I am happy I am drafted. I looked at my wife and child in
Connecticut and thanked Uncle Sam for getting me out of the country, for
escaping without the drag of becoming a missing person. I’ve killed many
people in the four months I’ve been here. I’ve finally broken through the
clay pot that covers my brain. I dance and sing while I shoot and kill. I
thank God for war. War is God’s invention to make us remember we are
animals. (72-73)

The war becomes an escape for Argue from the drudgery of suburban family life, and he
welcomes the opportunity to fight. He acknowledges his responsibility for the deaths of a
58 
number of people, but he does not fear suffering any guilt from his actions. Guare
suggests that American culture will inure the returning veteran against both
overwhelming guilt for his war atrocities and the primal urge to engage again in battle:
8

And I’ll go back and be convinced, the Reader’s Digest will convince me,
reassure me, and the newspapers and TV Guide and my Muzeeka will stick
their hands in my ears and massage my brain and convince me I didn’t do
anything wrong. And life will be so nice. And my wounds will heal and
there won’t even be, you won’t even see, one little scar, one little
bellybutton, one little memento to show that in violence I was reborn. I’ll
really miss the killing. (77)

By referring specifically to Reader’s Digest and TV Guide, as well as to Muzeeka (or
Muzak), Guare is pointing to aspects of American popular culture that aim to soothe
rather than to stimulate the public. Reader’s Digest and the “elevator music” Muzeeka is
meant to be repackage individual works in condensed, smoother form, making articles or
compositions more palatable to the average American by making them shorter, lighter, or
less dissonant. TV Guide is nothing more a magazine of television schedules and short
articles about actors and their television shows; it encourages only more television
watching. In short, Guare accuses most of American popular culture of actively
discouraging critical thought and thereby contributing to a culture that does not examine
its role in world affairs. His message is that Americans immerse themselves in pastimes
that allow them to avoid any self-reflection or acknowledgment of their social

8
We know now that Guare was wrong in this prediction; post-Vietnam War American
society would not help assuage the guilt of the returning veteran. While the media Guare
criticizes would generally maintain its desensitizing banality, it would ignore the subject
of Vietnam for years rather than excuse or rationalize it, and society at large,
uncomfortable with its own complicated feelings about the war, would shun the veteran
rather than comfort him.
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responsibilities, and thus they continue their bad behavior because everything they
consume allows them to rationalize it.
In Muzeeka, Guare is particularly critical of television for its role in creating an
unthinking society, and Guare makes a point of noting that even American soldiers in
Vietnam were susceptible to its power. After Argue delivers a particularly emotional
speech, his fellow soldier, a character called Number Two, attempts to soothe him with
television:
Buddy, calm down. Calm down. Look, lay down. In the bunk. Rest.
Rest. You want television on? I’ll put it on quiet so the VC don’t hear.
My old unit wasn’t wiped out till the end of Batman and the Ed Sullivan
Show. They must’ve sat in the black watching for us, watching the
television till the show ended and we turned it off. I never knew whether
they killed us ‘cause we were the enemy or because we turned off Ed
Sullivan. (73)

Television brings all human activity to a stop, Guare says here; it anesthetizes audiences
so completely that even warfare ceases until the combatants are released from its
powerful draw. Alter argues that television is particularly insidious because it influences
large numbers of people when each is alone and thus especially vulnerable to media
messages. She notes that television separates communities even as it gives them all
identical information: “Paradoxically, while serving to unite viewers, since they all see
the ‘same thing,’ it also separates them into single entities or minimal groups” (xv).
Without others around to serve as a questioning critical mass, Alter suggests, a television
viewer is likely to go along with whatever television is putting forth, watching and
accepting its message without resistance. She also notes that television’s influence on the
isolated individual helped to reinforce the government’s accounts of the war, for “the
global television image mainly supported the war and […] the entire medium was
60 
suspected of manipulating reality to various ideological ends” (xiv).
9
The theatre
community of this period strove to counteract the desensitizing spectacle of television by
presenting the war’s issues in ways that would be “able to restore at least weak
contestatory power to the dominant ‘anaesthetizing’ trend of media images” (Alter xix).
Guare’s contribution to this goal is to highlight the disturbing ways in which the war was
seen as an intriguing media event, rather than as the horrific enterprise it actually was.
In one of the play’s most memorable scenes, Number Two worries about an
upcoming battle and the media that will be there to report it:
CBS is covering the battle. I got transferred to this unit two weeks ago
when my outfit got wiped out at the Mekong Delta. (He falls on his back
in despair.) My whole unit was under exclusive contract to NBC. I’m
only allowed to fight for NBC. If they see me tomorrow—CBS—they can
strip me of all my rank. Cut my payments off back home. They can send
me to a unit. (He sits up.) Christ, an independent unit. An educational
network unit. I’m not fighting for no Channel Thirteen. (72)

Guare suggests that television functions less as a valuable means of communication than
as a means of creating celebrity. Number Two displays no understanding of the political
or military goals of the war, no personal dedication to the cause; he believes only that
appearing on television somehow legitimates his efforts. The war, Guare suggests, is not
reported as ideology or politics; rather, it is spectacle and drama, and its soldiers are
televised as actors. In Dispatches, Michael Herr relates stories of soldiers in Vietnam

9
It would not be until reports of the1968 Tet Offensive were broadcast that television
began to offer criticism of the war and the administration. Historian James T. Patterson
writes, “Television news programs […] tended either to soft-pedal the horrors of the war
[…] or to go along with the administration until 1968” (620). In his study of American
culture in the early 1970s, Robert Hargreaves recognizes television’s influence over the
American public: “It was television’s coverage of the Tet Offensive of 1968 that finally
turned public opinion against the continuing involvement of American troops in
Vietnam” (448). By the time Muzeeka appeared in New York on April 28, 1968,
television was reporting the war somewhat differently.
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playing up to photographers and cameramen in order to be featured in their reports.
Todd Gitlin, a prominent member of the New Left movement of the 1960s, attests to
television’s influence on the anti-war movement as well:
The rock ‘n’ roll generation, having grown up on popular culture, took
images very seriously indeed; beholding itself magnified in the funhouse
mirror, it grew addicted to media which had agendas of their own—
celebrity-making, violence-mongering, sensationalism. (6)

Gitlin recognizes that in was in television’s interest to turn the war into a media event and
that Americans responded to its influence. Even those Americans who actively opposed
the war and who recognized television’s influence both in fomenting support for it and in
desensitizing people to its horrors felt compelled to voice their opposition via the same
medium.
Guare’s representation of the war as a media event drains it of its connection to
ideology, and his protagonist is troubled by his revelation that the war is just something
to survive in order to return to American capitalism. When Argue realizes that the men
in Vietnam are fighting only for television ratings and consumerism, that they are merely
trying to survive an absurd situation in order to return to a society where they can make
money, he commits suicide in despair. After Number Two encourages Argue to join him
in establishing a national “atomic-powered disposals” company that will provide for them
both a lifestyle of affluence, Argue rethinks his involvement in the war:
ARGUE: (quiet) Is that it?
NUMBER TWO: Huh?
ARGUE: Is that all we’re fighting for?
NUMBER TWO: (stretching blissfully) That’s what I’m scratching the
days off my calendar for. (80)

Similarly, Argue’s wife sums up the war effort as follows:
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I tell the baby every day his Daddy is a hero and fighting all those dirty
Commies in Vietnam so he can come to us and make more money for us
so we can move to a bigger house and go to Yale to college and Europe on
vacations and take Mommy to dances and plays and the club. (81)

As his wife speaks these lines to the audience, Argue commits suicide by stabbing
himself, so dejected by his realization about the war that he refuses to continue
participating. The heightened experience of warfare gives Argue the feeling of being
alive that he has desired, but when he finds out that the war effort is only in service of
capitalism, he is disillusioned once again. In this scene, Guare suggests the illegitimacy
of the Vietnam War, arguing that the rhetoric of freedom and democracy used by the
government to justify the intervention is meant to blind Americans to the fact that they
are fighting and dying for economic interests.
Guare’s play does not encourage a specific action by its spectators like many
other plays of this period; there is no clear plea to the audience on behalf of potential
draftees or an admonition to reject a particular politician. Instead, Muzeeka draws
attention to the decline of interpersonal relationships in America, and it criticizes a
society so anesthetized by media and consumerism that its members welcome the horrors
of war as their first glimpse of genuine lived experience. American culture, Guare
suggests, turns human existence into a search for material wealth and notoriety, draining
people of their individuality as it encourages them to acquire advertised goods and to
advance into higher social circles with the ultimate goal of reaching celebrity status.
John Harrop points out that, in Muzeeka, Guare is exposing Americans’ “desperate desire
to be rich and famous […]; the obsession with being number one that was partially
responsible for the Vietnam debacle” (qtd. in Plunka 15). Harrop’s insightful
63 
interpretation of Muzeeka as large-scale cultural criticism is not shared by Zinman,
though, who sees the play as merely “whimsical satire” and deems it “rather too
lightweight to make a serious antiwar protest” (23). Zinman cites only the comic
representation of the soldiers fighting for specific networks in her essay, emphasizing
Guare’s commentary on the absurdity of many of the war’s events but discounting his
pointed criticism of American media. Plunka recognizes that Guare’s message can be
missed because of his approach, that his plays are often “frustrating due to the
paradoxical effect of the black comedy” (233), but that message is definitely present.
Muzeeka is absurd and comical in many scenes, but it makes a powerful argument against
the willful disengagement of American citizens from critical thought and from social
responsibility.
1968 is widely considered the turning point in the Vietnam War, the year that
public opinion shifted dramatically to oppose the United States’ involvement there—so
dramatically, in fact, that President Johnson, facing overwhelming disapproval of his
handling of the war, opted not to seek re-election. The Tet Offensive, which began on
January 31 and exposed the emptiness of American claims of a nearing victory,
contributed significantly to this shift in support. The Viet Cong orchestrated an attack on
all major cities in South Vietnam and on the U.S. embassy in Saigon simultaneously,
surprising and nearly overpowering United States’ forces and severely undermining the
United States’ image as superpower. Racial conflict increased in military ranks,
especially after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4. King’s death
triggered race riots around the United States, and black GIs in Vietnam became more and
more hostile toward a government that did not respect them at home yet sent them into
64 
combat to defend it against other people of color. Both the American public and the
GIs themselves began to see evidence convincing them of the war’s futility. A famous
quote by an officer who had just led the mission against enemy forces in Ben Tre,
“reducing the provincial capital of 140,000 inhabitants to rubble” sums up the absurdity
of the United States’ strategy in Vietnam. He told reporters, “It became necessary to
destroy the town to save it” (Isserman & Kazin 231).
In the theatre, the shift to oppose the war is less obvious than in public opinion
polls because the theatrical productions had largely espoused anti-war sentiments from
the beginning. However, in 1968 there is a noticeable shift in the terms of the argument,
with a much greater emphasis being placed on the suffering of the Vietnamese at the
hands of the American forces. In earlier works, protests against the harm being inflicted
upon the Vietnamese people and landscape were subordinated to concerns about
American politics and the safety of American GIs. The plays of 1968 do not offer
complex portrayals of Vietnamese individuals—regrettably, no Vietnam War drama
written by Americans does—but the plays appearing in this volatile year argue, to
varying degrees, for the sympathetic consideration of the Vietnamese in a way that few
Vietnam War plays of any other period will.
Another important theme Vietnam War plays of 1968 share is a growing
skepticism of rhetoric—both that of official government reports of war efforts and of the
general language of patriotism. Before the Tet Offensive, the government had
consistently presented the war to the American public in optimistic terms. Despite the
growing number of Americans killed and wounded, the official reports represented the
Americans as “winning.” Network newscasters maintained objectivity, and “with some
65 
notable exceptions there was not much footage of heavy combat that showed dead or
wounded American soldiers” (Patterson 621). However, reports from the early months of
1968 contradicted that optimism:
The initial thrusts of the Tet offensive, especially the breaching of the
embassy wall, convinced already skeptical Americans that Johnson,
Westmoreland, and other administration officials had been lying all along.
Critics of Johnson were all the angrier about being deceived because of the
publicity blitz that LBJ and Westmoreland had conducted in late1967.
After Tet it was clear as could be that there was no ‘light at the end of the
tunnel,’ as Westmoreland had maintained at that time. Indeed, the shock
from Tet greatly intensified an adversarial relationship that had been
developing between the media and the State since the mid-1960s. For
many in the media the credibility gap, a chasm after Tet, was never to be
bridged thereafter. (Patterson 680)

In the plays of this period, this theme of deceptive euphemizing and misrepresentation of
facts will come to the forefront, reflecting the skepticism of the troubled year; however, it
will also remain a significant part of Vietnam War drama well past 1968. In fact, later
war events and the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s will only intensify the public’s
distrust of government; consequently, the discrepancy between what is said by
government and what is seen by the public will continue to be a part of the theatrical
dialogue for many years.
Heller’s play does two things particularly well: it presents a view of the military
that challenges official rhetoric claiming clear and rational combat strategies, and it
makes a strong plea for the average fighting man, who will be sacrificed by greater
powers for a cause he does not fully understand. A growing concern in 1967 and 1968
was the war’s dramatic escalation; President Johnson ordered 45,000 additional troops to
be sent to Vietnam in August 1967, sparking thousands of anti-war protests around the
nation that fall, including the one documented by Norman Mailer in The Armies of the
66 
Night, where Abbie Hoffman and other members of the Yippie movement attempted to
levitate the Pentagon (Fenn 252). The theatre productions of this period are similarly
passionate attempts to end the draft and to stem further loss of life. We Bombed in New
Haven emphasizes this theme in the characters of Henderson, Sinclair, and Starkey’s Son,
who all resist the institutional forces that see them as expendable and who plead with the
other characters (and the audience) to help them avoid their fate.
Ron Cowen’s
10
Summertree (1968) takes this theme even further, making it the
primary message of the drama and drawing attention to the domestic forces that compel
young men to serve against their own beliefs. In particular, Summertree criticizes the
nuclear family for its role in fostering national expectations of conformity and obedience.
It highlights the generation gap between parents and young adults in the late 1960s, and it
presents a bleak view of the war’s consequences. Perhaps because Cowen refuses to
soften any of the harsh realities of the war to appease audiences, the play did not receive
good reviews; however, it managed to run for 127 evenings off-Broadway in spite of
critical indifference (Bordman 424). Its main achievement is its poignant portrayal of a
soldier’s parents attempting to move through the pain of losing their son in combat. In
their arguments and intimate moments, Cowen raises questions about the role of the
nuclear family as protector of its members and emphasizes the human cost of the war.
Cowen’s protagonist is a young man who drops out of school rather than study
what his father has chosen for him and subsequently finds himself drafted. The play
jumps back and forth in time and place—before and during the war, and then after he has
been killed—illuminating the forces that drove him to serve and the effect of his death on

10
Summertree is Cowen’s only play. He went on to write and produce for television.
67 
his parents. Cowen’s focus on a single family affected by war de-politicizes the play
and makes the antiwar argument on a very personal level, an approach more likely to
reach a wide audience during the exceptionally turbulent period in which the play
appeared. Summertree was first performed on March 3, 1968, a little over a month after
the shocking Tet Offensive, in which 1,100 Americans were killed and the United States
suffered a harsh psychological defeat, despite having inflicted a much higher body count
upon the North Vietnamese (Herring 232). After Tet, President Johnson “ordered an
additional 10,500 men to Vietnam,” and soon General Westmoreland requested another
206,000 (Herring 234-235). This dramatic escalation inflamed the protest movement in
the United States, and in the theatre, the criticism of national politics and institutions
began to take a back seat to the more immediate problem of saving lives.
Despite its clear antiwar message and its appearance on the theatrical scene during
the height of violence in Vietnam, Summertree is generally overlooked in discussions of
Vietnam War drama. The play, when it is cited at all, receives little more than a mention
of it another example of the genre. It is not considered in the works of Alter or Zinman,
nor does it receive attention in surveys of mainstream 1960s theatre. Robert Asahina for
one does acknowledge Summertree as taking on the subject of the Vietnam War, but he
dismisses the play as “embarrassingly sentimental” (33) with no other critique.
Particularly confusing is Fenn’s understanding of Summertree; he mentions the play only
to locate it among works he does not discuss in his study, those he claims “deal with the
Vietnam experience in a tangential manner” (233). The plays he excludes—Fifth of July
(1978) by Lanford Wilson, Lone Star (1979) and Private Wars (1979) by James McLure,
Strange Snow (1982) by Stephen Metcalfe, and Home Front (1985) by James Duff—
68 
portray characters who have returned home from the war and who are struggling to
come to terms with the Vietnam experience and to move past it. Fenn notes that, in this
category of plays, “the events associated with Vietnam are essentially reduced to the
fateful capriciousness of an unfortunate car accident or serious illness,” and as such, he
does not engage them in his book. Summertree, then, is grossly miscategorized with the
aforementioned works because the protagonist does not return from the war—he is killed
in combat.
Fenn’s troubling interpretation of Summertree does more than simply mislabel
Cowen’s play; it robs the play of its politics and denies it a place among other well
recognized antiwar plays in the charged cultural environment of the 1960s. Summertree
was an active participant in the cultural debate about America’s involvement in Vietnam
and a vehement plea to end the war. It reflects the antiwar movement’s impassioned
attempts to break through ingrained ideologies and practices and to convince audiences to
do more to stop the war, to remove party politics from the discussion and to realize the
human cost the war in Vietnam was imposing on America’s youth and families. Whereas
the other plays in Fenn’s category quietly reflect the malaise of late 1970s post-Vietnam
America, Summertree argues for immediate action, and it urges audiences to take this
action at a time when the possibility of preventing more deaths still existed.
In dramatizing one family’s complicated interpersonal relationships and
ideological disagreements, Cowen engages the generational tensions of the late 1960s and
makes a compelling argument against the cultural values that perpetuate and justify
American bellicosity. In order to create a kind of “Everyfamily” through which he can
stage his cultural debate, Cowen leaves his characters nameless (Young Man, Little Boy,
69 
Mother, Father)—an abstracting of characters typical of the period’s protest theatre,
which emphasized its social message over particularities of character development and
plot. Through this technique, Summertree exposes the complicity of the typical
American nuclear family in reproducing national values of masculinity, military duty,
and capitalism. Cowen shows that the American family is not a refuge from the
socialization that compels young men to join the military; on the contrary, it is an active
agent in the process.
The values Cowen aims to critique are given voice through the character of the
Father, whose uneasy relationship with the Young Man reflects the difficulties many
parents were having relating to their children in the late 1960s. The arguments between
the Father and the Young Man are representative of the cultural tensions between
generations, and through these debates, Cowen exposes the hollowness of certain
established values and the way that patriarchal power forces youth into betraying its
individuality in favor of empty tradition. Troubled by the Young Man’s artistic
tendencies, his desire to leave college for music school, and his close relationship with
his male roommate, the Father manipulates his son into doing what he believes is “best
for him,” refusing to acknowledge the possible validity of values that conflict with his
own. He urges the Young Man to abandon his roommate because, he claims, “it pays to
know a lot of people,” and he wants his son to finish his degree, saying, “He should be
able to choose what he wants to do, not like me” (10-11). The Father’s manipulation is
arguably well meant in that he wants to help his son succeed, but it is based in the
restrictive, conservative values of the World War II generation, values that at the time
enjoyed such unquestioned cultural acceptance they took on the guise of inherent truth.
70 
In the Father’s mind, “success” means one thing only: becoming a traditional
breadwinner—a financially secure, masculine, family man who earns his living through
respected business avenues.

His value system cannot reconcile his son’s decision to
follow a risky, non-traditional course of study like music, even though the Young Man is
musically gifted and derives great pleasure from composing. To make such a choice is to
reject values so ingrained in the Father’s identity that the Young Man becomes
incomprehensible to his own parent. Doing what is “best” for his son, then, does not
mean encouraging the Young Man in what makes him happy; rather, it means controlling
his behavior so that it complies with cultural norms. Here Cowen destabilizes the myth
of the nuclear family as a unit that nurtures the individuality of its members and raises
children to follow their own dreams. Instead, he shows that the nuclear family
reproduces accepted cultural values through a complex strategy of guilt, coercion, and the
withholding of financial support.
In fact, the parents in Summertree are so thoroughly socialized they are more
willing to risk the loss of the Young Man in war than they are to encourage him to betray
national expectations. When the Young Man drops out of college rather than study for a
business career, the Father withholds the money his son needs to enroll in music school,
even though he knows that without a student deferment, the Young Man will be drafted
immediately. To the Father, the army is a character-building rite of passage, a place
where the Young Man will gain discipline and “learn how to take orders”; he only
reluctantly acknowledges the likelihood of his son having to kill people and the
possibility that his son may be the one killed. In the final scene of Act I, the family is
seen together as the Young Man packs to leave for the army:
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MOTHER: It seems like we’re sending you off to summer camp again.
YOUNG MAN: I almost wish you were.
FATHER: You’re doing a good thing, whether you know it or not, and
you’ll be a better person for it.
YOUNG MAN: I wasn’t exactly thinking about that right now. But you
always seem to bring it up.
FATHER: Well that’s what you should be thinking about.
YOUNG MAN: If you want to know the truth, I was considering the
possibilities of running away again.
FATHER: You just try it and see what happens to you.
MOTHER: (To Father.) He’s only teasing you…
FATHER: (To Son.) He’ll do just fine. He’ll make us proud of him.
YOUNG MAN: I have enough problems without worrying about making
you proud of me. (24-25)

Here, the son subtly asks for help from his parents to avoid what he sees as his certain
death, but instead of receiving support for a decision not to serve and perhaps assistance
in escaping the draft, he is met with the threat of punishment. The family does not act to
protect one of its own from the devastation of war as one would hope it might do; on the
contrary, it pressures the Young Man into military service: first, by retracting financial
support that would shield him from being drafted, and second, by emotionally blocking
his path of escape.
Cowen shows the family to be a tool of the national mythology, a microcosm that
reinforces the national agenda, rather than a refuge from the danger that agenda requires,
forcing upon audiences the uncomfortable fact of their complicity in the deaths of the
servicemen (a theme that echoes that of Heller’s New Haven). In both plays, audiences
see that it is more important to the father character that he and his son fulfill their “duty”
than that the son remains safe from harm. Heller and Cowen each use the father/son
scenes to expose the self-serving nature of American military rhetoric, which glorifies the
soldier and redeems civilian underachievers in order to use those individuals as political
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cannon fodder. The families are shown to be complicit in producing soldiers through
complex emotional pressure that often accomplishes what social pressure alone cannot;
defying the government seems to be easier than defying one’s parents and rejecting years
of familial expectations. In each play, it is the father’s refusal to help the son that
ultimately breaks the son’s resistance; he tries to resist national pressures, but when his
own father sides with the government, the son capitulates. In these revealing scenes,
Heller and Cowen require audiences to examine the many subtle ways in which a large
number of American citizens are actually reinscribing a political agenda they may be
purporting to oppose.
In Heller’s play, the female character Ruth urges Starkey to act to save the men
doomed to die, and she even goes so far as to suggest she will help them flee; she is the
protective, nurturing mother figure who nobly resists institutional pressures in order to
save lives. Cowen, on the other hand, makes his female character an equal force in
pressuring Young Man to serve, challenging the mythology of mothers who do anything
necessary to protect a child. The Mother, acting independently of her husband, could
give her son approval to escape the war, but she does not. Instead, she stands with the
Father as he warns the Young Man of punishment should he try to run away. By saying
to her husband “He’s only teasing you,” she neutralizes the Young Man’s appeal, turning
it into a joke rather than acknowledging it as a last cry for help. Cowen makes the
Mother as guilty of sending the Young Man to war as her husband, for she offers no
resistance to patriarchal pressure. In her avowed allegiance to her husband, she passively
condones the Young Man’s forced enlistment, and she refuses to offer an escape—or
even comfort—in the Young Man’s final hours at home. The nuclear family is shown to
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be not a refuge from the hostility of the world but a microcosm of that world, using its
own kind of pressure—not jail but shame, not infliction of punishment but withholding of
support and love—to reinscribe the values of the nation and to send its sons to war.
When their son is killed, however, the gender differences emerge, and in the
exchanges between the Mother and Father, Cowen most starkly juxtaposes the reality of
death against the empty language used to justify it. While the Father’s belief in the
national mythology is strengthened by the Young Man’s death, it becomes obvious to the
Mother that the cause to which she sent her only son is an empty one. Formerly on her
husband’s side in all things, the Mother pulls away from him after their son is killed, both
emotionally and ideologically. She remembers specifics about her son—his favorite
flower, childhood pleasures—and disassociates herself from the glorified rhetoric that
justifies war, while her husband, on the other hand, uses the national belief that dying for
one’s country is of high honor to engage in a revisionism of his son’s character:
FATHER: I loved my son…I gave him everything he wanted, everything I
could. And he turned into a fine man.
MOTHER: He had to die so you could say that…
FATHER: When I look at that portrait you did of him, I see his
determination…
MOTHER: I’m sick of hearing you worship him! How much did either of
you worship the other when he was alive?
FATHER: He proved himself…
MOTHER: Why should he have to prove himself! How can anyone ask
another for that kind of proof! (41-42)

The Father copes with his son’s death by re-imagining him as a fallen hero, claiming that
in war the Young Man “proved himself.” By contrast, though, the play’s “in-country”
scenes show no heroic behavior by the Young Man. In fact, audiences know the Young
Man has accidentally killed an innocent Vietnamese family, and he becomes positively
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childlike in his final moments, calling for his parents and wishing for his toy giraffe to
comfort him. The Young Man “proves himself” in war to be exactly the kind of man he
was at home—sensitive, poorly suited for combat, compassionate—but the Father
reinterprets his son as the man he wanted him to be instead of feeling love and loss for
the man he actually was.
Cowen is especially provocative in an exchange between the Mother and Father
that encourages audiences to rethink the idea of military service in Vietnam. While the
Father sees strength in his son’s service and subsequent death, the Mother believes her
son would have been truly strong if he had refused to serve altogether:
MOTHER: He died for something he didn’t believe in, he was forced into
it.
FATHER: He went because it was his responsibility.
MOTHER: He went because he wasn’t strong enough not to! He went
because he was trapped! (42)

The Mother’s comment challenges the idea that the strong are those who go to war;
instead, she suggests that it takes more strength to resist the cultural pressures to serve
one’s country uncritically. Cowen challenges audiences to re-evaluate the opinion that it
is honorable, brave, and responsible to serve in Vietnam, and he suggests the possibility
that it shows greater bravery and strength of character to resist the national call to service
and to live life on one’s own terms.
11
Here he gives audiences permission—even urges

11
 With the rising death rates among Americans and Vietnamese, draft resistance became
more common, and antiwar activists worked to change the image of resisters from
cowards or shirkers to principled objectors. At the same time Summertree appeared, Dr.
Benjamin Spock and four others were facing trial for encouraging young men to resist the
draft. A poster urging draft resistance read, “Girls say yes to boys who say no,”
suggesting that the man who resisted the draft was more sexually attractive than the one
who served.
 
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them—to encourage young men to resist the war, to see them as making a good
choice, and to assist them in their efforts to do so.
Cowen makes a particularly valuable contribution to the antiwar effort by emptying
his play of any representation of military service as attractive.
12
There are no spectacular
combat scenes or seductive images of masculine power. Cowen shows no triumph of
American forces over dangerous Viet Cong; instead, the playwright depicts the Young
Man killing a woman and child. He is devastated and remorseful, and his character
becomes a clear contrast to his fellow soldier, who is concerned only with the additional
paperwork the Young Man’s mistake requires him to complete. In this short scene,
Cowen reinforces the Young Man’s compassion and sensitivity, which make him ill
suited for combat, and recognizes that, in this troubling war, the Vietnamese dead are as
likely to be innocent civilians as they are enemy combatants. The Young Man refuses to
rationalize the tragic consequences of his actions with defensiveness or excuses, and
instead, forces his fellow soldier to acknowledge the relationships among the victims:
SOLDIER. We’re going to have to take them over there in that field so
they can pick them up. I’ll take that one. You get those two.
YOUNG MAN. You mean the mother and son.
SOLDIER. All right—the mother and son. Let’s go. (14)

Here, Cowen clearly challenges common representations both of American soldiers as
competent, righteous warriors and of the Vietnamese as the inscrutable, Communist
enemy. The Young Man is no hero, and the combat situation has produced no thrilling

12
 In 1968, the only cinematic representation of the Vietnam War to be produced during
the war appeared—John Wayne’s The Green Berets—which did its best to make the war
in Vietnam look like World War II, the last American war to enjoy popular support. This
propagandistic film was meant to present the war as the government wanted it
understood, and it reinforced ideas of honor, noble sacrifice, and camaraderie that would
make Vietnam service seem appealing. 
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victory. In fact, Cowen keeps out of the play any trace of impressive spectacle or even
of pleasant camaraderie among soldiers. Summertree is unequivocally about loss, and
Cowen makes a point of showing nothing appealing about war.
In the play’s final moments, the Young Man is seen dying, slowly bleeding to
death from his battle wound. His last words, through tears, are “Mom! Dad! Please!”
and the stage lights fade to black. That final “Please!” echoes through the house as a
direct appeal to each audience member, imploring spectators to take immediate action on
behalf of the young men facing the draft. Cowen, then, challenges American audiences
to save their sons. The young men being sent to war, he argues in his play, are not John
Wayne-like soldiers, brave and capable, fighting the good fight to protect America. On
the contrary, they are just boys, better suited to the creation of music than to combat.
They are being sent into a war, Cowen argues, in which they are more likely to kill
innocent civilians than dangerous enemies, and when the young men die, they likely will
not die heroically, as old movies have shown. Instead, they will die alone and in pain,
wishing for their old lives and for something familiar to comfort them.
There is very little for audiences to feel good about in Summertree—no spectacle,
no redemption, no comic relief. In fact, the play resists even basic dramatic construction,
the traditional structure of plays that promises rising action and a climax. Audiences see
the Young Man dying in the opening scene, and for the rest of the play, there is only
heartache and misunderstanding among the family members. It is of little surprise, then,
that Summertree has not been afforded much critical attention since 1968. Although it
seems a bleak play that provides a rather unpleasant experience for audiences,
Summertree is valuable for its intervention into the discussion of the war during a highly
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turbulent period and for its sincere attempt to make audiences come to terms with the
reality of what they were asking families to sacrifice by sending their sons to war. Its
sentimentality can be seen in retrospect as a drawback, and its anti-climactic plot and flat
characters do not offer much to counteract Cowen’s heavy-handed message. However,
these are criticisms made on the basis of aesthetic criteria that do not apply well to protest
theatre, which demands strong messages and tactics to reach complacent audiences. 1968
was a year of particular intensity all across America (around the world, in fact), and
Summertree is but one of the many outspoken voices of the period. Rather than make his
statement in subtle terms and risk having it make too light an impression, Cowen opts to
overwhelm audiences with unrelenting sadness and loss, to force them to see the abject
suffering endured by soldier, family, and Vietnamese and to sense the unmitigated futility
of the war.
While Summertree narrowed audiences’ focus onto the ways the Vietnam War
affected a single family, Arthur Kopit’s
13
Indians (1968) expanded that focus and
exposed the war as yet another instance of American imperialism, not a unique military
action. Indians, which opened on July 4, 1968 in London (affording the play a more
objective audience than it would have found in the United States at the time) does not
appear to be about Vietnam at all; it is ostensibly an examination of the American
government’s role in the genocide of the Native Americans, from the destruction of the
buffalo (their main source of food) to the deliberate distribution of smallpox-infested
blankets to the massacre at Wounded Knee. As the play develops, protagonist Buffalo

13
Kopit’s other work includes the absurdist Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the
Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad (1963), Wings (1979), and the book for the musical Nine
(1982). He won a Tony for Wings, Nine, and Indians.
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Bill Cody, whom the government has used to help create its powerful mythology,
comes to realize his complicity in the destruction of the native people and their culture,
and he struggles to reconcile his actions, which he believes to be heroic and in the service
of a noble cause, with their consequences, the betrayal and death of a people he had
befriended and come to respect. In this way, Buffalo Bill comes to represent the
American GI,
14
who found himself similarly responsible for inflicting suffering upon the
Vietnamese, all the while operating in the service of a government claiming benevolent
intentions. Thus, Kopit chose to make his statement about the Vietnam War through
allegory, an approach he believed would expose the root causes of the war—a long
history of cultural imperialism—not just the daily horrors.
Like New Haven and Muzeeka, Indians utilizes Brecht’s alienation techniques to
highlight for audiences the inconsistencies in the American self-image. Doris Auerbach
writes, “The purpose and technique of Brechtian theater is to make the audience aware of
historical processes by showing them, in a theatrical way, to be changeable and man-
made, rather than immutable and natural” (92). The play opens and closes with only
three large glass cases on stage. They contain over-sized statues of Buffalo Bill and
Sitting Bull and a few Indian artifacts, emphasizing each man as preserved in American
history. Kopit challenges audiences to see American identity not as innate or divinely
inspired but as carefully constructed and, specifically, constructed at the expense of other
cultures. “The deliberate unreality of the setting,” Auerbach notes, “underlines the

14
Fueled by John Wayne Westerns and TV shows like Have Gun, Will Travel, American
GIs were inclined to think of their tours in Cowboy-and-Indian terms. Dangerous areas
in Vietnam were referred to as “real Indian country.”
 
79 
distortion of the white man’s view of both himself and the Indians” (92). In the play,
the characters from American history are nearly caricatures—brash, foolish, and over-
the-top. Buffalo Bill, riding an artificial horse with glowing eyes, and Wild Bill Hickok
play themselves in a Wild West Show staged at the White House for an Ol’ Time
President who is at the same time laughable and sinister. The play even includes an
appearance of Ned Buntline, who wrote the books about Buffalo Bill that made him a
legend. Buntline’s character reinforces Kopit’s point that the national mythology has
been used as a tool to obfuscate the reality of the Indian genocide. Buntline proclaims
that even though he and Buffalo Bill have become rich from the sale of his books:
I saw the nation profit more than us.
For with each one o’ my exciting stories,
Cody grew t’ represent its glories.
Also helped relieve its conscience,
By showing pessimism’s nonsense. (35)

The white characters display an arrogance and lack of compassion that, along with the
play’s heightened theatricality, serve to distance audiences from the national mythology
with which they might ordinarily identify. By contrast, the Indians are given a much
more sympathetic portrayal. They are calm, dignified, and argue their case logically and
persuasively. The white men act irrationally and insultingly when caught in deceptive
practices, which they are quite often. The juxtaposition of these characters draws
audiences into identification with characters they have been encouraged by other
representations to see as antagonists. By extension, then, Kopit’s allegory draws
audiences’ attention to the plight of the Vietnamese, who suffer similarly during and after
the war from the Americans’ cultural misunderstanding and cruel self-interest.
80 
Buffalo Bill is the one moderately redemptive white character, as he comes to
recognize his part in the systematic slaughter of the Indians. He tries to rationalize his
actions, but as he witnesses the government betray the Indians again and again, he is sick
with guilt at having been aligned with the government’s cause:
I wiped out their food, ya see. …Didn’t mean to, o’ course. (He laughs to
himself.) I mean IT WASN’T MY FAULT! The railroad men needed
food. They hired me t’ find ‘em food! Well. How was I t’ know the
goddam buffalo reproduced so slowly? How was I to know that? NO
ONE KNEW THAT! (79)

Of course, the irony here is that the Indians knew the buffalo’s reproductive habits.
Buffalo Bill is attempting to justify having just wiped out 100 animals with 100 bullets as
a display of his sharpshooting talent by claiming his efforts were in the pursuit of food for
his employers. He is wrestling with a newly acquired cultural sensitivity and an
awareness of his own government’s duplicity. Through the character of Buffalo Bill,
Kopit helps audiences come to a similar awareness in regard to the Vietnam War. As
Buffalo Bill becomes increasingly aware of his role in the destruction of the Indians, he
struggles with his desire to be the hero Buntline and the mythology constructed him to be
and his guilt at having been the tool of the government. Here, Kopit gets at the struggle
so many returning veterans would fight: the realization that in doing their “duty” to their
country, they were responsible for unspeakable atrocities. In 1968, it was bad enough,
but this internal conflict would be greatly exacerbated by the treatment of the returning
veteran in coming years.
To strengthen his argument about the ideological connection between the
American government’s treatment of the Indians and the ongoing war in Vietnam, Kopit
includes in the play the exact words of General Westmoreland, the leader of the
81 
American forces in Vietnam, from a statement in which Westmoreland attempts to
mitigate reports of large-scale civilian casualties resulting from American bombing
missions. Kopit includes these words in a speech by Colonel Forsyth, who answers
reporters’ questions about the Indian deaths at Wounded Knee:
FIRST REPORTER: Colonel Forsyth, some people are referring to your
victory yesterday as a massacre. How do you feel about that?
COLONEL: One can always find someone who’ll call an overwhelming
victory a massacre. I suppose they’d prefer it if we’d let more of our own
boys get shot!
FIRST REPORTER: Then you don’t think the step you took was harsh?
COLONEL: Of course it was harsh. And I don’t like it any more than
you. But had we shirked our responsibility, skirmishes would have gone
on for years, costing our country millions, as well as untold lives. Of
course innocent people have been killed. In war they always are. And of
course our hearts go out to the innocent victims of this. But war is not a
game. It’s tough. And demands tough decisions. In the long run I believe
what happened here at this reservation yesterday will be justified. (84)
(italics indicate Westmoreland’s exact words)

By including Westmoreland’s words, Kopit not only addresses the emptiness of the
language used to explain away death—“it’s tough” can hardly speak to the reality of a
massacre—he also makes a statement about the constancy of American bellicosity.
15

This kind of language, Kopit suggests, has been used for decades to obfuscate the
atrocities committed under the guise of the national myth. He highlights the emptiness of
American promises, the hypocrisy of American claims of benevolence and fair play,

15
 A particularly chilling parallel can be made between the slaughter of Indians at
Wounded Knee discussed in the play and the massacre of civilians at My Lai in Vietnam.
On March 16, 1968 in the hamlet of My Lai, American troops killed between 550-600
Vietnamese civilians, of whom none was a military-aged male (Fenn 253). It cannot be
said that this incident influenced the writing of Kopit’s play, as the news of the massacre
would not become known to the American public until November 1969, but the play
opened in New York on October 13, 1969, and subsequent performances must have been
significantly impacted by the audience’s awareness of the massacre.
 
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when the character of Sitting Bull confronts Buffalo Bill for his government’s
behavior: “We had land. … You wanted it; you took it. That … I understand perfectly.
What I cannot understand … is why you did all this, and at the same time … professed
your love” (85). It is not the action that is so objectionable; it is the refusal of the
Americans to acknowledge openly the motivation behind their actions. Similarly, the
United States made claims of benevolence toward the South Vietnamese, but the
slaughter of civilians, the defoliation of the countryside, and the political and military
support of the corrupt government revealed the true national character.
Unfortunately, Kopit’s allegorical approach did not succeed with 1968 audiences
and critics as hoped. Robert Asahina notes that Kopit’s allegory was “so tenuous that
audiences, and even critics missed the point” (34). Auerbach also recognizes the trouble
critics had in seeing Indians as part of the on-going anti-war debate, noting that while
“later discussions of the play saw the obvious parallel between Indians and the Vietnam
War […] most newspaper reviews in 1969 [the year the play opened in the New York
City], whether they were favorable or not, did not seem to make the connection.” “They
dealt mainly with the historical theme of the play and the creation of a legend,” Auerbach
continues, “but made no mention of the world outside the play” (102). Fenn argues that
Kopit’s ultimate goal of challenging governmental policies in regard to Vietnam is not
realized because the audience does not maintain enough of a critical distance to make the
necessary connections:
In performance […] the plight of the Indians tends to elicit the empathy of
the audience and divert its attention from the political analogies. If there
is a weakness in Kopit’s abstract rendition of the War in Vietnam, it lies in
his treating the symptoms rather than the disease. He deals with the
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atrocities and guilt associated with the war rather than the reasons for
American intervention. (112-113)

Fenn sees Kopit as emphasizing the suffering of the Indians to the detriment of a political
statement about the necessity of the government’s actions, but here Fenn seems to
misread the allegory badly, for Kopit’s play is very much about “the reasons for
American intervention.” The reasons for intervention in Vietnam, Kopit insists, are the
same reasons for Westward Expansion—the spread of American influence and power and
the establishment of foreign governments loyal to the United States and its ideals. In
Indians, Fenn sees the human suffering as the symptom (which he says Kopit addresses)
and the war as the disease (which he says Kopit ignores); Kopit, on the other hand, sees
the Vietnam War as a symptom itself—“a symptom of something which went back much
farther,” specifically a destructive national mythology. Kopit wanted to show that the war
in Vietnam was merely another part of “a struggle in which we’d been fighting
throughout history against people whom we conceived as being spiritually, morally,
economically and intellectually our inferiors.” “We imposed our will on them,” Kopit
argues, “and then justified our will morally in terms of some godly sensation that we felt
was for a general and moral good” (qtd. in Auerbach 87). Kopit aimed to show that the
Vietnam War was not a fight to liberate an oppressed people, as official rhetoric claimed;
it was instead another manifestation of the United States’ paternalistic approach to
peoples of color, a military action undertaken for the United States’ own self-interest with
no regard for the devastating effects that action would have on the indigenous people. A
Pentagon Papers document written by Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton
84 
in March 1965 supports Kopit’s theory. It indicates that the priorities of the United
States in regard to South Vietnam were as follows:
70%--To avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat (to our reputation as guarantor)
20%--To keep SVN [South Vietnam] … from Chinese hands
10%--To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better freer way of life (qtd.
in Isserman & Kazin 137)

For all the United States’ claims of intervening in Vietnam in order to save the South
Vietnamese from Communist rule or to preserve the American way of life at home and
abroad, the real goal was to preserve the United States’ global reputation. Kopit’s play
recognizes this goal as having roots as far back as the original occupation of North
America by white settlers, and he aimed to make audiences see that the Vietnam War was
a continuation of this destructive legacy.
Fenn’s comments are representative of a good deal of Vietnam War drama
criticism, which frequently finds plays lacking when they do not attempt to address issues
we now consider crucial to a well-rounded understanding of the war era. For example,
recall that Alter found Garson’s MacBird to be shortsighted in its preoccupation with
President Johnson; Alter believed Garson should have discussed the whole network of
forces at work in Vietnam, of which Johnson was only a small part. Similarly, Weales
and Asahina have each claimed that much Vietnam War drama has lacked a needed
comprehensive perspective, that it tries too hard to affect its audiences emotionally at the
expense of original political insight. Ironically, the case of Indians and its mixed
reception prove that such an academic approach does not necessarily make for an
effective theatrical statement, especially not if the playwright hoped to spark political
85 
action, for if audiences fail to grasp a play’s message, they can hardly be expected to
act upon that message.
Terrence McNally’s short, one-act play Botticelli (1968)
16
continues the kind of
critique of American culture seen in Guare’s Muzeeka and Kopit’s Indians. Like Indians,
Botticelli depicts the hypocrisy of American claims of the country’s morality. However,
whereas Indians focuses its criticism specifically the ways the United States’ government
betrayed and oppressed the Native Americans (and by extension, the Vietnamese and
other peoples of color), Botticelli makes an even broader criticism, indicting American
ideological inconsistencies on a number of moral controversies. Although the play takes
place in the Vietnam jungle, and the characters are clearly engaged in warfare, McNally’s
play is about more than the war efforts. Through the characters’ dialogue, McNally
argues that the Vietnam War is a consequence of logical inconsistencies in the American
value system, and he illustrates these inconsistencies by having the two soldiers speak of
American ethics while engaged in methodical, government-sanctioned killing of the
Vietnamese.
The action of the play is limited, consisting of two American soldiers waiting
outside a tunnel in the Vietnam jungle for a man to emerge. They have been ordered to
kill the man on sight, and to pass the time, they play the parlor guessing game
“Botticelli,” which requires a strong knowledge of historical figures. The soldiers show
their familiarity with artists, philosophers, composers, and writers spanning more than
two thousand years, and their game is occasionally interrupted with short exchanges

16
 I have not addressed McNally’s other Vietnam War play Bringing It All Back Home
(1969). 
86 
about their personal lives back home. When the man finally appears from the tunnel,
“young, emaciated […] quivering like a frightened rabbit,” the soldiers kill him quickly
and mercilessly, barely stopping their game to do so:
WAYNE: Here he comes. Quiet now.
STU: Were you an Italian sculptor working with Giotto on the campanile
in Florence.
WAYNE: I’m not Pisano. Get ready.
STU: Okay, and this is it, Wayne. Did you write a famous “Lives”?
WAYNE: I’m not Plutarch. Let’s go. (75)

At Wayne’s command, the soldiers kill the young Vietnamese man with an excessive
number of rounds and then easily take up their game again as they make their way back
to camp, expressing no remorse or revulsion at their practiced overkill. The message here
is that American society’s preoccupation with knowledge and achievement causes it to be
indifferent to, and frequently the cause of, significant human suffering. In other words,
all the sophistication of Western culture has not made the United States one bit more
compassionate; perhaps, it has even made it less so, for knowledge is acquired more to
establish one’s social superiority than to benefit humankind. McNally’s stark
juxtaposition of the two cultures—one better armed and educated but unnecessarily cruel,
the other quite primitive and defenseless—perhaps overemphasizes the economic
differences between the United States and Vietnam and ignores the richness of
Vietnamese culture and the strength of the Vietnamese people, but McNally draws this
clear line to argue that the war between the United States and Vietnam is not the “good
fight” government and military officials claim it to be, and that rather than serving as the
liberators of the Vietnamese people, the United States is instead behaving as a self-
serving bully. Fenn argues similarly:
87 
In counterpointing the heroic and aesthetic aspects of literary and
artistic works of the West, the calculated extermination of the Vietnamese
youth is brazenly unworthy of a culture that is ostensibly fighting to
protect its own way of life against other social systems. (195-196)

Ultimately, Botticelli suggests that by waging war against the Vietnamese, the Americans
are betraying their own boldly stated values, that the United States’ actions in Vietnam do
not support its claims of moral superiority among nations. The image that McNally
creates in the play’s final moments refocuses audience attention on the product of
American knowledge and might—the man’s face spotlighted, “contort[ed] with pain.” In
the end, American power harms more than it helps.
The murder of the man at the end of Botticelli is likely to have resonated
uncomfortably with contemporary spectators familiar with the famous Eddie Adams
photograph that appeared earlier that year, on February 1, 1968. That photograph shows
a young Viet Cong fighter at the moment of his execution by South Vietnamese Brigadier
General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. Loan is wearing full combat gear, while the young Viet
Cong wears ragged civilian shorts and shirt, is barefoot and unarmed. The juxtaposition
of the two men in the photograph highlights the same imbalance of power McNally
emphasizes: the South Vietnamese general (and by extension the American forces who
fought on his side) appears well supplied for warfare and quick to kill, while the Viet
Cong forces appear outmatched and casually slaughtered. American audiences were
shocked at the brutality captured by Adams’ photograph and other such media images,
and opposition to the war increased in intensity as the American public came to see the
United States’ military as ruthless murderers of the Vietnamese, not as the liberators they
claimed to be.
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By choosing to structure his play around the “Botticelli” game, McNally
questions the United States’ aims and intentions toward Vietnam. The entirety of the war,
the play suggests, is a game, and the United States continues the fight, in spite of the
increasingly obvious futility of the effort, simply to avoid being defeated. In the
following exchange, the soldiers display the American competitiveness McNally holds up
for critique:
WAYNE: You’re never going to get me.
STU: I’m not going to give up either.
WAYNE: Stubborn, stubborn, stubborn!
STU: I’d lose all self-respect if I weren’t.
WAYNE: Sshh.
STU: I mean the only reason to begin a game is to win it. (75)

Recall the previously cited Pentagon Papers’ document in which McNaughton specified
that the United States would continue engagement in Vietnam mainly (70%) to avoid a
humiliating defeat; American officials were concerned only slightly (10%) with the
welfare of the Vietnamese. McNally’s commentary voices what much of the American
public was beginning to realize: that their government was stubbornly continuing the war
for its own self-interests. The United States’ goal to win the war was complicated by the
nature of the war itself, the fact that victories were claimed not by acquisition of territory
but by body count: one side “won” if it killed more enemy troops than it lost of its own.
With this understanding, Zinman argues that both “Botticelli” and the Vietnam War “are
just games based on lists of dead people” (22). This recasting of the war as a game
makes the lives lost in it seem cruelly and senselessly thrown away.
After the Brechtian theatrical style of Muzeeka and Indians, Botticelli might
appear, by comparison, to be a work of realism. After all, the play is a fairly
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straightforward representation of a small-scale ambush. However, despite the realism
of the play’s action, McNally’s soldiers are far too educated to be representative of actual
infantrymen, of whom most were from the lower social classes in the United States and
often did not have high school diplomas. James Reston, Jr. reminds readers that “the
Vietnam veteran was distinguished not so much by the color of his skin as by his lack of
education. Standards of leadership had to be lowered as in no other war in American
history. The best, the brightest and the most cultured stayed away” (x). Therefore,
Wayne and Stu are symbolic representations of American culture in general; it would be
a mistake to interpret them as real “grunts.” Subsequently, their callousness should not
be seen as an act of cruelty by individual Americans; instead, it refers to the cultural
cruelty resulting from America’s continuing involvement in the affairs of other nations.
17

Zinman, then, does both the play and McNally a disservice by interpreting the
playwright’s message as a criticism of individuals rather than recognizing it as a criticism
of the larger culture. She writes:
McNally’s play is clever but ice cold; it indicts the soldiers—not the
illiterate grunts, but the men who would have been deferred—with the
practiced ease many learned in the late 1960s. It shows none of the
sympathy for men forced into such acts and such attitudes that the plays
written by veterans convey. […] The moral burden of the play is available
only to an audience of people who play Botticelli too, revealing the
playwright’s assumed position of moral superiority to his characters, as
well as his intellectual superiority to the real Vietnam soldiers, the grunts;

17
Of course, a great deal of cruelty by individual or small groups of Americans did occur.
The My Lai massacre was the most heinous and most publicized, but smaller scale
executions and other crimes were common. In 1969, David Lang published an essay in
The New Yorker about an incident of gang rape and murder committed by a squad of
American soldiers in 1966. That essay served as the basis for Brian De Palma’s 1989
film Casualties of War, for which playwright David Rabe wrote the screenplay. Later
plays will depict such incidents of individual cruelty, but Botticelli is not doing so.
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further, the play depends on the audience’s complicity in these elitist
attitudes. (22)

It is not clear how the play indicts “the men who would have been deferred,” as Zinman
claims; those men would have been better educated but would not have been in combat.
If she is interpreting the characters as symbols of the antiwar protestors on college
campuses, she does not say so. Because she also argues that Botticelli “distances itself
from the war no less than does Indians” and suggests that the names Wayne and Stu are
meant to suggest John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart, icons of American cinema and culture,
she seems to recognizes Botticelli as a metaphoric representation of the war. However,
because she criticizes the play for not showing “sympathy for men forced into such acts,”
she seems to be looking for recognition of the characters’ humanity. Her reading, then, is
uneven and seems to want the play to deliver a message the playwright did not attempt to
send.
Zinman’s reading is also evidence for my contention that it is problematic to
examine Vietnam War drama without significant consideration of its historical moment.
Her comment that the play “indicts the soldier […] with the practiced ease many learned
in the late 1960s” suggests distaste for the antiwar movement, a perception of the
activists as “joiners” who denounced the war effort because it was becoming popular and
exciting to do so. She takes the soldiers’ side in her criticism and sees McNally’s play,
and those individuals who might agree with his representation, as “elitist.” Her reading
suggests a 1980s revisionist view of the war that blames the United States’ failure to win
an outright victory primarily on the Americans at home who opposed it. As a result, she
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reads Botticelli “from the future”—with a pro-veteran approach to the war’s events,
and that reading obfuscates McNally’s pointed criticism of American morality.
Botticelli is a manifestation of Hemingway’s iceberg theory, the belief that the
dialogue between the characters is only the “tip of the iceberg” and that the majority of
the meaning of a story is implied rather than overly stated. For example, what appears to
be casual small talk between fellow soldiers actually exposes the nation’s hypocrisy in its
claims of valuing life and free speech. Interrupting the game briefly, the soldiers discuss
life back home:
STU: You still worrying about that letter from Susan?
WAYNE: Not since Raquel Welch I’m not.
STU: I bet.
WAYNE: Let her get a divorce. I don’t care. Hell, the only mistake I
made was thinking I had to marry her. I should’ve sent her to Puerto Rico.
She could’ve had a vacation on me, too.
STU: Only you had scruples.
WAYNE: Leave me alone.
STU: Jesuit high school, Dominican college scruples.
WAYNE: God, you’re insensitive. (72)

Hidden in this exchange is the suggestion that Wayne married his wife because she was
pregnant and that his conservative religious upbringing prohibited the option of abortion.
That his wife would have had to travel to Puerto Rico to obtain the abortion is a reminder
that in 1968 abortion was still illegal in the United States. It would not be until Roe v.
Wade in 1973 that the Supreme Court would vote to decriminalize the procedure, but that
decriminalization did not lessen the controversy surrounding the issue. By including this
bit of small talk within the soldiers’ game, McNally points out a serious inconsistency in
American values: life is considered precious only when believing so suits a particular
agenda. Obviously, the soldiers (and the American society they represent) do not value
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the lives of the Vietnamese, for the man is ruthlessly “cut down by a seemingly
endless volley of gunfire” (75) with no regret on the part of the Americans. A second
exchange between Wayne and Stu takes McNally’s point even further. When Stu crushes
a bug that has been crawling on him, Wayne comments, “I could never do that,” to which
Stu replies, “Bugs have souls now, too?” (74). Wayne’s comment suggests that he
believes himself to be either too ethical (or too squeamish) to kill a bug, but he is shown
to be quite unaffected by shooting a man at close range. In the United States at this time,
the souls of fetuses may be legally protected, but the souls of the Vietnamese, the play
suggests, do not appear to be of the country’s concern.
Moreover, the souls of the American GIs are not of great concern to the United
States government either, as McNally suggests in what may appear to be just a
throwaway line. After a little spat with Stu, Wayne laments, “I wish I’d burned my draft
card” (73). The characters say nothing more on this topic—they quickly go back to their
game—but the line recalls another Supreme Court case, this one being argued as the play
premiered. When Botticelli first appeared in March of 1968, the Supreme Court was
hearing the case of United States v. O’Brien (1968), which concluded in May of that year
that burning one’s draft card was not protected free speech. The justices decided that the
government interest in maintaining troop levels for continuing war efforts outweighed an
individual’s right to that particular type of protest. Thus, with Wayne’s brief aside,
McNally recognizes that the American judicial system in 1968 protected unviable fetuses
to a greater extent than they protected the lives of young American men or of the
Vietnamese. The value system America has historically held up as a defining
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characteristic—a respect for human rights and a protector of its citizens—McNally
shows to be applied selectively, only when it serves the government’s immediate goals.
It is important to note the efforts of playwrights in the late 1960s to bring public
attention to the effects of the war on the Vietnamese people, for the Vietnamese are not
discussed much in the Vietnam War drama of later periods, except in references to “the
enemy.” As the war winds down in the early 1970s, the work of American playwrights
becomes primarily concerned with the damage done to the people of the United States,
and the focus of post-war drama, we will see, becomes the returning veteran and his
assimilation into a society that does not know what to do with him. The damage done to
the Vietnamese is acknowledged only for how it affects the American GI: a source of his
own guilt and suffering; the Vietnamese will rarely, if ever, be afforded a sympathetic or
nuanced portrayal. Therefore, even though these early representations of the Vietnamese
and the discussions of their experience are inadequate (even paternalistic), the
playwrights do make attempts to include the Vietnamese significantly in the discussion.
Viet Rock uses actor transformation to display the anguish of Vietnamese mothers over
the loss of their children; MacBird’s three witches speak of napalm strikes and
defoliation; Jack Argue in Muzeeka testifies to the atrocities he has committed during his
tour; Summertree reminds audiences that innocent Vietnamese families are seen as
collateral damage; Indians compares the war on the Vietnamese to the genocide of the
Native Americans; and Botticelli stages the cold-blooded murder of an unarmed, young
Vietnamese man. Although the representations of the Vietnamese in 1960s Vietnam War
drama come nowhere close to doing justice to the Vietnamese experience, the plays do
try to make the case that the United States is causing unmerited suffering to civilians in a
94 
war that has no clear political goal. Later plays will obfuscate the Vietnamese almost
entirely in order to construct the American GIs as the war’s primary victims.
95 

CHAPTER 2

The 1970s

In the preface to his survey of 1970s America, Peter N. Carroll quotes Time
Magazine in saying “Nobody is apt to look back on the 1970s as the good old days” (ix).
Sandwiched between the turbulent, idealistic 1960s and the prosperous, conservative
1980s, the decade was largely one of disillusionment and pessimism. Inconsistencies
between the official reports of “Peace at Hand” in Vietnam and the continuing, even
expanding, violence in Southeast Asia caused the American public to grow increasingly
distrustful of its government. The invasion of Cambodia, the killing of students at Kent
State and Jackson State Universities by National Guardsmen in 1970, the relatively light
sentence given to Lieutenant William Calley for the murders at My Lai, and the leaking
of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 fanned the flames of antagonism between the government
and the public. The rising lack of faith in the government was exacerbated by the
revelation in 1972 of President Nixon’s Watergate scandal, which proved that
government corruption went all the way to the top. Moreover, despite the passing of the
Civil Rights Act of 1968, racial tensions were high, exacerbated by new legislation
enacted to bus white children into black neighborhoods in order to desegregate schools
more effectively. Add to all these issues a deep recession, high unemployment, and an
energy shortage, and Americans were feeling downtrodden indeed.
The theatre of this decade reflects these social and political tensions, and while it
is not necessarily any less politically motivated than that of the 1960s, it reverts to more
traditional dramatic forms to make its protests. The exuberance and intensity of 1960s
96 
drama, with its emphasis on radical form and wildly experimental performance
techniques, is generally eschewed in the early 1970s in favor of realism—a kind of
counterreformation of the theatre world. Mark Fearnow calls the plays of this period a
“drama of malaise” and suggests that the purpose of this return to traditionalism is to give
the country time for “rest, reflection, and recovery” after many years of exhausting
radicalism (423). The shifts seen in American theatre as a whole occur in Vietnam War
drama as well. In the early 1970s, as the war continues, so do theatrical antiwar protests,
but those protests are made in new ways. Rather than present the war in the abstract as
was common in the 1960s, the plays of the 70s tackle very specific events and
individuals, examining them in close detail to expose injustices and government
oppression. The “Everyfamily” of Cowen’s Summertree, for example is replaced by the
Catonsville Nine, real-life activists from Ohio on trial for burning draft records; the
nameless war of Heller’s We Bombed in New Haven is abandoned for specific battles in
Tay Loi, Vietnam in Berry’s G. R. Point. In other words, playwrights now ask audiences
to see rather than to suppose, often preferring to stage the real drama of the war rather
than to fictionalize it. In most cases, the plays take traditional realistic forms and avoid
the heightened theatricality common to plays of the previous decade. In content, the
plays’ critique becomes less about the United States’ treatment of the Vietnamese and
more about the United States’ treatment of its own citizens. The plays seek to portray a
more complete understanding of individual American stories treated only superficially in
other media, thereby drawing public attention to daily struggles fought by human beings
caught between overpowering political and social forces.
97 
To achieve these goals, playwrights in the early 1970s began to utilize the
technique of documentary theatre (also “theatre of fact” or “verbatim theatre”):
The words of real people are recorded or transcribed by a dramatist during
an interview or research process, or are appropriated from existing records
such as the transcripts of an official enquiry. They are then edited,
arranged or recontextualized to form a dramatic presentation, in which
actors take on the characters of the real individuals whose words are being
used. (Hammond & Stewart 9)

Rather than create the dialogue herself, the playwright constructs the play with the words
of others, arranging them to create a satisfying dramatic experience as well as to highlight
the portions of the dialogue the playwright feels to be most relevant or illuminating. This
editing process necessarily results in the infusion of the testimony with the playwright’s
own views, but the use of documentary material grounds the play in fact, giving the
play’s message a credibility it might not have had otherwise. Documentary playwright
Robin Soans makes the following distinction between the pick-and-choose technique of
official reports and his own calculated selection of material to include in his plays:
How is this creative editing any different from the spin that governments
put on their material? I can only say that, unlike governments that edit in
order to obfuscate and deflect attention, and therefore to limit our
knowledge, I attempt to edit in order to enlighten and intrigue, and
therefore to broaden our knowledge. (35)

Thus, documentary playwrights aim to destabilize the unassailability of government
sources by constructing a counterargument to their reports. By doing so, playwrights
reveal important aspects of social and political events that would otherwise be hidden
from view, either from neglect or because of deliberate manipulation.
These plays are usually intended to heighten awareness and to gain sympathy for
demonized individuals or social outcasts—in other words, to tell the sides of the story it
98 
would suit the government to conceal. The “characters” of documentary plays are
rarely heroic in the traditional sense. They are often average individuals who have
participated in or borne witness to remarkable events and thus have emerged as unlikely
authorities on issues of cultural significance. In some cases, they have performed—even
suffered and died—in acts of great bravery and honor; in other cases, they are the bearers
of shameful burdens. In every case, though, they are the repositories of important
information that, without the efforts of the playwright to record and share it, would most
likely be lost. In a period that re-embraced realism, documentary theatre went one step
further, presenting not only realistic-looking sets and behavior, but also real-life dialogue,
scenarios, and images. The result is a theatre experience that cannot be rationalized away
as an imagined event.
This technique is not new to theatre of the Vietnam War era; German director
Erwin Piscator developed the paradigmatic documentary play In Spite of Everything! in
1925. As Attilio Favorini describes Piscator’s contribution,
Piscator invented a new kind of theatrical piece composed exclusively
from documents, both verbal and visual. His innovation was to create a
drama based on the principles of news reportage, constructed in an epic
succession of tableaux and stations, and designed to promote direct social
action. Presented in a revue format and accompanied by music, political
cartoons, moving pictures borrowed from government archives, and
photographic projections, In Spite of Everything! created an alternative to
the capitalist newspaper accounts of the same events [the history of the
German Communist Party]. (xviii-xix)

Piscator’s production provided a dissenting voice to the controlling narrative of the
dominant political party, providing insights into the Communist movement that had
otherwise been hidden or distorted. The conscious juxtaposition of contrasting images,
speeches, and songs in a documentary play illuminates discrepancies in official reports of
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important events, allowing audiences the opportunity to understand more fully the
complexities of the social situation. Because of documentary theatre’s power to move
audiences emotionally and to enlighten them to unfamiliar viewpoints, it has been used to
discuss a wide variety of politically sensitive issues: for example, the Los Angeles riots in
Anna Deveare Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992; the martyrdom of Rachel Corrie in
Palestine in My Name is Rachel Corrie; and the suffering of the wrongly accused in The
Exonerated. In each of these plays, individuals whose voices may otherwise have been
silenced provide valuable, often incendiary, information and opinions.
It makes sense, then, that this technique would find favor in Vietnam War drama
of the early 1970s, the resurgence of interest in documentary theatre indicative of the
public’s distrust of official sources. During this period, the American public had ample
reason to doubt the word of the government, for it had concealed a good deal more than it
revealed to its citizens for many years. In 1971, Daniel Ellsburg leaked to the New York
Times a secret history of the United States’ twenty-five-year involvement in Vietnam.
Published as the Pentagon Papers, it established that the reasons the government had
given for intervention in Vietnam had been deliberately misleading, and that many
government officials—including Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara—knew for
some time that the war was unwinnable and yet proclaimed repeatedly to see “the light at
the end of the tunnel.” 1971 was also the year of the Winter Soldier Investigation, a
public forum in Detroit organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in which
veterans testified to having committed atrocities during wartime, discrediting government
claims that the My Lai massacre was an isolated incident. The veterans testified to
participating in the torture and murder of civilians in order to call into question the entire
100 
war effort by showing that the facts of the war did not conform to the government’s
version of it. The deaths at Kent State and Jackson State Universities in 1970
exacerbated the public’s distrust of its government into genuine fear, for the events
demonstrated just how far the government would go to quell dissent: “The government is
willing to shoot you” (Gitlin 414). As a result of the prevalence of such events, many
Americans no longer looked to formerly reliable sources (like politicians, military
officers, news media) as voices of truth; instead, authority was transferred to the
individuals closest to or most affected by the events in question.
Playwrights in this period developed their documentary pieces as a way of
exposing the important context of otherwise isolated news events, context often
intentionally omitted by politicians and journalists for political reasons. For example,
two of the plays I will discuss in this section deal with highly publicized shootings of
black veterans who committed serious crimes after returning home. News reports of
these events offered only limited background information about the veterans, portraying
the men as deranged psychopaths and thus contributing to the reputation the Vietnam
veteran would develop for being dangerously on edge. One case specifically—that of
Mark Essex, the New Orleans sniper—played heavily upon racial tensions of the early
70s by emphasizing reports of racist graffiti found in Essex’s apartment, exacerbating the
already fierce antagonism between blacks and whites. Those reports excluded
information about Essex’s model upbringing and sensitive nature; they also failed to
report on the nearly constant racial discrimination he endured in the Navy. Adrienne
Kennedy’s documentary play An Evening with Dead Essex attempts to tell the part of
Essex’s story the newspapers did not.
101 
In short, documentary theatre of the 1970s had the following goals: to elevate
the deeds of the average person to a level of honor and respect, to give a voice to
individuals whose social positions would otherwise keep them unheard, and to offer a
more complete picture of a situation reduced to a headline or news segment by media
looking to reinforce the status quo. The three plays I have selected for this section utilize
documentary techniques in varying ways, but they all attempt to illuminate an event of
the Vietnam War era beyond society’s media-created understanding of it. The Trial of
the Catonsville Nine gives voice to nine defendants accused of civil disobedience; An
Evening with Dead Essex examines the events that drove veteran Mark Essex to a
shooting spree in New Orleans; and Medal of Honor Rag tells of a decorated veteran
whose criminal act led to his murder by police. Each of these plays aims to garner
sympathetic attention for maligned or overlooked individuals by contextualizing their
actions and thus challenging reductive misrepresentations of them in the mainstream
media. These efforts signal a shift in purpose among playwrights of the Vietnam War
era: a focus inward (on Americans) rather than outward (on the Vietnamese) and a move
toward fostering understanding among a diverse citizenry.
At the end of his book about the rise and fall of the New Left, Todd Gitlin
observes that the activism of the student movement “never recovered from the summer
vacation of 1970” (411) and that, instead, “the antiwar initiative passed into new hands”
(417). Some of the men and women he credits with continuing the resistance are the
activists who came to be known as the Catonsville Nine. On May 17, 1968, nine Catholic
activists took 378 draft files from the Selective Service office in Catonsville, Maryland
and publicly destroyed them using homemade napalm in a protest against the Vietnam
102 
War. All nine were arrested, tried, and eventually found guilty of interfering with
war efforts. Father Daniel Berrigan, one member of the group, edited the nearly twelve
hundred pages of court transcripts into a documentary play highlighting the testimonies
of the nine defendants and casting them as martyrs in an epic battle.
The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1970) is an excellent example of documentary
theatre in both its form and its purpose. The play’s dialogue is all taken from court
records—the actual testimony of the witnesses and defendants—and it is arranged to
enhance the drama inherent in the courtroom proceedings of such a controversial case.
Berrigan’s purpose in creating the play was to give a more public forum to the
testimonies of the Nine, allowing them to reach citizens who would otherwise have
received only summaries of the trial from newspaper and television reports. Certainly no
news source would have presented the long speeches and revealing insights about
clandestine government actions the defendants expose in the play, nor would they have
adequately explained the moral reasoning each defendant used to make his or her
decision to engage in the act of civil disobedience. Berrigan’s play gives each defendant
a respectful spotlight to make a public statement that would otherwise have been heard
only by those in the courtroom. He makes it clear, however, that the play was not simply
another record of the trial:
It was a matter for us of life and death. For each of us, the spring had
wound tight in the weeks of discernment and scrutiny and long, patient
sharing which preceded Catonsville. There was a danger that intensity and
passion would be dissipated in the routine of the trial itself, in the
obeisance paid to legal niceties and court routine, in the wrangling and
paper shuffling which threatened to obscure the firmness and clarity of the
original deed.
This work had but one purpose therefore: to wind the spring tighter. (viii)

103 
In other words, Berrigan wrote Catonsville to memorialize the acts of the nine
defendants in art, keeping their revolutionary spirit alive and their purpose clear, and
continuing the protest of the war begun by their burning of the draft records, even as
several of them disappeared “underground” after the sentencing.
The protest the play aims to continue is not solely against the Vietnam War; it is a
broader protest against the hypocrisy of the United States government and its actions
toward oppressed peoples both at home and abroad. The defendants’ crime was in
burning 1A draft records, files on young men deemed fit to serve in Vietnam, but the trial
gave them a forum to explain how they arrived at the decision to commit a crime against
the government. All of the nine defendants testified to having served in aid missions both
around the world and in the United States, and their opposition to the war came from
first-hand knowledge of the United States government’s callous treatment of people in
need. For example, Thomas Melville testifies to witnessing in 1966 and 1967 the
execution of Guatemalan peasants who dared to oppose the cruel actions of the United
Fruit Company, with which the United States had economic ties:
So if any peasant movement
Does not conduct itself
According to their wishes that is to say
If such a movement
Is not completely ineffective
They start screaming
“They are communists!”
and begin executing these people (57)

The accusation of Communism leveled against the Guatemalans echoes the United
States’ justification for the war in Vietnam—that it was needed to stop the spread of
Communism throughout Southeast Asia—and Melville’s testimony thus raises questions
104 
about the claims of the government to be the protector of oppressed people around
the world. He shows the country to be much more aligned with big business than with
those in need. Then, when the judge attempts to diffuse Melville’s testimony by saying
that those involved in the Guatemalan revolutions are not the ones on trial, Melville
responds by saying, “No the court/is quite busy trying us” (58). His statement
makes an edgy commentary about the impunity with which the United States government
acts and the disproportionate punishment it imposes on its challengers, even when the
challenging act is relatively benign.
When it is Daniel Berrigan’s turn to speak, his testimony underscores Melville’s
by showing the disparity between his small act of civil disobedience, for which he is
standing trial, and the government’s actions in North Vietnam, for which no one is
accepting any responsibility:
So I went to Catonsville
and burned some papers because
the burning of children
is inhuman and unbearable
I went to Catonsville
because I had gone to Hanoi (92)

Here, again, a defendant indicts government hypocrisy and terrible actions committed
with impunity. Berrigan’s well-phrased explanation highlights the absurdity of the
situation: the Nine are being tried for burning papers, while the government burns
children in systematic bombings and still claims righteousness. Similarly, David Darst
tells of his experience with the inequities found at home:
I was living last year
In a poor ghetto district
I saw many little children
Who did not have enough to eat
105 
This is an astonishing thing
that our country
cannot command the energy
to give bread and milk
to children
Yet it can rain fire and death
on people ten thousand miles away
for reasons that are unclear
to thoughtful men (36)

In addition to the calculated brutality toward the people of foreign countries mentioned in
other testimonies, the government is here shown to be unconcerned with the welfare of its
own people. These speeches reinforce the defendants’ moral position and provide
important context for their act, a specific goal of documentary theatre, which aims to
recuperate individuals from cultural misunderstanding.
In order to represent the Nine as the moral leaders he believes them to be,
Berrigan writes their lines in verse form, while the other “characters’” lines appear in
prose. The Nine are thus constructed as noble individuals, people of honor and loyalty.
In addition, interspersed among sections of testimony are carefully selected quotations
from real individuals and literary characters whose moral positions place them in conflict
with higher powers. The inclusion of these pieces compares the trial of the Nine with the
persecution of these other individuals, situating the Nine in a history of men and women
who have suffered for their moral beliefs and thus again raising them to a heroic level. In
production, these quotations would likely be presented on placards or as projections,
creating in the audience a Brechtian alienation and allowing audiences to consider the
actions of the Nine alongside those of other persecuted individuals.
In my discussion of Kopit’s Indians in the previous chapter, I noted that the theme
of government hypocrisy and untrustworthiness so heavily portrayed in Indians would
106 
reappear powerfully in the early 1970s, and Catonsville is one of several plays that
highlight this. In each of the defendants’ testimonies, it is made clear that the way the
government behaves often does not coincide with what it claims to stand for. Their
accounts of governmental wrongdoing point to logical and moral inconsistencies between
what the government expects of its citizens and how it behaves itself. Nixon’s
authorization to invade Cambodia in 1970, for example, directly contradicted both
Nixon’s own claims that no such action would be taken and the United States’ professed
repudiation of imperialism. Similarly, American rhetoric about the equal treatment of all
its citizens was undermined by the Nine’s experiences with racial and class
discrimination. Philip Berrigan gives a speech worthy of Henry V when he explains that
the actions of the Nine were necessary only because the United States government
continued to act without regard for those they professed to protect:
We have already made it clear our dissent runs counter
to more than the war which is but one instance
of American power in the world
Latin America is another instance So is the Near East
This trial is yet another
From those in power we have met
little understanding much silence
much scorn and punishment
We have been accused of arrogance
But what of the fantastic arrogance of our leaders
What of their crimes against the people the poor and powerless
Still no court will try them no jail will receive them
They live in righteousness They will die in honor
For them we have one message for those
in whose manicured hands the power of the land lies
We say to them
Lead us Lead us in justice
and there will be no need to break the law (30)

107 
As such speeches attest, the opposition to the Vietnam War and to the actions of the
government did not dissipate with the turn of the decade; Catonsville makes as vehement
a protest as any 1960s experimental play. However, the documentary technique, which in
this case results in a number of traditionally delivered monologues, reconfigures the
protest into an experience easier for audiences to accept. The goal is critical thought, re-
evaluation of one’s relationship with one’s government, a refusal to accept on face value
what official sources report. The author of the play cannot be accused of sensationalizing
or of fabricating facts to incite protests, for the material is drawn from real life, and it is
presented to inform as well as to move.
Although Adrienne Kennedy’s An Evening with Dead Essex (1972) is frequently
discussed among other Vietnam War drama, it has only tangential links to the actual
events of the war. The play attempts to provide some social context for the case of Mark
James Robert Essex, a Vietnam Era veteran who killed nine people and wounded another
thirteen in a shooting spree in New Orleans on New Year’s Eve 1972.
18
Essex’s military
service during the Vietnam War era and the play’s references to the war earn it a place in
the canon of Vietnam War drama, but attempts to turn it into a play about the war result
in problematic readings. Kennedy does make several very pointed references to the
violence in Vietnam, but she links that violence to the violence inflicted on Essex,
exposing, then, not particular combat horrors, but the institutionalized racism of the

18
The full story of Mark Essex’s shooting spree is detailed in Peter Hernon’s A Terrible
Thunder: The Story of the New Orleans Sniper. Included in the book are a number of the
photographs called for in Kennedy’s play: his Naval portrait, the graffiti-covered walls of
his apartment, the dead Essex on the roof of the Howard Johnson’s hotel in downtown
New Orleans.

108 
United States as a whole (in all cases, white America fights people of color). Dead
Essex is a particularly strong example of the need to examine all Vietnam War plays in
light of their historical moment, for losing sight of the social climate of the early 1970s
reduces the important contribution of Kennedy’s play considerably.
The passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 did not eliminate racial tensions in
the United States; in fact, certain tensions may actually have increased with some whites’
belief that enforced desegregation had made a level playing field. Robert Hargreaves,
writing in 1973, notes, “the old system of de jure segregation, enforced by law, is in the
process of being replaced by a system of de facto segregation, brought about in large part
by the white exodus to the suburbs” (543). As a result, blacks endured a more insidious
kind of discrimination—socially reinforced if not actually legislated—in which the
institutions they strove to be a part of (the military or residential communities, for
example) would accept the economic and labor benefits of blacks’ participation but
would not fully consider them legitimate members. Rather than accept continued second-
class citizenship in such institutions, blacks took more and more pointed stands against
them. Boxer Muhammed Ali made such a stand when he applied for conscientious
objector status in 1966; refusing to help whites kill other people of color, he famously
said, “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong… no Viet Cong ever called me nigger”
(aavw.org).
19
Ali’s outspokenness on racism in the United States had polarizing effects,
contributing to the charged social tensions that would ultimately influence Essex toward
his violent rampage.

19
 Ali’s appealed his draft evasion conviction to the United States Supreme Court. The
Court overturned the conviction in 1971, after a five-year battle. 
109 
Kennedy’s plays—of which Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), an exploration of
a many-faceted identity, and A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White (1976), an
examination of celebrity, are perhaps her best known—are described as having “an
unmistakable style, characterized by fragmentation, ritualistic repetition and variation,
and radical experimentation with character and plot” (Sollors vii). This style is present in
An Evening With Dead Essex, which utilizes documentary technique in a unique way:
Kennedy has created a meta-drama in which the finished play-within-the-play is never
seen. Instead, the audience watches actors rehearsing for a presentation about Mark
Essex, one that will illustrate his innocent youth and his tragic disillusionment with the
social systems in which he was raised. In other documentary plays, the individuals
involved in the real-life events become the characters in the play, and the dialogue
spoken by the actors is taken from their transcribed interviews or testimonies. (Recall
that an actor would play the “character” of Daniel Berrigan in The Trial of the
Catonsville Nine, for example.) In Kennedy’s play, however, the individual involved in
the incident in question has no voice of his own; he became known publicly only in
death. Therefore, actors playing themselves piece together his story from photographs,
news clippings, and interviews about Essex and his actions. The poignant juxtaposition
of contrasting images and music create a feeling of contradiction and inconsistency,
giving insight into Essex’s perception of his environment. But his own statements are
never heard.
While Essex did enlist during wartime, he served as a dental technician in San
Diego and thus was not a combat veteran. Therefore, Kennedy’s play does not attempt to
explore the horrors of combat, nor does it attempt to excuse Essex’s behavior by claiming
110 
that he was suffering from the combat experience. Instead, Kennedy’s play aims to
do just what Catonsville did and Indians before that: it exposes the hypocrisy of the
foundational ideologies in the United States, and it depicts the disastrous consequences of
that hypocrisy. Kennedy’s play in particular, however, emphasizes the ways those
ideologies deliberately exclude blacks. She aims to show audiences that Essex was a
man betrayed by the ideals he believed in most and that his realization that those
treasured beliefs were hollow was intolerable to him. His violence rose out of profound
disillusionment, not generalized racial hatred. Hargreaves offers the following
commentary on the racial tensions of the period:
The United States today [1973] is in just as much danger as it was in 1968
of falling into the condition warned against by the President’s commission
on race relations, of a society split irretrievably into two, black and white,
separate and unequal. As a result, to be black in America is still for a
large part of the time to be angry.
The anger of black Americans is a phenomenon that has only peripheral
connections with their economic status or with their professional standing
in society. It is a result of having been treated for generations as second-
class citizens, a condition two black psychiatrists, Drs. William Grier and
Price Cobbs, have termed cultural paranoia. In this analysis the black
American has come to regard every white man as a potential enemy unless
proved otherwise and every social system set up against him unless he
personally finds out differently. Grier and Cobbs submit that it is
necessary for a black man in America to develop a profound distrust of his
white fellow citizens and of the nation. ‘He must be on guard to protect
himself against physical hurt,’ they write. ‘He must cushion himself
against cheating, slander, humiliation, and outright mistreatment by the
official representatives of society. If he does not so protect himself, he
will live a life of such pain and shock as to find life itself unbearable.’
(542-543)

Kennedy’s play shows that Essex was a man who could not cushion himself against
society’s ills. On the contrary, the play emphasizes that Essex bought into the country’s
mythology wholeheartedly, that he believed in the goodness of Christ and of the United
111 
States, and that he felt himself to be a beloved and dutiful servant of each. It became
unbearable to him, then, to experience constant discrimination within the systems to
which he had devoted himself.
Kennedy makes it clear that there was not one event, or even a number of events,
that caused the change in Essex; rather, it was a large-scale revelation that those systems
did not consider him worthwhile. Kennedy’s Director says, “All I know is we want it to
reflect everything that was happening, everything that preyed on his unconsciousness—
not things that happened to him but all that was around him—his witnessing the loss of
love—the loss of Christ” (123). It was the entire duplicitous society that drove Essex to
kill, Kennedy explains, increasing dramatic tension by having the Assistant Director read
the following listing of distressing news items several times:
This is what surrounded him—
War Dead Photos and Figures
McGovern and Eagleton Affair—loss of hope in McGovern.
Nixon’s speeches without conviction.
Interviews with G.I.s—Black and White G.I. Drug use Rising
Resuming the Bombing
Mining the Harbor
Photos—G.I.s –Black and White returning home
Unbalanced drug addicts
All the Peace is at Hand speeches

More war headlines
More photographs of Essex’s town—the outward tranquility
More church songs
Leaning on the Everlasting Vine
In the Garden
Blessed Fellowship
Jesus Loves Me
Items:
Death at the Olympics
Items: As a young man
Death of President Kennedy
Death of Malcolm
112 
Death of Robert Kennedy
Death of Martin Luther King
Kent State Killings
Death at Southern (129-130)

The repetition of these items, combined with posters of military aircraft and weaponry,
enhances the feeling in the play of oppression by social forces; the tragedy is relentless.
Kennedy’s unconventional choice to present Essex’s story as a play rehearsal
refocuses audience attention on the “backstage world” of human events—the complex
web of influences that precipitate our public actions. The premise of the rehearsal
process depicts a kind of “character work” being done on Essex: an examination of his
past, his beliefs, and his relationships with others, in order to portray him faithfully, much
as an actor would do for any role he undertook. It allows Kennedy to underscore
connections and emotions that might be lost on an audience member if merely “played”
by an actor. It also depicts a particular collective experience among the actors, all but
one of whom are black, of shared understanding and purpose. Kennedy stipulates in
stage directions that the emotion and exhaustion among the actors should be palpable and
that pauses and preparations should take a long time. These directions suggest that the
actors are experiencing a real personal struggle of conflicted emotions with the
presentation. The characters’ exhaustion is not only that of a grueling late-night rehearsal
but also of a lifetime of operating outside the system. Their emotion comes not only
from their theatre work and from their efforts to understand Essex, but also from too fully
understanding him and his dissatisfaction with his place in society. While no character
excuses Essex’s violence, all feel the weight of empathetic recognition. The deception
that tormented him they feel themselves, and they recognize the injustice of the situation.
113 
An Evening with Dead Essex, then, is not about the Vietnam War in the way
that most Vietnam War drama is. Because Essex did not serve in Vietnam, nor did he
actively oppose the war, the play is neither clearly about combat nor protest. It does,
however, make a strong argument that American violence against the Vietnamese is
directly linked to America’s history of violence against blacks, and it reflects the growing
resentment of blacks drafted to serve a country that did not consider them equal citizens.
One actor, reading a statement from Essex’s roommate, expresses “confusion about the
deep racial significance of the war between the U.S. and Viet Nam, white against non
white” (120), and the Director specifies that “each soldier should talk about how brutally
used he felt to fight a darker brother for a country that despises him even more than his
Viet Nam enemy” (120). The war, Kennedy argues, is simply another manifestation of
institutionalized racism in the United States. She even makes a direct comparison
between the bombing of Vietnam and the police killing Essex, both excessive displays of
firepower against people of color:
DIRECTOR: Here are the items. (Reads from clippings slowly.)
1972—B-52 bombers made their biggest raid on the Vietnam War
demilitarized zone to date dropping nearly 200 tons of bombs.
1973—at 9:25 p.m. the helicopter lumbered past again. (Pause)
When the sharpshooters opened fire, a slight figure, rifle in hand,
bolted into the open. Trapped in a withering crossfire between the
helicopter overhead and marksmen in two adjacent buildings, Jimmy
Essex was literally ripped apart by at least a hundred bullets. The police
kept firing even after he went down, his body twitching with the impact of
each slug and his rifle shattered beside him.
They very much continue into each other—they are one and the same.
(125)

114 
Kennedy is certainly addressing the issue of the Vietnam War in her play, but she
focuses specifically on the effect it is having at home, a trend of the early 1970s that will
continue in all American Vietnam War drama to follow.
Critically, the play has been received quite differently. Alter calls Dead Essex an
“ingenious, deceptively simple play,” noting that “his New Orleans killings, terrible
though they are, were not a reaction to his Navy experience, but rather a
disillusionment—individual and collective—with the entire hypocritical social system
encountered […] both before and after the Vietnam War” (171). She supports the links
Kennedy makes between Essex’s death and the violence in Vietnam by suggesting that
“as the United States becomes increasingly racially integrated in the sixties, it
‘compensates’ by turning to fight yet another racial ‘other’ in Indochina” (33). Fenn,
however, repudiates the link made between Essex and Vietnam, preferring to see Essex
as no more than a madman and Kennedy’s play as valuable only as a bad example. He
claims
An Evening with Dead Essex merits a certain distinction in the canon of
homecoming plays, since its abysmal failure to generate any dramatic
empathy for Essex (unless one shares his radical position) leads to
comparison with others that do. Although Essex has been culturally
conditioned in terms of religion and patriotism, and has eventually turned
against his society, no indication of his altered perspective is given other
than his learning to hate white people in the Navy. Servicemen in the
Navy, however, seldom came into contact with either civilian or military
Vietnamese. His hatred of whites and American culture appears to have
evolved within the social context rather than outside it, and thus his case
differs significantly from that of protagonists such as Rabe’s David, whose
problems of reintegration arose primarily as a result of confrontation with
their families. Attempts to equate the violence in Essex’s case with that of
Vietnam are entirely gratuitous, and despite the psalm-singing, the play
fails to present Essex in any light other than that of a conscienceless
murderer. (211-212)

115 
Rather than examine Dead Essex on its own merits as a play of 1972, Fenn has
capriciously grouped it among other Vietnam War “homecoming” plays and then
determined it to be an “abysmal failure” because it does not adequately explore issues of
reintegration. Herein lies the main problem with Fenn’s thematic categorization. It is not
only reductive to call Dead Essex a homecoming play it is also inaccurate, for Essex does
not come home from Vietnam. The play obviously does not explore reintegration issues
as well as other plays; it does not try to do so. Essex did not experience difficulty re-
assimilating into society, for he was never fully a part of society to begin with, the
realization of which is what pushes him over the edge. Fenn does the play a disservice by
taking it out of its historical context and reading it as a different type of play altogether.
Kennedy’s play gives Mark Essex a defense; it argues persuasively for greater
recognition of the psychologically destructive effects of American racism on the
individual.
Tom Cole’s Medal of Honor Rag (1975) shares some similarities with An Evening
with Dead Essex, in that both contextualize the criminal actions of black veterans by
attempting to reconstruct for audiences the social influences that drove each man to his
violent end. In the documentary trend, both Cole and Kennedy portray this context to
recuperate individuals incompletely represented by news reports of their actions. Dead
Essex has a greater challenge in doing this because Mark Essex’s large-scale violence is
difficult for even the most sympathetic person to justify. In addition, Essex’s profound
disillusionment with trusted ideologies is a complex psychological shift that does not
easily lend itself to theatrical presentation; a great deal of imagination and willingness to
116 
reconsider longstanding beliefs must be asked of audiences if sympathy is to be
gained for a man who set out to kill as many people as possible.
Medal of Honor Rag, however, which Fenn places “in rich contrast” to Dead
Essex, is more easily accepted by audiences, both because the events in question are less
bloody and because Cole’s play is much more conventional than Kennedy’s. Medal of
Honor Rag aims to contextualize the real-life events of April 29, 1971, when, in Detroit,
black Vietnam veteran and Medal of Honor winner Dwight H. Johnson was shot to death
during his attempt to rob a store at gunpoint. Because Johnson did not harm anyone in
his crime—he was killed by the storekeeper before Johnson fired a shot—his robbery
attempt is generally regarded as a suicide in which he “needed someone else to pull the
trigger” (Cole 149). Most importantly, though, the play is a fictionalization, in which
D.J. (the character based on Johnson) manages to pinpoint particular incidents that have
tormented him, giving audiences the comfortable out of linking his violence to individual
traumas, rather than to more unsettling large-scale cultural deception and hypocrisy.
Cole’s approach to telling the story of Johnson is a problematic one, although no
doubt well intentioned and emotionally powerful. Medal of Honor Rag is a one-act in
which D.J., currently residing in a military hospital, meets with a new psychologist, one
who specializes in “impacted grief”
20
(he is a Holocaust survivor, we later find out). In
the course of their conversation, a number of details emerge about D.J.’s inability to
reconcile his personal moral beliefs with the things he both saw and did in Vietnam or
with the way he has been treated back in the States. The doctor promises to return in two

20
 Impacted grief is extreme and prolonged grief, often associated with depression. It is
characterized by the individual’s inability to articulate his feelings, to move through the
stages of the grief process, or to continue in his life’s development (Doverspike 1).
117 
days to continue their conversation, but we are told that D.J. does not show up for
that meeting. In a monologue to the audience, the doctor recounts D.J.’s attempted
robbery and his death at the hands of the storekeeper. It is an emotional play, for it
includes speeches detailing both D.J.’s wartime traumas and the doctor’s, who opens up
to D.J. in an uncharacteristically personal moment between doctor and patient. However,
the characters and their experiences are all fabricated. As Cole explains, “The characters
in this play are fictional, but the events reported are all drawn from experiences and
testimony of the period” (120). He is not using transcriptions of Johnson’s psychiatric
interviews for his play (as a more paradigmatic documentary piece would), and it is not
even clear that the experiences Cole gives to D.J. were Johnson’s experiences at all,
although Cole assures us they were someone’s. Therefore, the documentary aspect of
this play is flimsy, and it gives a particular motivation to the real-life Johnson that may
not be at all accurate.
This does not mean, though, that the play is not valuable, for it does several things
well. First, it makes a helpful segue between the documentary pieces of the early 1970s
and the more traditional realistic drama of the late 1970s, enlisting elements of both.
Documentary elements are limited in Medal of Honor Rag, but the fact that Cole includes
the material he does helps to ground the play in specific events, despite the liberties he
takes with the characterization. The insistence on presenting the war in Vietnam “as it
really happened” will become dominant in plays written after the war’s end, for it will be
deemed unfair to those who served to attempt to turn the war into some kind of metaphor
or fable. While there will certainly be fictionalized accounts of veterans in the years
118 
ahead—Lanford Wilson’s 5
th
of July (1978) is one—the trend toward specificity of
experience will be paramount, and Cole’s play recognizes this fact early on.
More important, however, are the early contributions made toward recognizing
the complications facing returning Vietnam veterans, especially those of color. Medal of
Honor Rag continues the debate over American integrity by dramatizing D.J.’s inability
to reconcile the elevated social status he receives back home as a result of winning the
Medal of Honor with the murderous behavior he committed to earn it. His whole life, he
tells the doctor, he had been raised to avoid fights, to mind his manners, and to be a
“good boy.” Then, in Vietnam, after seeing his friends burned alive in their tank, he
killed every enemy in sight, beating one man to death with the butt of his weapon. When
the American support forces found D.J., he was delirious and had to be sedated and
restrained. He was quickly given a medical discharge and shipped home. It was for this
behavior that D.J. was awarded the Medal of Honor, for the kind of extreme violence his
mother had specifically raised him to avoid, and for which, if enacted at home, he would
likely have met the same fate as Mark Essex. In addition, the medal turns D.J. into a
minor celebrity and affords him the social recognition and special treatment that comes
along with such a position, but D.J. is greatly discomfited by being honored for what he
sees as a shameful loss of control in which no lives were saved. Here Cole exposes a
moral inconsistency of civilization: why it is acceptable, even honorable, to kill in certain
circumstances, yet evil and punishable to kill in others. Regardless of the social benefits
he enjoys as a result of his Medal of Honor status, D.J. cannot feel good about his award
because he despises the way he earned it; he cannot accept the inconsistencies between
the country’s rhetoric of honor and its sanctioning of uncontrollable violence.
119 
D.J.’s conflict is compounded by the power the medal gives him in society, a
power that as a black man he would be otherwise denied. The doctor asks D.J. why he
does not just throw his medal away, like hundreds of veterans did on the steps of the
Capitol at the Dewey Canyon III demonstration in 1971. D.J. responds:
You got your reasons for wanting to see no more war, right?—and no
more warriors. I dig that, for your sake. But a lot of folks don’t want the
black veteran to throw down his weapons so soon. Know what I mean?
Like, we are supposed to be preparing ourselves for another war, right
back here. Vietnam was just our basic training, see? I’m telling this to
both of you, y’see, so you won’t be too surprised when it comes. (148)

D.J.’s speech is a chilling echo of the Essex case only a few years earlier. The inclusion
of this exchange at the end of the session between the doctor and D.J. does more than
foreshadow D.J.’s decision to rob the store; it reminds audiences that black soldiers
experienced the Vietnam War differently than white soldiers and subsequently
experienced their homecomings differently as well. For D.J. to repudiate the Medal of
Honor would mean that he would lose the thing that raises him above the masses. He
tells the doctor, “You know what I’d be without that medal? I’d be just another invisible
Nigger, waiting on line and getting shit on just for being there!” (146). D.J. faces a
terrible double bind: he hates the medal as a reminder of his actions, but he needs it to
have any measure of power in a society that would not even see him without it. All
Vietnam veterans brought home their nightmares and guilt and struggled to find work and
peace of mind, and they all were received coolly by American society, who often saw
them not as returning heroes but as failures and “baby-killers,” but black veterans came
back even more disenfranchised than white veterans, for they were treated as second-
class citizens to begin with. In The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of
120 
Vietnam, Jerry Lembcke notes that once the real-life D.J., Dwight Johnson, returned
to his hometown of Detroit, he was “unable to find steady work until he was awarded the
Medal of Honor” (107). Once he was recognized publicly as a hero, he became useful to
the army as a recruiter and public relations figure. Similarly, D.J.’s medal affords him a
welcome measure of freedom and impunity, but to enjoy it, he has to own the actions for
which the medal was given him. As the final moments of the play tell us, it ultimately
becomes impossible for him to do so.
Both Medal of Honor Rag and An Evening with Dead Essex depict the tragic
consequences endured by individuals who find themselves in moral conflict with social
forces delivering contradictory messages. In Essex’s case, he could no longer believe in
a country that systematically relegated blacks to secondary citizenship despite claiming to
treat all persons equally, nor could he continue to follow Christianity, which he came to
see as “a white man’s religion.” D.J. could not live with or without his medal.
Paradoxically, both plays simultaneously destabilize and reinforce the stereotype of the
Vietnam veteran as a “loose cannon,” a man always on the edge of a dangerous
flashback. Each play aims to humanize its subject, to contextualize the veteran’s
reactions as deeper and more complex than simply a response to having seen too much
combat. The men’s criminal behavior, the plays argue, comes from their profound
inability to accept their newly perceived reality; neither man should be easily dismissed
as deranged. However, just by presenting these stories, the stereotype is unintentionally
reinforced. The attempts to explain each man’s action and are laudable and do much to
recuperate these individuals, but the plays also attest to the ubiquity of such events, and
thus reinforce the image they are trying to destabilize. The sympathetic portrayals of
121 
Essex and Johnson are notable divergences from the more common representation of
the troubled veteran seen in cinema and television—Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver
(1976), for example—but they still show the veteran to be unable to assimilate, and they
thus contribute to the cultural image of the Vietnam veteran as a lost cause. It will be a
goal of Vietnam War drama of the late 1970s and early 1980s to counteract a good deal
of what was portrayed on the screen.
Despite their differences in subject matter and style, the documentary plays in this
section all similarly emphasize the disconnect between the United States’ professed
ideals and its behavior toward its citizens; they expose national ideological
inconsistencies and oppression the United States would like to attribute only to other
countries. The plays portray the personal damage done to individuals who come into
conflict with national forces determined to protect the status quo, and this theme becomes
more apparent when the plays are read historically, rather than taken out of their context
to be read thematically or generically. Read historically, the plays provide valuable
insight into the cultural climate of the late war years and attest to the public’s distrust of
authoritative voices and news sources. Of course, a play’s relevance to its own historical
moment may limit its relevance in others, and one can argue that these three plays, so
firmly entrenched in the events of their day, are useful only to illuminate a decade long
passed. However, while the specifics of each play are dated—the court case, the shooting
deaths—the criticisms the playwrights make of American society are unfortunately still
quite relevant; it certainly cannot be said that institutionalized racism and government
hypocrisy have been eradicated in the twenty-first century. Additionally, the United
States continues to impose its economic and ideological influence on other countries, and
122 
the plays’ criticisms of such issues continue to speak to present-day concerns.
Topical or not, though, these documentary plays receive little attention from
contemporary critics and are rarely staged today; instead, the enduring social concerns of
racism, civil disobedience, and veteran reintegration are examined onstage through more
current events. It is the goal of this dissertation to draw attention to the plays of the
Vietnam War era for the contributions they make to American literary history,
contributions that are greater than mere records of combat issues, but I also recognize that
few of these plays will enjoy contemporary production runs, bound as they are in their
moments. It is my hope that my situating the plays within their historical moment
illuminates both the plays and the history, and that that history illuminates the present.
The War Ends, but the Drama Continues

The last American helicopter leaving Saigon on April 30, 1975 signaled the end
of the Vietnam War era in the United States, but by no means did the war cease to impact
American society. The experience had been devastating for the men and women who
served in Vietnam, and although grateful to return home at last, they often brought with
them guilt, nightmares, flashbacks, and drug addictions, and their readjustments rarely
went smoothly. American civilians suffered their own anxieties about the war, and
sometimes took their frustrations out on returning veterans. Mark Baker’s Nam, a
collection of interviews with veterans, recounts many incidents of inhospitality toward
returning service personnel. Lembcke’s The Spitting Image refutes claims that veterans
were actually spat upon, a story that has become a crucial part of the Vietnam War
mythology in America, but over and over again, veterans attested to their fellow
Americans’ coldness, a response that may have come from political opposition to the war
123 
or simply from uncertainty about how to receive an individual who was drastically
changed by the war experience.
The Vietnam War was a severe contradiction to the carefully cultivated American
mythology, which had no room for war atrocities or embarrassing defeats, and the way
many American civilians dealt with this ideological inconsistency was to repress it, to put
the war out of their minds and to marginalize the Vietnam veteran, whom they saw as a
painful reminder of a national shame. Philip Beidler, who served in Vietnam in 1969 and
then went on to become a professor of English at the University of Alabama, describes
the disconcerting experience of the veteran’s homecoming as one he was forced to
process on his own:
Getting a handle on the experience once it was over, then, was not just a
question of ‘readjustment’ of the sort imaged in the story they told in
every unit about the kid on the first night home at the dinner table who
calmly asks his mother to pass the fucking butter or who gets up after the
meal, goes outside the back door, and scrapes off his china plate into the
garbage can. Rather it was a problem of ‘vision’ in its largest sense—of
having undergone an experience so peculiar unto itself and its own insane
dynamic as to make nothing in life ever look altogether sane again—and
subsequently (and here would be the real point of difference from other
veterans of other American wars), of being sentenced, by unspoken
national consent, to solitary confinement with the memory of it, urged to
tell no tales, please, on the grounds that even were the experience of
Vietnam to prove susceptible eventually to certain methods of explanation,
there would be virtually no one in the entire country who would care to
hear about it. (9)

The unwillingness of most Americans to discuss the war on any level—personal or
public—led to a national silence on the subject, a generalized denial of the social
problems the war had engendered, as well as of the ideology and practices that had
created it. After World War II, the returning veteran was welcomed as a hero, and while
a victory parade could not relieve “battle fatigue” in those who suffered from it, the
124 
national approval of the war effort and the men who fought in it gave veterans a
strong support system for their reintegration. World War II veterans also tended to return
home with their units, easing their transition into civilian life by keeping them together
with others make the same adjustment. The Vietnam veteran returned home alone,
sometimes within 48 hours of being in combat, and the difficulty of his abrupt reentry
into his old life was often exacerbated by a troubling welcome home. Veterans were
often ostracized from families and communities who feared the veteran was unstable and
thus capable of unexpected violence, or who saw him as shiftless for not quickly
assimilating back into jobs and useful activities. The lasting national unease over the war
left the Vietnam veteran largely alone in his transition:
This burden of silence rested squarely on the war’s veterans. ‘Going to
war is a landmark experience in the life of an individual,’ stated Robert
Muller, a former Marine lieutenant, ‘but in the case of Vietnam you
learned very quickly to repress it, keep it secret, shut up about it, because
people either considered you a sucker or some kind of psychopath who
killed women and children. … It’s unnatural.’ ‘They came back,’ recalled
Dave Christian, perhaps the most decorated American soldier in Vietnam,
‘and people said, “Forget it. Block out Vietnam. What you did was
worthless.” It twisted a lot of guys.’ (Carroll 313-314)

Lacking sympathetic ears for their stories or healthy outlets for their delayed stress
symptoms, many veterans numbed their pain with drugs and alcohol, beginning
destructive addictions or worsening those developed in Vietnam.
Occasionally, however, veterans dealt with their war experience by channeling
their anxieties productively into art, and the voices of those who saw the war firsthand
tended to be more influential to the national understanding of the war era than official
reports, which repeatedly proved untrustworthy. Vietnam veterans had been attempting
to tell their side of the war story since 1967 when Vietnam Veterans Against the War
125 
(VVAW) was founded by Jan Barry and five other veterans who marched together in
a demonstration in New York City. Veteran opposition to the war grew in the 1970s with
the Winter Soldier Investigation and the Dewey Canyon III march on Washington D.C.,
at which a number of veterans threw their Vietnam service medals onto the steps of the
Capitol, in repudiation of the war and in memory of their fallen friends. When the war
ended, veterans turned their attention to domestic battles: they worked to secure veterans
benefits through the Veterans Administration; they fought for better medical treatment at
VA hospitals where severely injured veterans suffered in terrible conditions; they lobbied
for employment opportunities and counseling centers (Nicosia). But most of all, they
fought to gain cultural recognition and appreciation for their service, and one of they
ways they did this was by dramatizing the war in ways that could attempt to express the
surreal, tragic experience to a country that could not—and often did not want to—
imagine it.
Peter N. Carroll notes that the cultural repression of the Vietnam War as a
survival mechanism for the United States: “Such amnesia buffered the country from the
agony of its history.” But before the end of the decade, a number of artistic
representations of the war would appear, indicative of the war’s refusal to stay buried in
the nation’s collective memory. Carroll writes,
By the late seventies, the Vietnam War—or, more precisely, some
versions of the war—reappeared, in journalism (Michael Herr’s
Dispatches; C. D. B. Bryan’s Friendly Fire); memoir (Philip Caputo’s A
Rumor of War); fiction (Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato); and film
(The Boys of Company C, Coming Home, Go Tell the Spartans, The Deer
Hunter, and Apocalypse Now). Still, behind metaphor and symbol, the
evil of Vietnam remained buried. (313-314)

126 
Carroll does not mention the Vietnam War drama that appeared in the late 1970s, but
he might have included David Rabe’s Streamers (1976) among the other works he cites.
Rabe was the first veteran to put the Vietnam War experience on stage. His plays The
Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1969) and Sticks and Bones (1969), two parts of a
trilogy of Vietnam War plays, received critical acclaim in New York, and Sticks and
Bones won the Tony Award for Best Play in 1972. Rabe’s plays do not present the
Vietnam War experience realistically; instead, they use metaphor and style to express the
psychological disruption the characters experience because of the war. As a result,
Rabe’s plays can transcend their historical moments better than most Vietnam War drama
does; including fewer specifics about the Vietnam War and engaging persistent social
concerns (like racism and violence), they seem more applicable to other periods, and
because they better adhere to dominant aesthetic criteria, they meet with more critical
approval than do other Vietnam War plays.
However, as Carroll suggests, using metaphor and symbol to discuss Vietnam
obfuscates the real problems of the war—the ideology that fostered it, the destruction it
caused, and the social problems it left behind. Streamers (1976), the last play of Rabe’s
trilogy, has been called the “best play of the [Vietnam War drama] canon” (Zinman 16).
The play depicts the tensions of a cross-section of American males under the stress of
their imminent deployment to Vietnam. Rabe does not undertake the issue of the war in
any detail; in fact, he mentions Vietnam only as a possible destination for the men, who
have finished basic training and are in a “holding company” until they receive orders.
Instead, Rabe explores masculinity, social hierarchy, and random violence and avoids the
specific effects of the war on American society. Beidler sums up the play:
127 
Indeed, if Streamers is “about” anything, it is about the effects of a
“memory” of something called Vietnam upon a group of soldiers mainly
who have never been there, who have to conceive of its threat as almost
pure imaginative projection, and who in turn allow imaginative projection
to turn itself most deadly real in bitter experiential fact. Conversely, the
bearer of this “memory,” the one character in the play who has already
been out there, is an aging, boozy, career NCO, lost almost completely in
his own world of make-believe, of dreams of better wars, of the
camaraderie of the airborne, or heroism in Korea, of anything but what his
most recent war just was.
The war is there, then, in Streamers, as some weird amalgam of memory
and imagining, at once a curse and a terrible prophecy. (180)

The metaphor of Streamers is that of a skydiver whose parachute fails to open—a
“streamer”—and it is described as the sudden realization of one’s imminent death, “for
which there is no preparation and from which there is no escape” (Watt & Richardson
798). The use of metaphor—in Streamers and elsewhere—to represent the war allows an
audience some measure of insight into an experience they can never fully understand, but
this intellectualizing of war events, I suggest, becomes politically and socially
problematic because it leads to both misrepresentation and compartmentalization of the
war in American culture. To sum up the war in a metaphor is to reduce it to a digestible
size and familiar form, thus permitting it to be absorbed into the individual and cultural
consciousness. While this absorption may be necessary, to some extent, for the country
to progress beyond the war years in a productive way, it also absolves American society
of really dealing with the damage the war has done to the national identity. A metaphor
explains the war; it structures the experience into the recognizable, and thus forecloses
128 
the necessary cultural conversation about the causes and effects of the United States’
involvement in Vietnam.
21

In the introduction to this dissertation, I suggest that the genre of Vietnam War
drama develops in part by responding to representations of the war seen as inaccurate or
incomplete—plays tend to appear as corrective rather than as imitation and/or variation—
and the postwar period boasts a number of plays that do this kind of work. The Vietnam
War drama that follows Streamers will almost entirely emphasize factual and
compassionate representation of the veteran’s experience in order both to gain the veteran
cultural recognition and to resist the continued manipulation of the war’s legacy into
service of the national mythology.
The appearance of David Berry’s G.R. Point in 1977 marks a significant turning
point in the development of Vietnam War drama. The play is not as artistically polished
as other Vietnam War plays of the late 1970s, and therefore it is frequently overlooked as
a choice for criticism or performance in favor of plays from the same period that more
closely meet the dominant aesthetic criteria—Rabe’s Streamers or Lanford Wilson’s 5
th

of July, for example. However, Berry’s play is the first theatrical attempt to portray
realistically a GI’s tour in Vietnam, to show the American public what the war
experience was really like for the average soldier, and thus it begins the cultural trend that
emphasizes the American combat soldier’s actual experience as the defining one of the
war. Berry, a veteran, felt it was necessary to bring factual information about the

21
 Beidler objects to the Russian roulette scene in The Deer Hunter as “exactly the kind
of ‘concept’ some hot-shit twenty-four-year-old graduate of the UCLA film school would
invent as ‘a metaphor of the insanity of Vietnam’” (Late Thoughts 84). 
129 
Vietnam War to American audiences.
22
He did not want to intellectualize the
experience or to mythologize it; instead, he wanted to bring the experience home so that
audiences could better understand the hardships returning veterans had endured. From
1977 on, artistic representations of the Vietnam War center around the impact of the war
on the veteran, rather than on the politics of the war or on the experience of the war from
the Vietnamese perspective (which, as we have seen, was given only the briefest attention
in earlier plays). In addition, Berry’s play is the first to encourage a cautious optimism
about American life in the post-Vietnam War era. Nearly all of the plays I have
discussed so far are relentless in their criticism of government, the national mythology,
and social systems. Little is expressed in Vietnam War drama of the 1960s and early
1970s that suggests hope; thus, G.R. Point signals the beginning of a shift in the national
outlook, and despite the play’s depiction of suffering, the final moments encourage
Americans to focus on the future, rather than to protest the present or to dwell on the past.
The action of the play takes place at a remote Graves Registration compound, a
unit that prepares bodies to be shipped to the large morgue in Saigon. The soldiers in this
unit do not go out on patrol, but they must defend their compound from NVA attacks.
The plot is simple: it follows newly arrived soldier Micah Bradstreet through his tour, a
tour cut short by his mother’s death, which brings him home early on emergency leave.
Micah’s Vietnam experience is less about the war than it is a spiritual journey of self-
realization. He aims to serve his tour in Vietnam without compromising his character,
but he is challenged by the lawlessness of the war zone and comes to realize that life does

22
I had the fortunate experience of speaking with David Berry in a phone interview, and
his comments shed light on a number of artistic choices made in G.R. Point.
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not always allow one to remain faithful to one’s ideals. During his time in Vietnam,
he faces the terror and excitement of combat, the loss of close friends, loneliness and
physical longing, and, finally, the death of his mother. He leaves Vietnam humbled, but
with a greater understanding of life’s complexity and ambiguity.
Contributing to Micah’s personal growth are several supporting characters: his
fellow soldiers and a Vietnamese woman who works at the compound. White, college-
educated Micah does not immediately fit in with the men in his unit, for he presumes to
educate them about such things as politics and grammar, thus highlighting their class
differences and exacerbating tensions within the group. In the end, though, it is Micah
who learns from the others, who are all better than he at handling the chaos of Vietnam
because they have learned that strict adherence to theory and ideals is not possible in
situations that require survival techniques. In an early scene, for example, Micah objects
to Sergeant Deacon’s treatment of Mama-san, the Vietnamese woman Deacon refers to as
“an employed ally” but treats like a slave. When Micah tries to protect Mama-san from
rape by Deacon, another soldier, Zan, pulls Micah away before Deacon can cut him with
his knife. Micah resists Zan’s intervention out of principle but learns that principles are
difficult to maintain in his new environment:
ZAN: You wanna buy that lady’s virtue with your life? ‘Cause that’s
what you’re gonna pay! You wanna play John Asshole Wayne and be a
hero, man?
MICAH: But I’m right!!
ZAN: Uh-huh … but you’re alive, and so’s Deacon and so’s Mama-san.
(Pause.) How’s your cut?
MICAH: It’s nothing.
ZAN: It’s a warning, man. Don’t try bein’ a hero here. It’s the quickest
way I know to get funeralized. The Nam hasn’t got any heroes—you
don’t risk your ass for anything. Dead is dumb, Micah, and dead in the
Nam is the dumbest of all. (22)
131 

Zan tries to connect with Micah as a friend, but Micah, struggling to assimilate his new
experiences into his preconceived morality, rejects Zan’s offers, as well as invitations
from the other soldiers to participate in bonding rituals. Most distressing to Micah is his
reaction to his first firefight: in the rush of adrenaline from the battle, Micah ejaculates
and is sickened by what he interprets as a sexual response to murder. Under duress,
Micah shares this fact with Zan and then pulls away from him in embarrassment and
defensiveness. Micah’s abandonment of his only true friend fuels his guilt and regret
when Zan is later killed by friendly fire. Berry’s protagonist has nearly all of his beliefs
about himself tested during his tour, and as a result, he leaves Vietnam physically whole
but emotionally shattered.
In the play’s final scene, Micah learns of his mother’s death by a stroke, an event
he believes he contributed to by writing relentlessly specific letters home, sparing no gory
detail from the mother he sees as domineering and cold. Amid sympathetic friends,
Micah lapses into self-pity and self-recrimination:
MICAH: Had to die, didn’t you? Gave yourself a fucken stroke! A
fucken stroke to bring me home. Found a way to trade, didn’t you? I’m
fucken good at it, aren’t I, Mother?! It’s a goddamned good soldier who
can kill with words—right Mother?! All my fucken letters, every one,
every one plugged a different vessel in your brain!! I got you, didn’t I,
Mother?!! (52)

Berry’s writing here is rather heavy-handed, driving home the point made earlier in the
play that, in a letter, Micah’s mother said she would trade places with Micah if she could.
Berry reminds the audience of that moment a little too obviously, perhaps assuming that
spectators would not be able to make the connection themselves. A good deal of Berry’s
writing struggles in this way; Berry seems so intent on getting his message across that he
132 
overstates points and allows characters (especially Micah) to emote excessively,
underscoring important dramatic components, perhaps, but also making the play more
melodramatic than necessary.
The writing in G.R. Point is problematic in more ways than just aesthetically. It
struggles to achieve the goals for character representation Berry had envisioned, and this
results in both political and performance repercussions. The group of soldiers he has
created in G.R. Point is racially diverse, and Berry wants very much to avoid acting
stereotypes in productions. Micah is clearly the protagonist, but Berry pointedly insists
that Micah “must not occupy sole focus,” even though “his journey is the central one in
the action” (6). Berry is adamant that the other characters should be taken as seriously as
Micah and that they should be given the same respect. To assure his characters are
played realistically, Berry has included in the published play a three-page Author’s
Preface that gives specific character notes and guidelines that aim to avoid turning them
into flat “types.” Berry deemed the preface necessary in order to avoid in future
productions the mistakes he felt were made in the 1979 Broadway production, in which
no participant had Vietnam experience, a detail Berry believes contributed to their failure
to grasp the nuances he had hoped for in his play. Apparently, the Broadway
performances distorted his characters so disagreeably that Berry felt the need to offer the
following lengthy explanation in defense of them:
Beware the easy stereotypes of these characters. Mama-san is neither
Bloody Mary nor some sort of prostitute; she is the chief symbol and
reality of survival strength in the play, the life principle struggling against
almost overwhelming odds. To think of K.P., Tito, or Shoulders as simply
‘ghetto’ people, streetwise and hip, is to demean them. K.P. is more
nearly the classical fool of this play, perhaps more in touch with the moral
universe than any other character. Deacon may not easily draw our
133 
sympathy, but he never lies in the play and he knows moral
equivocation when he sees it; he, too, cares deeply, feels responsibility,
and acts firmly. Micah has strength and moral certitude on his side, but he
must learn the lesson of ‘Know thyself’ from all the others. Micah must
not be seen as either spoiled or wealthy (for he is not); he is simply
untested, all that he’s believed has never been tested before. Zan’s deep
goodness must not be mistaken for sainthood; he is capable of error and
has not enough experience of the world to complete Micah’s journey to
the light. Straw’s simplicity must not be that of a simpleton; he is terribly
young to be in this place and is remarkably pure. Johnston is not a
simpleton or joke caricature; in his awkward efforts to lead and to belong,
we must see our own poor efforts and our small successes. These are
people with considerable warmth, possessed of so-called simple virtues.
In them, we must recognize our common humanity, our common capacity
for truth and honesty, our common validity. (6-7)

Within Berry’s (overly?) prescriptive notes lies a genuine personal respect for the
characters he has created, and he wants them represented faithfully in production. His
intentions to destabilize stereotypes are laudable, but it seems to speak to the weakness of
Berry’s writing that this corrective was necessary, for apparently the play’s dialogue and
dramatization alone do not sufficiently express these character qualities to actors and
directors. If Micah’s lamentation of his mother’s death is overwritten, perhaps characters
like Shoulders and Straw are underwritten, drawn too flatly to express the depth and
sincerity Berry wanted them to have.
The dialogue is not the only element of the play that troubles Berry’s goal of
creating three-dimensional non-white characters; it is also the system of relationships
Berry has created by centering the play on Micah’s personal growth. Berry wants each
character to be valued for his or her richness of experience and for the different kinds of
wisdom he or she has gained from those experiences, but his structure casts those
characters as little more than tools of Micah’s education. In his preface, then, Berry
contradicts himself, for he wants us to recognize the common humanity of his characters
134 
as well as to use them as symbols and tools of Micah’s path to enlightenment.
Berry’s preface suggests that he was personally moved by his interaction with the people
he met in Vietnam, but the roles he has given them in his play bespeak a still-incomplete
understanding of them as individuals. For example, Berry’s insistence on respect for
Mama-san is a nod toward recognizing the plight of the Vietnamese and especially of
Vietnamese women; Berry wants to humanize her and to resist trapping her in a
Madonna/whore dichotomy. However, his use of her as a “symbol” undermines his
noble intentions. By representing her as a “life principle,” he merely underlines her
exoticism and her motherliness and fails to dramatize fully her struggle to exist under
unrelenting war conditions. Similarly, the sympathetic K.P., who comforts Micah after
Zan’s death, is portrayed as alternately hypersexual and nurturing, combining common
stereotypes of black men and black women respectively. His primary dramatic function
is to guide Micah home with the wisdom he will need to continue his life. The way Berry
has chosen to structure his play—centered on Micah—thus undermines his effort to
develop three-dimensional supporting characters.
These flaws in G.R. Point are serious, but they do not negate the contributions
Berry’s play makes to the cultural discussion of the Vietnam War. Like most other
veterans who have written about their war experiences, Berry wrote G.R. Point to work
through personal difficulties engendered by the war. However, he had another goal in
mind as well: to show the American public what Vietnam had really been like (Berry,
interview). Five years after returning from Vietnam,
23
Berry still felt that the veteran

23
Berry served in Vietnam from April 4, 1969 to November 11, 1969, when he was
brought home on emergency leave, just as G.R. Point’s protagonist Micah is.
135 
experience had not been accurately represented, and he set out to create a play that
would show “the way it was.” G.R. Point, therefore, aims for realism in setting and
acting. In our interview in October 2009, Berry noted that he wrote G.R. Point
deliberately without subtext and insisted that directors should “let actors live off the top
of their heads, as we did in Vietnam.” The goal, then, is to recreate for audiences, as
accurately as is possible in a theatrical production, the experience of life in the war zone.
In the preface to the play, Berry warns directors against imposing on the drama any kind
of artistic embellishment that might take away from the realistic effect he intended:
Uncluttered by ‘theatricality,’ G. R. Point will do straightforward and
powerful work. ‘Stagey’ effects, self-conscious ‘arias’ or stage
movement, and stylistic razzmatazz whatsoever will devastate the rhythms
of the text, weaken the characters, and imbalance the simple architecture
of the play. Simple naturalism in acting and design is what’s called for.
(5)

G.R. Point’s realism sets it apart from most Vietnam War drama, which generally utilizes
stylized movement, fragmentation of scenes, flashbacks and flashforwards, special
effects, and other such theatricality to simulate the chaos of combat and the surreal
complexity of the war experience. Instead, Berry felt it was necessary to “deliver
valuable information” about the Vietnam War experience, rather than turn the war into an
intellectual exercise or a spectacle.
24
It is likely that the resulting play therefore suffers
from too little artistry, which may condemn it to a production life primarily in
educational theatre, but it deserves recognition as a part of the rising veterans’ movement,
which would reach its peak in the early 1980s and would ultimately earn for veterans the

24
When I asked Berry his opinion about Rabe’s Streamers and its use of metaphor to
represent the war experience, he replied that he felt such representations were “ducking
it,” avoiding the “emotional truth.”
136 
social respect they had been denied. Berry’s preface, which indicates his need to
influence future production and acting choices, is indicative of the growing insistence of
veterans on the public recognition of their service and on the truthful representation of the
war—that is, representations that did not distort the GI’s experience into stereotype,
metaphor, or political polemic. As will become the trend both in later Vietnam War
plays and in more generalized American culture, the veteran’s voice is being established
here as the most credible American voice to speak about the war.
Robert Asahina sees in G.R. Point a lamentable autobiographical focus that artists
like Rabe managed to avoid, despite Rabe and Berry both being veterans. Asahina
writes, “What was lacking in G. R. Point […] was not credibility but interest, not truth
but ideas: The author’s apparent need to relate his experiences far exceeded our need to
know about them” (35). Asahina’s comments about G.R. Point reflect the critic’s
conditioned appreciation of textual ambiguity and artistry, something Berry did not set
out to produce. Berry’s goal was realism; he wanted intellectual ideas in the play
significantly less than he wanted raw emotion and verisimilitude. Asahina’s remarks,
which were written in 1978, also reflect the general cultural sentiment felt toward the
Vietnam veteran just after the war: an unwillingness to engage with the details of
returning veterans’ stories, out of guilt or revulsion or perhaps just war fatigue. By
saying that Berry’s need to tell his story mattered more to him than the audience’s need to
know, Asahina pinpoints both the veteran’s need for an understanding audience for his
story and the general culture’s unwillingness to serve as audience to a story that seemed
almost entirely without redemption. Unwittingly, Asahina has not found fault with the
137 
play as much as he has revealed his (and the greater American public’s) distaste for
what the veteran brought home with him.
It is notable that the plays of the late 1970s tend to stay away from overt political
discussions of the war, quite unlike the politically provocative plays of the 1960s and
early 1970s. Again, Berry’s preface warns against inserting politics into G.R. Point,
which he claims does not aim to tackle such divisive issues:
I have carefully avoided polemic, gore, unnecessary bloodshed or violence
in G. R. Point. The play has no political axes to grind; it merely presents
people caught in the situation. Do not burden the play by bringing
hawkish or dovish attitudes to it, for it is a piece of theatre and its themes
are far older than America’s Vietnam conflicts. (6)

Berry’s sentiments here signal a change in purpose in Vietnam War drama: a turn away
from protests against government policy, critiques of national mythology, and pleas for
galvanized political action, and toward the examination of the Vietnam War’s effects on
the individual veteran and, to a lesser degree, on his extended family and community.
This change in purpose, however, is really no less political than the “hawkish or dovish
attitudes” Berry warns against. Critics have often cited Rabe’s comments rejecting the
label “anti-war” for his own plays. Plays cannot significantly alter political events, he
argues, and war plays merely depict human activities very much a part of humankind’s
“pageant” (Rabe ix). However, Berry sees his role as playwright differently from Rabe.
Rather than create a fictional world of ideas loosely relating to Vietnam as Rabe has done
in his Vietnam trilogy, Berry feels that his straightforward approach is what is needed to
influence audiences to live with more awareness of war’s effects. “A good war play,”
Berry claims, “is a good anti-war play.” His approach was not to attempt large-scale
political change from the stage (as a play like Garson’s MacBird did), but to show the
138 
reality of war (as well as the theatre can) to large numbers of people who would
consequently be too horrified to support consciously any war effort that might arise. His
goal with G.R. Point was to show American audiences “what it’s like to be in it [war] and
what it does to people.” “If you show people what it’s really like, they’re not going to
want anyone they love to go there” (Berry, interview). Thus Berry’s play takes on a
political role in spite of his assurances in the preface that the play takes an apolitical
position.
During the war years, Vietnam War drama was largely preoccupied with
intervention into government policies, whether those policies escalate the number of
troops in Vietnam or persecute antiwar protestors. With the war over, theatre artists no
longer had the imperative of stopping the war or discrediting government officials or
policies, and they turned instead to the difficult tasks of rebuilding and healing, both
individual lives and psyches and the collective life of the nation. To this end, G.R. Point
offers one of the first optimistic messages to be heard from a Vietnam War play, an
invitation from Berry to focus on the life ahead rather than on the life behind. K.P. has
the final line, one that sums up Berry’s hopes for his play’s healing effects. As Micah
says his goodbyes, K.P. tells him to “count the livin’, not the dead” (53). With this line,
Berry encourages the American public to put the horrors of the war behind them and to
rededicate themselves to living with a common purpose, to cease dwelling on 1960s
political divisions and the tragic human loss, and to value the life ahead rather than to
mourn the life lost. As Berry writes,
G. R. Point is a play of reconciliation, in the service of peace and
understanding. It seeks to heal. If we see and feel in its people our
common ability to maintain grace and compassion in the midst of the very
139 
worst that mankind creates for itself, then my Dedication to fallen
friends will not be in vain. If we leave your theatre having laughed and
cried, feeling warm toward the strangers who sat next to us, then Mama-
san’s knowing that life is what’s important in life will not be in vain. (7)

In our interview, Berry explained that G.R. Point emphasizes the necessity of
“collaborative survival,” the interdependence of humankind that is threatened by the
privileging of individual success at the expense of the whole. His message in 1977 urges
Americans to do what they can to push forward, to recover from the stasis and malaise
debilitating the nation. In a number of the plays that follow G.R. Point, we will hear
echoes of this message, as Vietnam War drama of the late 1970s takes up the task of
dealing with the war’s aftermath in America, the disillusionment and tragedy of losing
the war along with a sense of national pride and unity.
The small spark of optimism expressed at the end of G.R. Point is fanned into
flame in several Vietnam War plays that follow it. The war is still treated seriously, with
playwrights giving voice to the myriad personal tragedies engendered by the war—loss of
life, physical disability, veteran assimilation difficulties, broken families, personal and
national disillusionment, etc.—but these topics are handled more gently than they were in
early periods and more lightly than they will be in the 1980s, when issues of identity give
rise to group mobilization. That is, the political components of earlier plays are still
present in works of the late 1970s, but they are situated within works that offer audiences
opportunities to laugh and to leave the theatre with a small hope for the future.
Lanford Wilson’s 5
th
of July (1978) is one such play. Its tight dialogue and strong
characterization give voice to the pervasive disillusionment of the post-Vietnam War
period, but the play ends with a message of encouragement for the whole country. Like
140 
Rabe’s plays, 5
th
of July is about more than the particulars of the Vietnam War; it
deals with the individual’s struggle against social forces that threaten to overwhelm him.
It succeeds so well in capturing the spirit of the post-Vietnam War era that Mark Fearnow
boldly states, “If American drama of the 1970s can be said to have a masterpiece, it is
surely The Fifth of July” (427). Fearnow recognizes 5
th
of July’s ability to transcend
what some see as the limiting categorization of the Vietnam War play and to achieve
success as a mainstream play. In fact, critics of this play generally overlook the issue of
the war in favor of timeless themes of family and personal survival, deflecting attention
from the contribution Wilson’s play makes to the evolution of Vietnam War drama.
25
5
th

of July makes an important cultural statement about the war’s continuing effect on
American society in the late 1970s by demonstrating the country’s disillusionment and
moral failings, but it also leaves its audiences with optimism that has been absent from
Vietnam War drama to this point.
5
th
of July is one of what Wilson calls a “mini-series” (rather than a cycle or
trilogy) of plays dealing with the Talley family of Lebanon, Missouri. The other two are
Talley’s Folly (1979)—which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1980—and Talley &
Son (1985), which both take place in 1944. 5
th
of July is set on Independence Day 1977
in the Talley home, where Ken Talley, his sister June and her daughter Shirley, their Aunt
Sally, Ken’s lover Jed, and friends John and Gwen have gathered for the ceremonial
scattering of Sally’s husband’s ashes. Ken, a disabled Vietnam veteran (he has lost both
legs), is hoping to sell the family home to Gwen, an heiress and aspiring singer, who

25
 For example, neither of the two main critics of Vietnam War drama, J.W. Fenn nor
Toby Zinman, engages 5
th
of July in any significant way. 
141 
wants to construct a recording studio in it, but Sally pushes for Ken to retract his
offer to sell, to live in the house with Jed, and to return to teaching English at the local
high school (his profession before the war). As the play unfolds, Wilson reveals the
complexity of the group’s relationships and the challenges facing Ken as he tries to
decide the fate of the family homestead, as well as his own. In the end, Ken and Jed
decide to live in the house with Aunt Sally. Jed will rebuild the neglected garden, and
Ken will return to teaching; they will set down roots, both literally and figuratively.
The themes of family and home, both vital components of the play, emerge most
clearly when the play is removed from its historical context, which Robert Cooperman
does in his critique of the Talley saga. Cooperman chooses to examine 5
th
of July as the
last play of the series rather than on its own merits as a product of 1978. Cooperman
claims:
By studying the plays in their chronological order rather than in their order of
composition, one can follow the steady progression of the American family as it
dispensed with the formalities that characterized the family of security and
became instead a family of ‘contemporary traditionals.’ (67-68)

Intriguingly, although 5
th
of July is the last in the Talley series chronologically, it was the
first play written. Gene A. Barnett notes:
When Wilson had about one-third of the play that eventually became 5
th
of July,
he realized that the house in which the play was set was going to be very
important. And if the house was important, then obviously, so was the
background of the family that built it and lived in it for several generations. (107)

In other words, Wilson did not write 5
th
of July to finish off a trilogy begun some time
earlier; he wrote the other two plays to give a history to characters already conceived in
5
th
of July. Thus, in spite of 5
th
of July’s position as last in the Talley history, it deserves
to be seen as having been born of its historical moment, not created by a dynamic born
142 
and developed in the other two plays. Unfortunately, critics tend to consider the
play’s Vietnam War ties only as character background; they note that Ken, June, Gwen,
and John were a close foursome at Berkeley and active in the anti-war movement, and
they recognize Ken’s disability as a war injury, but they do not examine the war issues
any further. As a result, 5
th
of July is not generally recognized for the strong statement it
makes about America’s post-Vietnam War readjustment. In particular, 5
th
of July gives
voice to the wounded idealism of the counterculture, the difficult re-integration into
American society the veteran faced, and the lamentable shifting of cultural values from
an emphasis on community to an emphasis on self, but it also suggests an encouraging
path of action for the country’s future.
Dramatic representations of the counterculture are limited and generally do not
offer particularly well-rounded characterizations of its members. The musical Hair
(1968) represents the counterculture as hippies moving rather aimlessly between
indiscriminate sexual liaisons, generalized protests, and drug trips. There are a few
pointed references to the Vietnam War, Secretary McNamara, and the draft, but the
experience is voyeuristic and escapist rather than encouraging of critical thought. Robert
Weller’s Moonchildren (1970) depicts protestors unflatteringly, as opportunists living
self-absorbed lives. 5
th
of July, on the other hand, presents a more varied and
sympathetic picture of activists in the antiwar movement, avoiding both hippie
stereotypes and homogenization of the participants. Gwen and John are foils to June and
Ken, all activists at Berkeley but different in their commitment to the antiwar movement:
June and Ken cared deeply about the causes they fought for, while Gwen and John
merely played at caring, dabbling in protests for the thrill of their immediate drama but
143 
never actually committing themselves. In June, Wilson expresses the disillusionment
of the 1960s activists in the state of the country in the 1970s. When challenged by her
daughter Shirley, who belittles June’s activism by calling her “militant and angry,” June
retorts, “You have no idea of the life we led. […] You’ve no idea of the country we
almost made for you. The fact that I think it’s all a crock now does not take away from
what we almost achieved” (62). Todd Gitlin writes of the decline of the student
movement, “The riptide of the Revolution went out with the same force it had surged in
with, the ferocious undertow proportionate to the onetime hopes” (420). June’s cynicism
reflects the exhaustion and dispiritedness of the period, felt especially deeply by those
who had been the most idealistic the decade before.
June’s commitment and genuine emotion contrast with Gwen’s superficial
involvement in the movement. Gwen admits that she never marched in protest because
she “never had a pair of shoes that were really comfortable” (62). Clearly, her
commitment to the cause lasted only as long as her personal comfort and interest held
out, in direct contrast to June, whom Gwen describes as having been “sensational” in her
dedication. To her credit, Gwen holds no illusions that she was a dedicated activist
herself; she acknowledges her participation in the events as whims she would follow only
as long as they continued to hold her attention and as long as they required no real
sacrifice from her:
GWEN: Who knew what we were doing? We were in TV, we were in
Time magazine, it was a blast. Also it was such a crock, really. You go to
an anti-war, end the war rally, right? You march to the White House.
JOHN: You take a taxi, but nonetheless.
GWEN: Anyway. You get there. Five hundred thousand people,
speaker’s platforms, signs thick as a convention, everybody’s high, we’re
bombed, the place is mobbed, everybody’s on the lawn with their shirts
144 
off, boys, girls; they’re eating chicken and tacos, the signs say: End
the War, Ban the Bomb, Black Power and Gay Power and Women’s Lib;
the Nazi Party’s there, the unions, demanding jobs, they got Chicano
Power and Free the POW’s, and Free the Migrants, Allen Ginsberg is
chanting Ommm over the loudspeakers, Coretta King is there: how
straight do you have to be to see that nothing is going to come from it?
(63)

Gwen’s attitude reflects that of a large portion of the United States’ population, who saw
incidents such as the protests and subsequent riots that occurred at the 1968 Democratic
National Convention as certain to achieve no real political change. However, Wilson
gives voice to June’s position in the movement as well by having Gwen recognize June’s
genuine dedication and offer some compassion for her profound disillusionment that the
movement failed to achieve its goals. Gwen says to Shirley, “Don’t knock your mother,
‘cause she really believed that “Power to the People” song, and that hurts” (63). Gwen
knows she participated in the movement for the excitement of it, not because she held any
genuine political convictions, but she appreciates that June was a real activist, dedicated
to making a new kind of country. This disparity of ideological commitment explains
other aspects of their characters in the play: Gwen is as careless as ever, for she feels no
real loss, but June has become bitter because her ideals have been shattered. Gwen will
flit from one diversion to another as the years pass—she is currently working on a
singing career—but June’s heart was in the counterculture movement, and her
disillusionment pervades her character.
Wilson also contributes a new voice to the growing veterans’ movement by
dramatizing Ken’s family’s mixed reactions to his service and injury:
SALLY: Your mother was very proud that you went. I could have killed
her.
145 
KEN: Wasn’t that interesting? I thought so, too. And ashamed that I
came back.
SALLY: Oh, that isn’t true.
JUNE: The hell it ain’t. (96)

This short exchange is packed with meaning: it expresses the complex emotions
American civilians had toward those members of their family who served. The tradition
of military service in the United States and the social honor bestowed upon those who
returned from World War II influenced many parents to encourage their sons to serve in
Vietnam, or at least to frame their being drafted in positive terms, as “character-building”
or “duty to country.” Those who opposed the war in Vietnam (as Sally’s comment
suggests she did) detested the use of such coercion and distortion of facts to compel
young men into military service. Ironically, the people who encouraged their sons to
serve in Vietnam were also the ones who were most troubled by the men those sons had
become when they returned home. Wilson’s dialogue expresses the distaste felt by many
Americans for what the veteran represented: a lost war, immoral behavior in combat,
contradictions to the national mythology. Ken recognizes that his mother would probably
have felt more comfortable if he had died in Vietnam, for she would then be able to
construct him as a fallen hero rather than having to deal with him as a damaged man.
(The father in Cowen’s Summertree engaged in such revisionism of his son’s character
after he was killed, and the family in Rabe’s Sticks and Bones preferred a dead son to a
live, blind, and combative son.)
Ken receives a similarly unreceptive welcome from the students he visits,
causing him to change his mind abruptly about returning to teaching:
KEN: (Biting) No, I think it was more a question of a sincere lack of
rapport.
146 
GWEN: A lot of messy questions, right?
KEN: No, I was quite prepared for the messy questions. Dry urbanity;
humorous self-deprecation.
JED: The kids wouldn’t look at him. (Pause. Nobody looks up.)
KEN: Which God knows I should have been prepared for, but for some
reason I was not. (90-91)

The kids’ reaction to Ken reflects the nation’s general response to the Vietnam veteran in
the late 1970s. The veteran was an embarrassment, a reminder of the nation’s inability to
defeat the Vietnamese, evidence of inconsistencies within the national mythology. He
was also a source of national guilt and shame, since he was both the perpetrator of
violence on the Vietnamese and a victim of combat violence himself. One of the major
obstacles the veteran faced was finding compassionate listeners if he ever got around to
telling his story. Thus, Ken’s decision at the end of the play to return to teaching
foreshadows the nation’s changing relationship with the Vietnam veteran. The veteran
will become a teacher of sorts, embracing his identity and using his experience to effect
change on many levels. Like Johnny Young—Ken’s student with speech difficulties—
the veteran will grow tired of being ignored by a society lacking the patience and
fortitude to hear him out; he will insist on being recognized, and his words will gain
credibility as the nation redefines him as heroic instead of as a national shame.
Looking forward, Wilson suggests that Americans rededicate themselves to home
and family, even though the family in 5
th
of July is a non-traditional one. Wilson does
not advocate conventional mores—heterosexuality, reproduction, traditional family
structures—but he does suggest that Americans’ efforts should be in service of one
another, that the key to rebuilding national strength and confidence lies in refocusing
attention on issues at home rather than intervening in the affairs of other countries.
147 
Again, John and Gwen are character foils, this time for Jed and Sally. John and
Gwen make commitments to no one; even their plane tickets always have an open return,
allowing them to act entirely on their whims. Through them, Wilson is critical of the
society that emphasizes instant gratification rather than a dedication to work. John and
Gwen are careless people who throw money at issues rather than investing time or
commitment to create something lasting. A sharp contrast to Gwen’s frantic energy and
wild mood swings, Jed is described as “an almost silent listener.” He has remarkable
patience, rooting plants all winter on the sun porch, planting a garden that will not mature
for ten years. That garden becomes an important symbol in the play: it represents starting
over, committing to a place, setting goals years away, rediscovering lost treasures, and
putting the dead in service of new life. The group’s purpose at the family homestead is to
scatter the ashes of Sally’s husband Matt on the grounds, and by sprinkling the ashes in
the garden, Sally encourages both the seedlings and the family to flourish. One can see in
this symbol the reflection of the nation as well: the fallen soldiers will fertilize new
patriotic ideals. The promise of the budding garden contributes to the play’s optimistic
ending. When Gwen and John are denied the purchase of the house, the contaminating
influences in the group are purged, and what is left is a multi-generational family (a
happy blending of generations after the divided Sixties) rededicated to one another and to
their home and community.
Wilson’s overarching theme is that real victory is in surviving hardship, for the
characters and for post-Vietnam War America. In the story Gwen and John’s friend
Weston tells, one can see the predicament of the country in the late 1970s. Weston
recounts a tale of an Eskimo family whose store of caribou meat freezes solid in a cold
148 
snap, leaving them without any food for the winter. To save the family, a young man
breaks wind on the meat, thawing it, but rendering it unpalatable. The family cannot
bring themselves to eat it, and they all die of starvation. Ken finds the story offensive not
because it is crass, but because it has no moral; there are no “saving results” to the tale,
which Ken believes crucial to a proper folk tale. The family has refused their salvation
simply because to eat the meat would be unpleasant, and that choice is morally repugnant
to Ken:
WESTON: So the saving grace—
KEN: —would have been surviving. Don’t choke on it, don’t turn up
your nose, swallow it and live, baby.
WESTON: Even if it stinks, man. (98)

Emphasizing the parallel, Weston asks Ken what the saving grace of his service was, if
indeed there were heroes in Vietnam. Ken’s response is grounded in the Eskimo story,
but it resonates of the country’s attempt to assimilate the Vietnam War into its national
identity. To deny the realities of the war and its effects, as was being done by most of the
country in the immediate post-war period, was to cease to progress and, ultimately, to
perish, Wilson suggests. Ken advocates dealing with the experience and moving on,
rather than let the unpleasantness eliminate the possibility of further life. The war must
be processed, as repugnant as it is, in order for the country to live past it.
Because of his thematic emphasis on the family, Cooperman sees this anecdote as
being specifically about the Talley family, not as any reflection on contemporary
American attitudes. “The Eskimo myth […],” he writes, “depicts the need of an
individual to escape from a harmful family situation in order to survive” (81).
Cooperman’s interpretation of the Eskimo myth is too much restricted to the world of the
149 
play, an unfortunate result of his decision to read 5
th
of July out of context. His
reading does not recognize the larger relevance of the story to the painful national
Vietnam War experience. Similarly, Barnett sees optimism in Wilson’s play in many
scenes, themes, and tropes, but attributes that optimism to the characters alone, instead of
seeing it reflected outward toward the country. In the final scene, Ken reads the
transcription of his student Johnny Young’s recorded story:
After they had explored all the suns in the universe, and all the planets of
all the suns, they realized that there was no other life in the universe, and
that they were alone. And they were very happy, because then they knew
it was up to them to become all the things they had imagined they would
find. (127)

Barnett interprets this passage narrowly, as reflecting optimism only within the world of
the play:
The theme here—acceptance of the future, happiness in that acceptance,
and commitment to fulfilling one’s potential—is more applicable to
Kenny than to any other character except Shirley. The play is ‘about’ this
more than anything else: Kenny’s acceptance of his past—his mutilation
in Vietnam—and his reengagement with the present. (113)

Barnett’s sees the story primarily in relation to Ken, but I suggest Wilson offers this
optimism not just about his character but about the United States as well, for 5
th
of July is
about post-Vietnam War America as much as it is about the Talley family or individual
characters. It is not only Ken who needs to accept his past and re-engage with the future;
in 1978, it is necessary for the whole of the United States to do this. The play suggests to
the entire country, not just to returning veterans, that the saving grace of the Vietnam
War is in the survival of it.
In the optimistic practicality of its final scene, 5th of July contrasts powerfully
with the two Vietnam War films that also appeared in 1978. Coming Home and The Deer
150 
Hunter were both released in 1978, the first films to attempt representations of the
Vietnam War since The Green Berets in 1968. Coming Home is the story of a romance
between an Army wife and the disabled veteran she meets while volunteering at a VA
hospital. The Deer Hunter depicts the shattering of a Pennsylvania steel-working
community when three of its members leave to fight in the Vietnam War. In a recent
article for Vanity Fair magazine, Peter Biskind examines briefly the politics of each
film’s representation of the war. Noting the film’s setting “in sunny Southern
California,” Biskind claims, “Coming Home is considerably more upbeat than The Deer
Hunter” (279). “Upbeat” may feel like an odd choice of words for a film with such
serious themes, but one can argue that Bob’s suicide both offers him peace and opens the
door for Luke and Sally to continue their relationship. While the film’s two suicides
draw attention to the suffering of the returning veteran and to the unsettling number of
suicides of Vietnam vets, the “love story” within the film is given the chance to survive.
However, the optimism of Coming Home is confined to the love story aspect of
the film. One can find a measure of optimism, perhaps, in Luke’s new involvement in
the antiwar movement—he chains himself to the gates of a recruiting facility in protest
and speaks honestly to a high school class about his service, discouraging the young men
from buying into the same socializing influences he did—but that optimism is entirely
retrospective. The film takes place during the war years, and, unfortunately, any antiwar
sentiments it might ignite (or rekindle) for viewers in 1978 will arise years too late to
have any influence on the war’s events. When Luke asks the high school boys to
reconsider their willingness to serve, he reminds them, “There’s a choice to be made
here,” but when the American public saw this film, that choice was long past. A viewer
151 
might align herself with Luke’s position and feel righteous in her beliefs, but the film
requires nothing further from her. She can neither take action against the war nor
encourage others to do so; a male viewer can no longer make the decision not to serve.
The film offers no commentary about what should be done in 1978, only a voice from the
past offering a choice that no longer exists.
The Deer Hunter
26
offers even less optimism, and it does not profess any way to
transcend the war and live again. In fact, the final scene of The Deer Hunter reflects only
the stunned stasis of American communities. Appearing in 1978, it does good work for
the rising veterans’ movement in that it shows Americans how deeply the war affected
those who served, but it does not suggest any hope for those veterans. In fact, it depicts
only the “Superman” character of Michael as able to survive the war even moderately
well. The other characters are shown to be weaker than Michael: Steven suffers serious
physical injuries, and Nick is so mentally destroyed he brings about his own death. The
film does draw attention to the previously ignored cultural wounds of the war, but it does
not offer any hope of transcending them. 5
th
of July, on the other hand, suggests a path of
acceptance for audiences, as well as for the characters. Ken’s message, “Swallow it and
live, baby,” urges audiences to accept the Vietnam War as it was, not to revise it and not

26
 Both veteran playwrights with whom I spoke for this study objected to The Deer
Hunter’s portrayal of the war. David Berry’s G.R. Point was written before The Deer
Hunter appeared so it does not respond to the film, but John Di Fusco’s Tracers
(discussed in the next chapter) was written in partial response to The Deer Hunter’s
depiction of the veteran experience. Both Berry and Di Fusco object to the Russian
roulette trope, which they see as fabricated, and each said he found the film “too dark.”
Berry and Di Fusco, who were both in combat situations, were clear that the veteran
experience included a good deal of camaraderie and boredom, as well as horror.
 
 
152 
to ignore it, but to work through the tragedy in order to survive it. It may be that
Wilson’s pragmatic suggestion oversimplifies the difficult process of assimilation for the
veteran, and it certainly does not examine the role of the government or the national
mythology in creating the Vietnam War, but it is an admonition not to allow the trauma
of the war to cause the country’s demise.
Wilson has said that Ken is “an English teacher who just happens to be a vet”
(qtd. in Barnett 113). Wilson’s specification indicates that he does not want Ken’s
veteran identity to be considered primary; he prefers that Ken’s profession identify him.
In addition, Ken and Jed are gay, but the play does not make their sexuality an element of
the conflict or drama; instead, it is simply who they are. Wilson’s choice to de-
emphasize identity issues is notable because of what it suggests about 5th of July’s
historical moment. Wilson’s progressive characterization suggests a timely social need to
recognize commonalities rather than to emphasize differences. Wilson sees Ken’s ability
to make a contribution to his community as his defining characteristic; his disability and
his sexuality are not as significant to his character as what he can do for others. I make
this point to contrast the spirit of unification prevalent in the drama of the late 1970s with
the emphasis on identity issues that will arise in plays of the 1980s. The establishment of
the veteran identity becomes a primary concern of Vietnam War drama of the 80s,
fueling the veterans’ movement and contributing to the building of the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial in Washington D.C. in 1982. Plays with such agendas are examined in the
next chapter. At this moment, however, the emphasis is on unity rather than dividedness,
collective growth and survival rather than individuation.
153 
Diverging from the late 1970s trend of using theatrical realism to speak of the
Vietnam War, Amlin Gray’s How I Got That Story (1979) utilizes Brechtian techniques
to comment on the United States’ inability to comprehend its most recent war. Like
Heller and Guare in the late 1960s, Gray looks to distance audiences from their emotions
about the war enough to allow them to contemplate it critically, and also like Heller and
Guare, Gray’s play is darkly comic, a quality that facilitates that emotional distancing.
Audiences are alienated from direct empathetic identification with the characters by the
plays’ overt theatricality, as well as by their incongruous use of humor in the treatment of
such a somber subject, and as a result, the fabricated nature of the war comes to light. In
Heller’s New Haven, the war is depicted as having been created in order to sustain the
military industry; in Guare’s Muzeeka, it is depicted as necessary to sustain capitalism.
Gray expands on these themes by depicting the war as a series of media events perceived
by the American public as shocking, inscrutable, and utterly unconnected by any unifying
narrative, whether of national mythology or cause-and-effect.
How I Got That Story follows a nameless reporter from his entry into Ambo-land
(Vietnam) through a number of traumatic experiences that challenge his professional
objectivity. He witnesses a monk’s self-immolation, survives both a plane crash and a
gunshot wound, and is held prisoner by guerilla fighters. Through it all, he tries to obtain
“facts” to include in his dispatches, facts such as a wounded soldier’s hometown and
whether he enlisted or was drafted, claiming that without such background information
he has nothing to report. He tries to contextualize what he sees and to explain cause-and-
effect relationships between events, but the “story” never coalesces because he
understands too little about both the culture of Ambo-land and the history of the conflict.
154 
Gray was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War but served in-country as a
medic. He was a participant in the war’s events, but not a combatant, and thus it makes
sense that his protagonist is a reporter rather than a soldier. The position allows the
character a measure of objectivity and distance from life-and-death situations in order to
attempt a rational processing of the events he observes. In addition, the choice allows
Gray to comment on the role of the media in disseminating to the American public
images and stories that exacerbated the United States’ cultural misunderstanding of
Vietnam.
One other actor—Gray calls the character “The Historical Event”—plays all the
people the Reporter encounters in his Vietnam experience, twenty separate characters,
among them the inscrutable Dragon Lady of Madame Ing, the gung-ho photographer, the
young Vietnamese prostitute, the superstitious yet jaded G.I., and the lifer officer ripe for
fragging. The actor changes character in each episode of the play, episodes linked
without segue or explanation and introduced by slides announcing each scene’s title.
Gray also indicates that this actor should be responsible for making all necessary sound
effects, which should be obviously not realistic. These alienating effects make clear the
theatricality of the work, which provides the emotional distancing required for critical
contemplation of a sensitive subject, but more importantly, they establish the reporter’s
perception of Ambo-land as both homogenous and sharply disconnected. The use of one
character to represent every person engaged in the war suggests the reporter’s perception
of them all as mere components of a larger event, not as unique individuals, and the fact
that scenes change abruptly without segue suggests the reporter’s inability to make
important connection between events and thus to understand the larger political
155 
underpinnings of Ambo-land’s conflict. Representing the perspective of the average
American, the reporter is hindered by his cultural conditioning from understanding the
war in any depth. In other words, How I Got That Story suggests that Americans do not
appreciate the complexity of Vietnamese culture, perceiving individuals and events with
unique concerns as all alike, while at the same time failing to comprehend the interrelated
nature of seemingly unrelated occurrences.
Gray emphasizes this concept by specifying the play’s setting: “A wide shallow
space, as bare of props and set pieces as possible. This will help characterize the EVENT
as the REPORTER sees it: broadly, shallowly, and in sharply isolated fragments” (ix).
The reporter witnesses the self-immolation of a monk and is bewildered by what seem to
be contradictory spiritual and political motivations for his actions. He is summoned to
meet with the leader of Ambo-land’s government, Madame Ing, who speaks cryptically:
“We will never be perfectly inscrutable to you until we have killed you and you do not
know why” (13). Hoping for valuable news material from combat, the reporter catches a
ride into the field, meeting both a GI who detests him for volunteering for hazardous duty
and a photographer whose prize shot captures his own arm being shot off. Along the
way, the reporter is injured, captured, and eventually looks to settle in Ambo-land and
adopt an Ambonese orphan. The reporter’s journey is disjointed, a series of shocking
experiences disassociated from political context and without a comprehensible cause-
and-effect structure. In Vietnam Protest Theatre, Nora M. Alter refers to this effect as
“spectacularization,” which transforms the war “through the reporting media, into images
so radically severed from their ties to reality that they may be taken for reality
themselves” (157). This collage of experiences Gray has created does not function
156 
merely as retrospective or satire; it represents the general American understanding of
a war experienced primarily through highly publicized news events, such as the famous
images of the execution of the Viet Cong fighter and of the young girl running from a
napalm attack. Because most Americans were unfamiliar with Vietnamese culture and
history, because the reasons behind the United States’ intervention in Vietnam were
unclear, and because much of the information coming from the war was either
sensationalized or altered to fit military and/or political agendas, the entire war
experience became surreal—the “characters” absurd, two-dimensional types, the events
unrelated and incomprehensible—just as the play depicts it.
In the play, the result of this “spectacularization” is the shattering of the reporter’s
mental state and his descent into catatonia. The final scene depicts the reporter stunned
into stasis, literally overwhelmed by unrelenting images of violence and destruction
devoid of rational explanations or redemptive outcomes. The wild photographer the
reporter met on his plane ride into combat situations returns, now having lost his legs as
well, to snap the reporter’s picture. That image is then projected to the audience, but the
face in the photograph is not the reporter’s; it is the face of the actor playing the
Historical Event. Gray’s commentary here is that the reporter has been completely
absorbed into the event, taken over by the story he was sent to report. The war has been
all consuming, so much so that the reporter’s identity is entirely erased.
Zinman believes this ending undermines the dramatic structure of what has come
before. “The play stops rather than ends,” she writes.
The war correspondent and his story have become one, just as the media
and the war seemed to become one. The audience has not witnessed a
death scene but a photo opportunity, and thus the Historical Event is
157 
merely one of many anonymous death/events rather than a decisive
conclusion of the play. (12)

Although Zinman argues in her essay that these indeterminate endings are weaknesses in
Vietnam War drama, this non-conclusion is quite appropriate to Gray’s message. Gray
does not claim that the reporter has died; his stage directions are as follows: “The
Reporter shuts his eyes. As the sounds continue, he falls into a position almost too
awkward to be sleep; a position that suggests a drunken stupor or a state of shock” (61).
If the body of the play is constructed to represent the experience of the war for the
average American—destabilizing, shocking, incomprehensible—the ending of the play
similarly represents the war’s end—draining, anti-climactic, discouraging. The reporter
is Gray’s synechdocal American, and the play depicts the fracturing of ideological
continuity and its concomitant debilitation of progress, on a national scale as well as a
personal one. When the last Americans left Saigon on April 30, 1975, the United States
could not rejoice in victory as it did in 1945 at the end of World War II. The war in
Vietnam had been lost, and the experience was so distressing that virtually the entire
country would repress discussion of it. Through the end of the decade, the United States
would move as if shell-shocked, disillusioned by the war years and further hobbled by the
ongoing energy crisis and economic recession. Gray’s play premiered in April of 1979,
just months before President Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech, which aimed
to stir Americans out of the large-scale cultural malaise, and How I Got That Story
depicts both the war experience that fostered that malaise and the stunned stasis of the
country that resulted. If the ending of Gray’s play is unsatisfying, it is because the
experience it depicts was unsatisfying. Gray impresses upon his audience the confusion
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of the Vietnam War experience and then simply leaves them with it, very much as
Americans were left with the experience to make sense of individually.
I have argued throughout this study that Vietnam War drama reflects the historical
moment’s most pressing war issue; thus, it may seem to be an aberration that in 1979
Gray chooses to reenact the war’s events rather than to deal with what may be the more
immediate concerns of veteran reintegration or inspiring of national morale. Alter takes
such notice of Gray’s approach:
Writing four years after the final withdrawal of American troops from
Vietnam in 1975, Gray could afford to present a truly retrospective
dramatization of what has become public history. It is all the more
significant that, in contrast to most other plays written at the time, How I
Got That Story still focuses on the war in Vietnam rather than switching
its attention to war veterans coming home. (157)

Alter’s view of Gray’s play as “truly retrospective” is echoed by New York Times theatre
critic Frank Rich’s interpretation of the play as depicting the effect of the war on 1960s
America:
The playwright has a word, “imprintment,” to describe his hero’s sad fate:
It’s what happens when a reporter “goes to cover a country and the
country covers him.” But, of course, reporters were not the only ones to
be imprinted during the Vietnam War; the readers back home were, too.
That’s why How I Got That Story transcends its many, intricate parts to
embrace the larger story of the Vietnamization of America during the
1960s. While that story isn’t a scoop in 1980, the Second Stage has
abundantly proved that an old nightmare can still be brought back to
stunning life. (46)

I do not agree, however, with Alter and Rich that How I Got That Story is merely
retrospective, that it simply restages “an old nightmare.” Instead, I suggest that Gray’s
play does work similar to that done by Rabe’s Streamers: it attempts a kind of “summing
up” of the war experience, crucial in the late 1970s for the assimilation of the war into
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both cultural and individual understandings. Streamers, I have suggested, works to
encapsulate the psychological effect of the Vietnam War experience into a metaphor, in
order to give the experience comprehensible shape. How I Got That Story works along
the same lines, but rather than focus attention on the experience of the soldier as Rabe
does, Gray represents the experience of the non-combatant, the involved observer. The
purpose is the same, however: to make the Vietnam War less debilitating to the American
understanding by giving it representation it as something—even if it is necessary to admit
that the “something” is absurd or irrational. In other words, it served late 1970s America
well to be able to explain the Vietnam War in some way—in any way, as metaphor or
surreal experience—rather than to wrestle with the abstract horror of it.
27
J. W. Fenn’s
summary of Gray’s play gives this kind of explanation, absolving the audience of
responsibility for rationalizing the war: “An irrational war defies logical analysis and
comprehension, and no sense can be made of it either from an individual or collective
perspective” (184). Fenn’s explanation is liberating, for if it is agreed that “no sense can
be made of it,” people are free to cease trying; the experience can be excluded from one’s
struggle for rational coherence. It is somewhat comforting, I suggest, to accept the war as
incomprehensible, rather than to believe it must be comprehensible but to be unable to
make sense of it, but as I have suggested at the beginning of this section, dismissing the
war as incomprehensible or relegating it to the realm of metaphor has potentially
detrimental political repercussions. The causes and effects of the Vietnam War would

27
This theory makes it possible to argue in favor of The Deer Hunter’s Russian Roulette
scenes as useful metaphor rather than against them as unrealistic distortion of the
experience, as a number of critics and veterans claim.
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have to be examined critically at some time, but it would be left to playwrights (and
scholars, historians, and politicians) of later years to take up this task.
I conclude this chapter on the 1970s with a brief treatment of three one-act
comedies by James McLure, another veteran playwright. In the post-Vietnam War
period, veteran playwrights, or playwrights using veteran words and testimony, will
become the rule rather than the exception, primarily because the veteran voice gains
greater and greater credibility as a source of information. McLure’s plays are traditional,
realistic comedies with undertones of sadness and loss coming from the characters’
experiences with the Vietnam War. The theme of the war is the pervasive subtext of each
play, but war specifics are mentioned only sporadically and rather superficially; it is
character background rather than the plays’ main topics. I have decided to include these
plays, despite their tangential treatment of the war, in order to illustrate the generic
breadth of Vietnam War drama. At the end of the decade, it has become acceptable—
maybe even welcome—to speak of the war in a comic context. McLure does not
trivialize the experience of the Vietnam War, but he encourages audiences to laugh at the
petty conflicts of his characters, conflicts that, because of their superficiality, contrast
sharply with the characters’ far more serious difficulties engendered by the war. The
laughs are welcome after years of theatrical protests and expressions of pain, but
audiences are not allowed to forget that the war still haunts the characters and the nation.
The plays—Lone Star, Laundry and Bourbon, and Pvt. Wars (1979)—all have
similar form and content. Each is a three-character, one-act play; the actors in Lone Star
and Pvt. Wars are all men, and in Laundry and Bourbon, all women. Each play has a
strong main character, a quirky sidekick, and an antagonist who plays a fool of sorts. The
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conflicts range from drunken squabbles to social gossip to pranks, but beneath such
minutiae runs a pervasive longing for a more innocent and comprehensible pre-war
existence. McLure’s concern through all three plays are the re-integration difficulties of
the Vietnam veteran—his inability to keep a job, his sense of displacement, his longing
for a world that is understandable—and the effect of the veteran’s return on his family
and community. The Vietnam War is not the topic of these plays in the way that it is for
the majority of Vietnam War drama, but it is the crucial subtext, the event that has
disrupted the lives of the characters. The characters focus their attention on immediate
issues and rarely speak of the war directly, but it is the underlying source of their
confusion and sadness, quietly present throughout the action, haunting the characters
much as the war continued to haunt Americans even as they did their best to put it behind
them. Disillusionment pervades the characters’ lives, as it did the nation in 1979,
stunting forward progress.
Clive Barnes prophesied in 1971 that “Nostalgia may prove to be the overriding
emotion of the seventies, with remembrance of things past far more comfortable than the
realization of things present” (qtd. in Brantley xvii). Lone Star and Laundry and
Bourbon, intended as a double bill, embody Barnes’ prediction, as the characters long for
the freedom and promise of days past and feel unsettled in the post-Vietnam era, in which
everything seems different, less exciting, flatter than before. Lone Star takes place
behind a roadhouse bar in Maynard, Texas, the favorite haunt of Roy, a Vietnam veteran,
and his brother Ray, who was disqualified from service because of a football injury. In
the drunken conversation that occurs among Roy, Ray, and Cletis, a friend of Ray’s (who
admires Roy but whom Roy despises), it becomes known that Ray had an affair with
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Roy’s wife while Roy was in Vietnam and that Cletis has just returned from crashing
Ray’s beloved car into a tree. Roy, while already struggling to put his Vietnam
experience behind him, loses the last vestiges of his youth and idealism in the same night.
In the following exchange, McLure captures the veteran’s desire to return not only to the
place he calls home but also to a time of innocence, to a state of mind that mercifully
excludes the experience of war he has just endured:
ROY: You don’t know how many times I thought about that. I promised
myself that was the first damn thing I’d do, was get drunk in back of
Angel’s. And now I’m doin’ it.
RAY: (Pause.) You been back two years now, Roy.
ROY: So what? (Pause.) I served my time.
RAY: Well, you do this every night.
ROY: But you see, when you’re trying to come back to a place in your
mind you want it to be how you remember it. Not how it is. (10)

McLure reveals that this ritual of Roy’s has been going on for a long time; we are not
witnessing Roy’s first visit to Angel’s after the war. However, beneath the humor of this
moment lies the nostalgia of which Barnes speaks, the desire to re-experience a memory
and a state of being, not merely to revisit a location. The emergence of television shows
Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley in the 1970s attest to Americans’ own nostalgia at
this time; the revisiting of an idealized 1950s gave comfort to a nation longing for the
simplicity of previous decades.
McLure also recognizes the shift in public attitudes toward the veteran and in
veterans’ attitudes toward their own service. In the years immediately following the war,
veterans often deemphasized, even denied, their Vietnam service because American
society was not particularly receptive to returning GIs. As the veteran’s movement
gained momentum, however, service in Vietnam became a mark of great sacrifice for the
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nation, and the veteran became recognized as a patriot rather than as an
embarrassment. In the quotation above, Roy implies that, while he served his time in
Vietnam, a number of men in America did not: “I served my time.” In the following
exchange, the audience learns that Ray was one of those men who escaped service, a fact
that exacerbates Roy’s feeling of isolation among his loved ones:
ROY: (Pointing his finger in Ray’s chest for emphasis.) And don’t
forget: I served my time.
RAY: (Ashamed.) They wouldn’t take me. You know I had football
knee.
ROY: What you had is football brain. And when you’re too stupid to get
into the Army, you’re too dumb to breathe. Now that’s what I call dumb.
RAY: Not so dumb I didn’t go to Nam and get myself shot.
ROY: What did you just call it?
RAY: Nam. That’s what you call it.
ROY: Don’t try to be cool. You can’t say Nam. You weren’t there. It’s
Vit Nam to you. (10)

Here, Roy also protects his Vietnam experience by refusing to allow Ray to use the
language of the soldier. Plays that emphasize the veteran experience in Vietnam (Berry’s
G.R. Point and John Di Fusco’s Tracers, for example) make a special point to transcribe
exactly the language of the grunt, for the acquisition of the jargon was both crucial to
effective communication in combat and definitive of the seasoned soldier. Roy prohibits
the use of that jargon by his brother, whom he deems unworthy of the privilege, just as
veterans guarded their experience from its being co-opted by civilians who escaped the
horrors of the war but now sought the cultural cachet of the veteran.
Finally, McLure communicates the frustration felt by the veteran who returned to
a community that simply could not live up to his expectations. Hobbled by his service
experience, the veteran struggled to find a purpose in his old life. Roy laments, “The
thing is … nothing has been the same since I come back. Things I see … people I see …
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it’s like they never was. The thing is … I can’t seem to get nothin’ started no
more…” (30). America was enduring similar frustration in 1979, struggling with the
economic recession and the concomitant plunge in national morale and progress.
McLure does not leave audiences in sadness, however, for he ends his play, not unlike
Wilson ends 5
th
of July, by encouraging acceptance of the past and a focus on the future.
The following exchange expresses Roy’s resignation to his new existence, one in which
he will leave behind his adolescent behavior but also his unbridled optimism:
RAY: You can get a new car.
ROY: Won’t be the same.
RAY: No.
ROY: Things is never the same. (The brothers look at each other.)
RAY: No. (34)

The knowing look between the brothers acknowledges the shift in their relationship
caused by Ray’s affair with Roy’s wife, but it also speaks of Roy’s need to grow up, to
stop trying to recapture his lost youth, and to set his attention and energies on making a
new life for himself and his family. As a reflection of the times, these lines encourage
Americans to resist the paralyzing nostalgia and regret spawned by the Vietnam War
years and to set about making a life anew.
Laundry and Bourbon, the companion piece to Lone Star, opens with Roy’s wife
Elizabeth folding laundry on the back porch of their house, anxious over Roy’s absence
from home for a few days. Her best friend Hattie stops by for a visit (and a few drinks)
and learns of Roy’s absence and that, unbeknownst to him, Elizabeth is newly pregnant.
Into this mix comes Amy Lee, the wife of Lone Star’s Cletis, who invites herself over
primarily to gather and spread town gossip. The topic of the war is even less present in
Laundry and Bourbon than it is in Lone Star. Since the characters are all women who
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stayed stateside during the war, the combat experience touches them only through
Roy. However, McLure makes it clear that the war is still a factor in these women’s
lives, especially in Elizabeth’s, who struggles to help Roy reintegrate into life in
Maynard. Elizabeth tries to explain to Hattie how Roy has pulled away from her since he
returned from Vietnam:
HATTIE: I know. I seen the change. But believe me you’ve been perfect
about it.
ELIZABETH: I haven’t been anything. I haven’t done anything. He was
the one that went off for two years. He was the one got shot up. He’s the
one that has nightmares.
HATTIE: Nightmares.
ELIZABETH: Yeah, almost every night. (Pause.) Anyway, now he’s
back and he can’t seem to get nothing started. He made me quit the job at
the pharmacy. He worked some out at his Dad’s place. He’s done some
rough-necking out in the oil fields. But then he always gets in fights and
gets himself fired.
HATTIE: Well … what’s he got to say for himself.
ELIZABETH: He says he’s looking for something.
HATTIE: Hmnnn. What?
ELIZABETH: He doesn’t know what. He says everything has changed
here in Maynard.
HATTIE: Nothing’s changed in Maynard since the Civil War.
ELIZABETH: I want him back the way it used to be. (13-14)

Here, McLure depicts the chasm that opened between the returning veteran and his loved
ones. The veteran’s combat experience prohibited him from re-entering his old life, even
if all the components of that life were still there. Roy has been fundamentally changed
by his service, and regardless of his desire to try to recapture the past (and his wife’s
desire for the same thing), he cannot reconnect with his life again. McLure treats this
problem of re-integration relatively lightly in his plays—since they are comedies, it
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would not serve them well to engage issues of alcoholism or PTSD too strongly
28
—
but he portrays his characters sympathetically, recognizing the profound disruption the
war continues to have on veterans and families, even in less serious cases. McLure
expresses the veteran’s feeling of displacement, for not only has his perception changed,
everyone else’s lives have continued in the year or more of the veteran’s service. Again,
though, McLure ends on an optimistic note, as Hattie puts her hand on Elizabeth’s
stomach, acknowledging the promise of a new life.
In Pvt. Wars, three Vietnam veterans alternately amuse, irritate, and comfort one
another in a veterans’ hospital, while waiting for the release they both long for and dread.
The men prefer the company of fellow veterans, even when they actively dislike one
another, to that of civilians, whom they see as unlikely to understand them. The stasis at
the end of the play, when the men find that their plans to leave the hospital are thwarted,
comes as both a disappointment and a relief; despite their hope to re-engage with their
families, they feel more secure in the safe world of the hospital than in the unknown
civilian world, which has moved on without them. In this play, McLure acknowledges
the wounds of the returning veteran, both physical and emotional. Gately struggles with
his “nerves,” and he hopes to be let out of the hospital when he proves he can fix a radio.
His friend Silvio reminds him, though, that he can leave whenever he wants, suggesting
that he voluntarily stays hospitalized. Silvio has lost his genitals in combat but
overcompensates for his emasculation by flashing nurses and playing the alpha male
among the other patients. Natwick complains of having to wear a urine bag, attesting to

28
Serious dramatic treatments of these issues will appear in the 1980s, when veteran
concerns of Agent Orange poisoning and posttraumatic stress disorder become commonly
known to the American public.
167 
his wounds as well. Pvt. Wars, like Lone Star, tells of the difficulties of reintegration
for the veteran, but the reintegration is complicated in this play by the more serious
injuries suffered by the characters. They have yet to make it back to their homes, a
transition forestalled by their injuries, but one suspects that when, and if, they return,
their homecomings will likely be fraught difficulties similar to those faced by Roy.
Unusual for Vietnam War drama of this period, McLure makes a bit of a political
commentary in a discussion between Gately and Natwick about a literary character
Gately admires:
NATWICK: You can’t draft Hiawatha.
GATELY: Even if you did, what makes you think he’d serve? Hiawatha
was one of the greatest Indians of all time. What makes you think he’d
fight for this shitty Army? He’d go to Canada first!
NATWICK: Are you saying Hiawatha was a draft dodger?
GATELY: Not if it was an Indian war. If it was an Indian war, hell, he’d
put on his war paint, get in his canoe and go whip ass!
NATWICK: (Weary.) But only his own wars.
GATELY: That’s right! And if everybody would fight their own private
wars, things would be all right. But no, people have to keep sticking their
noses into other people’s wars! (18)

Here, Gately challenges the kind of American interventionism that created the Vietnam
War. While most Vietnam War play of the late 1970s eschew political arguments,
McLure takes a moment to voice an opinion that would become more popular in the
years to come, as the country protested intervention in Nicaragua and Beirut. The
country displayed what became known as “Vietnam Syndrome,” the reluctance to
intervene in the conflicts of other countries for fear that a Vietnam-like quagmire would
result.
Even with his political commentary, McLure continues his optimism about
America’s future. Gately, who has been trying to repair radios despite the fact that Silvio
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secretly steals parts from him, sums up America’s path in terms of his experience
with the radios:
I’m not discouraged. The main thing is to keep your incoming parts ahead
of your outgoing parts. America was built on this theory. […] The Free
Enterprise System. And if one guy like me can make a radio work—then
America works. (26)

McLure’s metaphor of the radio parts is suggestive again of the path America should take
into the future: he recognizes that there is a loss, but encourages a focus on the positive.
Believing the positive outweighs the negative, he asserts, will be the key to America’s
rebuilding.
The plays by Berry, Wilson, and McLure all end with a suggestion of hope, a very
cautious and qualified optimism that peeks out from beneath each character’s nostalgic
longing for the days before the war. In his plays, McLure captures the pervasive sadness
the Vietnam War left in American society, its ripple effects on individuals and
communities. McLure’s characters are alive and relatively healthy, but their lives have
been significantly altered by the war, and that experience subverts their attempts to
reignite productivity. This subtext of the war mitigates the comedy of each play and
expresses America’s inability to emerge completely from the “hangover” of the war;
however, McLure, like Wilson, suggests that strengthened human connections will
temper the harshness of Americans’ post-war lives.
Seeking to make the war expressible becomes a major goal of artists in the
postwar years, and they utilize a range of techniques to try to capture the unique surreal
quality of the Vietnam War experience. Michael Herr’s memoir Dispatches (1977) is
lauded for succeeding in this task; Herr’s psychedelic prose manages to express the
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cognitive dissonance felt by grunts who were alternately immersed in brutal combat
and replenished with small comforts from home. The combination of the familiar—
American rock-and-roll, beer, movies—with the utterly foreign—warfare, jungle
landscape—created a jarring experience that could neither be reconciled with traditional
beliefs nor expressed in traditional ways. Because the Vietnam War was almost
universally described as something one had to experience to understand, the primary
authorities on the war were those who had been there; veteran voices became recognized
as the ones who could speak of the war best. Berry, McLure, Rabe, and Gray are all
veteran playwrights, and they each use different techniques to express the war
experience—through metaphor (Streamers), realism (G.R. Point) and theatricality (How I
Got That Story). This diversity of approach is indicative of the elusive nature of the war
and the necessity of artistic variation in striving to express it.
The plays of the 1970s I have examined in this chapter refocus attention on the
individual, primarily the veteran, but also on antiwar activists and veterans’ families.
Most broad criticisms of American ideology have been left in the 1960s, and instead
plays expose the effects of ideology on a personal level. As the decade turns, Vietnam
War drama will return to its political origins, with veterans seeking greater social
recognition and appreciation for their service. As the war becomes fodder for an
increasing number of film and television productions, its representation in the theatre
declines somewhat, and the plays that do appear in the 1980s and afterward focus almost
entirely on the veteran experience, a focus that brings important social change for those
who served but that dangerously ignores root causes of the war.
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CHAPTER 3

The 1980s, 1990s, and Afterward

The election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980 ushered in a decade of restored
patriotism, economic prosperity (at least for some), and social conservatism. Largely
characterized by cultural superficiality and pastiche, the 1980s has been described as “an
insubstantial period, one given to surface and design rather than substance and content”
(Bondi vii). This quality was embodied in the nation’s new leader: Reagan, a former
actor, projected an image of optimism that enhanced his appeal to a majority of
Americans. The country was hungry for a change. It needed economic relief from the
crippling recession and energy shortages of the 1970s and improved confidence from the
demoralization of the Vietnam War and the Iran hostage crisis. Reagan helped to
stimulate both; his “supply-side economics” cut taxes to encourage investment and his
patriotic rhetoric redefined the war in Vietnam as “a noble cause.” For some Americans,
the economic strategies worked well, and they were rewarded with substantial incomes;
in other cases, the strategies sent jobs overseas, and the wealth gap widened alarmingly.
Similarly, the revisionism of the Vietnam War relieved veterans from their social
disgrace and helped to publicize their reintegration struggles, but it also obscured the
serious ideological problems that had created the war in the first place. On the surface,
the country was flourishing, but underneath, the dissent was still brewing.
As the decade began, the country would break its long silence on the topic of the
Vietnam War and begin to address the myriad problems faced by veterans and their
families. In his excellent history of the Vietnam veterans’ movement, Gerald Nicosia
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notes the following as factors that contributed to the renewed prevalence of the topic
in the press:
a spate of excellent Vietnam movies in the late 1970s like The Deerhunter
[sic] and Apocalypse Now; the rapid expansion of Vietnam Veterans of
America […]; the return of the Iran hostages; the fight to save the Vet
Centers; the release of the five-volume Legacies of Vietnam study in
March 1981; but perhaps most of all a sufficient lapse of time for the
nation to begin examining its own dark and painful deeds relative to that
tiny Southeast Asian country, which like it or not had grown to become a
touchstone of the American conscience. (401)

Much of the credit for focusing attention on the struggles of the veteran is due to the
veterans themselves and their unflagging, often extreme, efforts to have their concerns
addressed. Their insistence on medical attention for Agent Orange-related illnesses, on
funding for the Vet Centers that provided counseling, and on governmental recognition of
their service and sacrifice helped redefine their role in American society. Carroll reports,
“A 1979 Harris poll found that most people viewed Vietnam veterans as victims, not
perpetrators, of a senseless war” (315), a significant shift from the largely negative
perception of veterans during and immediately after the war. Revisionists explained the
war as a failure of strategy, not a failure of ideology, and claimed that Congress and
antiwar activists put the veterans in an unwinnable situation. In the 1980s, the issues of
the war’s validity and its ideological roots were pushed aside in favor of establishing the
Vietnam veteran as a hero. To decry the war years after it ended would be to devalue the
service of the veterans; thus, the terms of the argument were changed.
In the theatre, this focus on the veteran is paramount, and 1980s Vietnam War
drama contains almost none of the cultural criticism found in the plays of the 1960s and
little of the optimism and encouragement of unity of the plays of the late 1970s. The
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severity of veteran suffering may have been discounted in the 1970s; the need to
relegate the war to the past was so great on both a national and an individual level the
destructive by-products of the war’s legacy were largely ignored. But by 1980, the
veterans were determined to gain cultural recognition, and the theatre was one way they
did so.
The Veteran Experience
In his January 22, 1985 review of John Di Fusco’s Tracers (1980), New York
Times drama critic Frank Rich states, “It doesn’t make any difference what ideological
side we chose during the war—we’re on the side of these veterans as soon as we meet
them” (368).
29
This emotional alignment with the Vietnam veteran is exactly the desired
effect of Tracers, which grew out of workshops developed by Di Fusco and seven other
veterans who comprised the original cast. The appearance of Tracers marks not only an
important step in the evolution of Vietnam War drama, but it also serves as a galvanizing
force in the veterans’ movement. By 1980, Vietnam veterans no longer denied their war
service in fear of being socially shunned. Thanks in large part to President Reagan
having declared the Vietnam War “a noble cause,” instead of the “mistake” many others
had called it, as well as to cover stories in Time and Newsweek, veterans were getting a
new public image. They were not, however, receiving any more help from the
government than they had when they were virtual outcasts. In fact, in spite of Reagan’s
patriotic rhetoric redeeming the Vietnam veteran and reimagining the war, he cut $900

29
 By the time Frank Rich reviewed Tracers in New York City in 1985, it had enjoyed
several long runs in Los Angeles and Chicago and had been rewritten to include the
image of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the Resurrection scene at the play’s end.
 
173 
million from the Veterans Administration (VA) budget as soon as he took office, a
decision that eliminated funding to 91 Veteran Outreach Centers, perhaps the most
crucial service in successful veteran reintegration (Nicosia 397). Veterans believed that
this decision was not motivated only by economic concerns but also by the government’s
fear of the Vet Centers’ power to organize disgruntled veterans into political active
groups. The clash between the VA, which repeatedly denied that veterans’ medical and
psychological problems could be directly related to Vietnam service, and veterans, who
believed that their government’s indifference to their social and medical needs was yet
another betrayal, came to a head in May 1981. Veterans occupied the Wadsworth VA
building in Los Angeles and staged a hunger strike both inside the building and out in
memory of their fallen comrade James Hopkins, who had died from Agent Orange-
related health problems. A military funeral was held for Hopkins at the Westwood
Veterans Cemetery, in which director John DiFusco and the cast of Tracers were key
participants (Nicosia 409).
Di Fusco specifies that Tracers is not about the war, it is about “the Vietnam
experience.” Unlike Vietnam War drama of the 1960s and early 70s, the purpose of
Tracers was not to argue against the war or to discredit individuals or policies that
created or perpetuated the military involvement. Instead, it was developed to tell the
story of the American men who served in Vietnam and to preserve their experiences as
part of history. Di Fusco felt that the experience of the average GI had not been
expressed fully or accurately by any representation up to the point of Tracers’ creation
174 
(interview)
30
. Di Fusco served in Phu Cat, Vietnam from November 1967 to
November 1968, returning home to Los Angeles to study theatre in college. Carrying an
emotional burden few civilians could (or would) help him to bear, Di Fusco began the
workshops primarily to work through his war experiences with other veterans. Later,
though, he felt a growing need for public acknowledgment of their experience and sought
to develop the workshop activities into a full-length play. The reticence of the general
public in the late 1970s to speak about the recent war led Di Fusco to believe that those
who served in Vietnam were “at risk of becoming forgotten veterans.” “Hawks thought it
was a failure, and doves thought it was a disgrace,” he said, “but the vets would never
forget it” (interview). Premiering in October 1980 at the Odyssey Theatre in Los
Angeles, the play became a communal, confessional event for the veterans who
performed it, as well as for those who witnessed it, and it contributed significantly to
raising awareness of veterans’ myriad concerns.
The play is episodic, using an ensemble cast to represent the diversity of the
veteran identity as well as the diversity of experience. Di Fusco deliberately avoided
creating a play that centered on a single protagonist (as Berry’s G.R. Point does) because
doing so would tell only one story and would construe that one experience as
representative of every veteran, and he makes clear that “everybody had a different
Vietnam” (interview). Tracers, then, is a collage of the Vietnam veteran’s experiences,
from his initiation into basic training to his efforts to reassimilate after returning home,
including the terrifying first firefight, the boredom of downtime, recreational drug use,

30
 I met with Di Fusco in October 2009 during rehearsals for Tracers at the Elephant
Theatre in Los Angeles. He kindly granted me some time to talk about his Vietnam
service and the play that developed from it. 
175 
both rowdy and quiet camaraderie, and death in combat. It is a mix of realism and
stylization; Di Fusco aims for realistic presentation of dialogue and emotion, but also
uses pantomime, choreography, ritualistic dance, and lighting effects to convey the
surrealism of the war experience. The influence of the Open Theater, the Living Theatre,
and Jerzy Grotowski, whose work emphasizes movement and images, are obvious in
Tracers, which aims to make the audience feel the veterans’ experience rather than think
about it critically. Tracers employs choreography and Tai Chi movements to suggest
bonding rituals and the imprintment of individuals with the new culture in which they
find themselves immersed. One scene in particular, “Blanket Party,” uses pantomime to
represent the GIs’ distasteful job of collecting their fellow soldiers’ body parts after a
brutal combat mission. Rich comments, “While the gore is left to our imaginations, we
can’t help sharing one soldier’s urge to vomit” (370). This visceral reaction is precisely
the goal of Tracers. Similarly, the climactic scene, “Ambush,” simulates the chaos and
terror of a disastrous firefight; productions often utilize a strobe light, crashing sound
effects, and onstage smoke to achieve the disconcerting effect. The scenes, structured to
lead spectators through extreme waves of emotion, encourage sympathetic identification
with the veterans regardless of political affiliation.
While the emotion of the play invites audiences to feel what the veteran feels, the
language of the play emphasizes the veteran’s alienation from his old culture. The
specific language of the war is a crucial component of the Vietnam veteran identity, and
Di Fusco made clear that one goal of his in developing Tracers was to preserve the war’s
jargon, the acquisition of which was indicative of the GI’s transformation from civilian to
soldier. The dialogue, described by Rich as “a jivey, at times funny, language that
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combines timeless military lingo with rock-‘n’-roll cadences, drug jargon, pidgin
Vietnamese and English, and an almost surreal litany of profanity” is introduced to the
audience in the second scene of the play, “Saigon List,” in which the actors string
together location names, nicknames, euphemisms, slang, and the like in a barrage of
terminology foreign and unexplained to the audience (369). Fenn sees this scene as
alienating to most spectators:
The verbal associations no doubt mean much to those who have had had to
fill sandbags and crouch behind them, and who have personal memories of
particular places. The images must remain unintelligible to the
uninitiated, however, and the scene would seem to appeal primarily to an
audience of veterans rather than to a general theatre audience. (194)

The unintelligibility of the scene to the non-veteran is not a flaw of the play, though, as
Fenn suggests; on the contrary, it serves an important purpose in establishing the veteran
identity as one very different from the average American, one with its own vocabulary
and set of references. If the words mean nothing to the spectator, that distancing only
serves to express the unique subjectivity of the Vietnam veteran, set apart from the
mainstream both by his experience and by the language he was forced to acquire to
survive it.
What seems most objectionable to academic critics is the play’s resistance to
summary, its refusal to encapsulate its message into an easily expressed thesis. For
example, Fenn is fairly dismissive of Tracers, affording it a mere two pages in his study
and determining that it “lacks the overall artistic or thematic direction essential to the
creation of a definitive dramatic statement” (195). He compares Tracers to Berry’s G.R.
Point despite the very different structures of the two plays, interpreting both as using “the
fragmented consciousness technique as its organizing structural element” (193). He also
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finds Tracers inferior to another episodic play, The Dramatization of 365 Days,
which he sees as doing similar work as Tracers but with better “guiding consciousness
and intensity” (193). Fenn’s preference is for thematic coherence, something Tracers
does not aim to produce. The veteran experience is multi-faceted, contradictory, and
ultimately unsettled, and the play that seeks to express that complex experience is not
likely to conform to traditional structure.
Zinman’s criticism of Tracers is not unlike Fenn’s; she objects to the play’s
refusal to answer the questions it poses at the beginning and thus to leave the audience
with a satisfying ending. For example, Tracers’ final scene, the “Epilogue,” is “an
extended version of the Prologue,” in which, Zinman argues, “the audience watches the
play destroy its own structure” (10).
31
In reiterating the questions and accusations of the
Prologue—“You were there?” “You were a pawn,” and “How does it feel to kill
somebody?”—the play thwarts the audience expectations of closure. Zinman argues that
“the answers have eluded both the players and the play, and only the debilitating
repetition remains” (10). However, veteran playwrights of the 1980s could not answer
the questions engendered by the war any more than playwrights of the 1960s could stop
its escalation. It is unreasonable to think that a play—any play—could bring about
closure to such a large, morally and politically complicated issue. Instead, Tracers, like
many Vietnam War plays, highlights the struggle it depicts; it does not attempt to offer a

31
 Di Fusco explains that he structured the play like a rock concert. It was not meant to
have a traditional plot; rather it was meant to link together a series of “songs,” whose
placement in the whole gave the play a satisfying ebb and flow of intensity. “Ambush”
ends the performance with a big finish and is followed by the “Epilogue,” which Di
Fusco meant to function as an encore. His intention was to stimulate the senses and the
emotions of the audience, not to follow traditional dramatic construction.
 
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solution. In his essay “‘No Body’s Perfect’: Method Acting and 50s Culture,” Leo
Braudy argues that the indeterminate endings of several 1950s films “show that the
conflict itself is the issue rather than the resolution” (288). I suggest that this is precisely
how Tracers works. Narrative closure allows one to see the conflict as resolved and thus
to put it out of one’s mind; because the struggle of the veteran was far from resolved, it
was the intention of Di Fusco (and other playwrights who use the same approach) to
underscore that fact.
As I mentioned in Chapter Two, the strong link between Vietnam War plays and
their historical moment often minimizes a play’s ability to maintain its social and/or
political relevance once the immediate concerns of that moment have passed. As a result,
few of the plays discussed thus far in this study enjoy production today. Tracers,
however, is a notable exception. Despite the fact that the specificities of the Vietnam
veteran’s experience are the play’s primary concern, Tracers still speaks powerfully to
audiences in the twenty-first century. It may be that the Vietnam War has risen to a
mythological level in American culture, and thus people are drawn to representations of
the experience the way they are drawn to genre films. More likely, though, Tracers
retains its relevance because it represents the veteran’s journey, and that journey is
similar for the majority of service personnel, even when the site of combat, the
nationality of the enemy, and public support for the war change. What Tracers depicts is
not only the unique experience of serving in Vietnam, but also the more general war
experience: the GI’s transformation from civilian to soldier, his psychological struggle
with killing, his fear of being killed, the friendships forged in times of great stress, the
difficulties of reentering society after combat service, and the isolation of the veteran
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from his loved ones and community. These experiences apply to men and women
fighting in any war, I daresay, and because the United States continues to deem warfare
necessary and to send troops into combat, Tracers continues to have a relevant message
for the American public.
In this way, Tracers has a political edge to it, even though it generally avoids any
direct commentary on political or ideological issues. Rich notes,
One war that is not refought in Tracers is the battle over the conflict’s
origins and validity. […] In general, the concerns in Tracers are more
primal than polemical. ‘How does it feel to kill somebody?’ is the
unsettling question that ricochets like an incantation throughout the play.
(370)

The “primal” concerns Rich indicates are the ones that give the play its staying power.
Tracers addresses the human suffering brought about by involvement in combat
situations, and Di Fusco adamantly reminds us that the individuals responsible for
creating war are often personally unfamiliar with that kind of suffering. When the United
States invaded Iraq, Di Fusco relinquished his right to collect royalties on performances
of Tracers, with the hope that doing so would encourage the mounting of a large number
of productions. He felt it important in a time of war to expose as many people as possible
to the veteran experience so those who supported the wars would be aware of how they
were asking service personnel to sacrifice. He mentioned specifically that President
George W. Bush did not have combat experience when he began the war with Iraq, and
often, people who support wars do so with only the vaguest understanding of what the
combat missions will mean for those who fight. Making Tracers available to the largest
number of spectators possible, Di Fusco hoped, would provide valuable information
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about the devastating and far-reaching effects of war on veterans of any conflict
(interview).
A recent production in which Di Fusco was involved was mounted at the Elephant
Theatre in Los Angeles. One of the final performances occurred on Veterans Day,
November 11, 2009, and in honor of the occasion, a panel of veterans spoke to the
audience after the show. Members of the panel included Di Fusco, original Tracers cast
members Vincent Caristi (Dinky Dau) and Rick Gallavan (Scooter), prominent veteran
activist Shad Meshad, as well as veterans from the first Gulf War and the current war in
Afghanistan. The post-show discussion focused on the experience of the veteran, and
while the specifics of each conflict were mentioned, the similarities of the various combat
experiences were the notable topic. No confrontational questions about either war’s
legitimacy or comments that would have cast the veterans in an unfavorable light were
raised in this unabashedly pro-veteran atmosphere, only sincerely voiced appreciation for
the men’s service and a sad resignation that the current wars would be continuing for
some time yet. At the end of the evening, the crowd was unified in its dislike of war, not
because of any specific ideological viewpoint but because of its destructive effect on
young American service personnel and the people who love them. While this is certainly
a nationalistic perspective of war, taking no consideration whatsoever of its effects on the
people of the “enemy” nation, it does perhaps serve the purpose of the veteran
playwrights. Di Fusco, like Berry and G.R. Point, wanted to share his experience in part
so that people would be stripped of their illusions about war service—that it was
character-building and noble. Showing the American public what war was really like, the
veterans hoped, would discourage them from ever sending anyone they loved into battle.
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Because of its emotional appeal and its generally apolitical emphasis on the
individual soldier, Tracers is currently more produced than any other Vietnam War play,
and as such is taking its place as the paradigmatic example of the genre, not because it
tells the representative story of the war, but arguably because it tells the story many
Americans see as the war’s most important issue to themselves: the experience of the
American GI. This focus continues with nearly all post-war representations,
32
and the
form of Tracers—fragmented, confessional, using an ensemble cast, written by
veterans—is the model for the majority of Vietnam War plays that follow it.
Emily Mann’s Still Life (1980) marks a return to the use of the documentary
technique discussed in Chapter Two to address the war’s issues. Mann, who is now the
Artistic Director of the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, New Jersey, has written a
number of documentary plays, among them Greensboro: A Requiem (1996) about the
massacre of civil rights demonstrators by the Ku Klux Klan, and Execution of Justice
(1982) about the murders of Harvey Milk and George Moscone in San Francisco. Still
Life is a result of interviews Mann conducted in 1979 with a Vietnam veteran, his wife,
and his mistress, and it examines both the difficult assimilation of a returning veteran and
the pervasive presence of violence in American society. The use of the documentary
technique in Mann’s plays allows for preservation and representation of the multi-vocal
discourse surrounding controversial subjects. Unlike fictional dramas, Mann’s work is an

32
 Even representations that attempt to tell the other side (Oliver Stone’s film Heaven and
Earth, for example) appropriates the Vietnamese perspective and shifts attention to the
suffering of the American serviceman.
 
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ethnographic study of responses to social disruption. Mann explains why she opted
for the documentary technique to tell this Vietnam veteran’s story:
I chose the documentary style to ensure that the reality of the people and
events described could not be denied. Perhaps one could argue about the
accuracy of the people’s interpretations of events, but one cannot deny that
these are actual people describing actual events as they saw and
understood them. (Testimonies 34)

This need to establish credibility is evidence of the shift in cultural authority made in the
1970s from official sources to average individuals.
The title Still Life refers not only to the image that concludes the action—that of a
traditional still life collection of fruit and bread disrupted by the incongruous presence of
a hand grenade in the middle—but also to the stasis of the characters both in life and in
the play’s blocking. Three characters—Mark, a Vietnam veteran; Cheryl, his wife; and
Nadine, his mistress—sit at a conference table for the bulk of the play, recounting to the
audience the paths their lives have taken since the war; they are given a little leeway to
move around and occasionally to leave the stage, but they are mainly confined to their
seats. The stories are told, not dramatized, resulting in a subdued, confessional
experience. The documentary technique invites this confessional quality to some extent,
but good deal of the play’s stasis is a result of Mann’s authorial decisions. Her unusual
choice of staging makes visible the psychological isolation of the characters, despite their
physical proximity at the table and in one another’s lives, and it attests to their cessation
of progress as productive human beings. The violence they have experienced, directly
and indirectly from the Vietnam War as well as within American society in general, has
stunted their forward motion, forcing them to relive traumatic events rather than move
ahead.
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Mark displays the conflicted psyche of the veteran, still struggling years after
the war’s end; he feels pride in having survived the war, and yet he feels guilt for the
deaths he caused. He admits to having killed a Vietnamese family out of anger and
frustration, and acknowledges that the incident was whitewashed by military officials in
order to preserve the image of the war. He is acutely aware of the contradiction between
the nation’s professed moral character and the behavior the military encouraged in
Vietnam:
Sometimes I look at a news story,
I look at something someone goes to prison for here,
I think about it.
There’s no difference.
It’s just a different place.
This country had all those rules and regulations
And then all of a sudden they removed these things.
[ . . . ]
My parents watch the news and say:
“Oh my God somebody did that!
Somebody went in there…and started shooting…
and killed all those people.
They ought to execute him.”
I look at them.
I want to say,
“Hell, what the fuck,
why didn’t you ever listen…
You want to hear what I did?” (120-121)

Mark’s testimony expresses the internal conflict of veterans who have committed murder
in Vietnam and are aware that their actions, which were expected and rewarded in
wartime, would be punishable by imprisonment or death in the United States (a theme we
have seen in Cole’s Medal of Honor Rag). During the emotional climax of the Dewey
Canyon III veterans’ demonstration in 1971, in which veterans threw their combat medals
on the steps of the Capitol Building in Washington D.C., many veterans repudiated the
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government that had turned them into murderers. For veterans denied the catharsis of
such public, symbolic gestures (and even for those who participated in them) the anger
and shame from the war did not dissipate with the passing of years, a result of both the
depth of the psychological trauma and the American public’s sustained discomfort with
the veteran’s presence.
But Still Life reminds audiences that veterans are not the only ones to suffer the
war’s effects; the play gives voice to the suffering of veterans’ families as well. Mark’s
internal confusion manifests itself in physical violence toward his wife: “See, I see the
war now through my wife./She’s a casualty too./She doesn’t get benefits for combat
duties./The war busted me up, I busted up my wife . . . ” (63). The increased attention to
the plight of Vietnam veterans in the early 1980s also drew attention to the social
problems that were exacerbated by the veterans’ unresolved internal conflicts—among
them domestic abuse, child abuse, and divorce. The country was beginning to see that
the war’s effects would not end with the veterans’ generation, that the damage being done
to veterans’ families would extend the war’s influence to their children. In one of
Tracers’ final monologues, a character mentions the legacy of Agent Orange poisoning
on his children (they are born with serious birth defects), but Still Life raises the issue of
the psychological damage the next generation will suffer through broken marriages and
incommunicative, even abusive parents.
A solution to the chaos caused by Mark’s erratic behavior, his wife decides, is to
reestablish order through a return to traditional values and behavior. Cheryl, also a
victim of war as the target of Mark’s unfocused anger and ingrained violence, espouses
the reactionary values and sentiments that were a large part of Reagan-Era rhetoric. She
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wants to return to the Church, and she rejects the social upheaval of the 1960s,
expressing a need for structure and guidance, patriarchal strength, and clarity of roles:
“I’m past the sixties./I want to go back to the Church./And Mark just will not understand
the importance of this for me./I mean, when there’s no father around,/the Church shows
some order, you know” (119). Fenn recognizes in Cheryl the anxieties of the larger
culture: “With the war’s end, Americans felt the consequences of the sixties: the effects
of the rebellion against the social order and institutions; the breakdown of communal
identity and purpose that a fragmented society left its citizens; and the physical and
psychological cost of the War itself” (232). In Cheryl’s testimony, Mann captures the
shift toward conservatism that the 1980s would bring, a desire for the stability of the
1950s, before the fundamentals of American society had been challenged.
Mark’s mistress Nadine is representative of the post-war tendency to
intellectualize the war’s events and to turn the actual violence committed by veterans into
an abstraction to be contemplated. She is drawn to the intensity of the Vietnam War
experience without a full appreciation of the real damage it has done; for example, she
does not speak of the murder of the Vietnamese family as an actual event and instead re-
presents it as emotional murder. Because she is not victimized by Mark’s physical
violence like Cheryl is, she romanticizes his intensity and speaks of violence as a concept
rather than as actual pain: “You know, all Mark did was--/He brought the war back
home/and none of us could look at it” (108). Of course, that is not all Mark did; he has
been violent and thoughtless toward his wife and son, and he is guilty of inhuman cruelty.
However, Nadine makes a provocative point by drawing parallels between the violence
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of war and the violence in everyday American society.
33
She says, “The
sixties…/You know, a lot of us went through that whole/decade pretending to ourselves
we were pacifists” (102). Nadine rejects the whole counterculture movement as foolish,
now embracing violence as the more natural behavior of humans. She recognizes the
unpleasant reality that violence is very much a part of American society, and thus argues
that the Vietnam War is not the atypical event most Americans prefer to think it is.
Indicative of the 1980s trend to skirt the politics of the Vietnam War in
representations of it, the play avoids stating a clear message or purpose. The characters
are difficult to like so one does not easily identify or engage with anyone on stage. Mann
interweaves their testimonies to highlight contrasting interpretations of events, which
allows the audience to see the difference in perspective among the three characters, but
she does not impose any further interpretation of her own on their accounts. The result is
that audience members are required to process the play’s information individually; they
are not guided by authorial voice toward a particular political or moral position. Instead,
they are left to contemplate the viewpoint of each character and thus to see the lingering
effects of the war fifteen years after its official end.
These elements of Still Life have led to decidedly mixed evaluations of the play’s
success. Fenn goes so far as to call it “one of the best plays of the canon of dramatic
literature dealing with Vietnam in its portrayal of the consequences of the war for the
American soldier and for American society” (222). He values the play’s complex

33
 Nadine even recounts the violent births of her three children. Each time, her required
C-section surgery caused her to experience difficulty breathing so doctors had to perform
a tracheotomy as well. She woke from each birth stitched up in several places.
 
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structural presentation of the characters’ experiences and Mann’s thematic
examination of American society’s pervasive violence. He also values Mann’s handling
of her characters’ stories, which he deems more “sensitive” than other playwrights’
treatment of veteran issues. Frank Rich, on the other hand, calls Mann’s efforts “sheer
incompetence” and claims that her play “tends to trivialize such issues as the plight of the
Vietnam veteran, war atrocities and feminism.” Rich, unlike Fenn, holds the characters
in low regard, especially Mark, whom he deems “a villain of Vietnam, not a victim.”
Rich argues that Mann has done Vietnam veterans a disservice by holding up Mark as
their representative, thereby indicting them all as perpetrators of Lt. Calley-like actions.
More moderate is Zinman’s criticism, which does not significantly engage the characters
but instead voices objection to the play’s neutrality of opinion. “Mann’s relentless
cultivation of objectivity,” Zinman concludes, “may leave an audience with too few
emotional guideposts and, further, render the play politically mute” (19).
I believe that Still Life makes an important contribution to Vietnam War drama
because of its ambiguity, not in spite of it. In most of the plays I have examined, it is
fairly easy for a spectator to take sides; the moral lines are rather clearly drawn.
However, Still Life blurs those lines and forces audiences into a more active examination
of American character and the ways the Vietnam War has affected it—destroying
admirable qualities; reinscribing selfish, destructive behavior. Mark’s actions do not
make it easy to sympathize with him, but as events like the Winter Soldier Investigation
proved, war atrocities were not necessarily an aberration in Vietnam. Rich objects to
Mark serving as the representative GI, and doing so allows Rich to distance himself from
being aligned by nationality with people who behaved extraordinarily cruelly. If we see
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Mark as an average soldier, on the other hand, we are denied the comfort of setting
ourselves distinctly apart from immoral actions. Scapegoating Lt. Calley allowed the
country to pin My Lai on a “bad seed” rather than accepting his actions as indicative of
ideological inconsistencies and a failure of leadership (prosecuting Lynndie England for
the torture of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad in 2004 accomplished
the same thing). Because Mann uses Mark as her protagonist, rather than as an
antagonistic foil to a heroic leading man, audiences are denied the opportunity for
comfortable identification with the play’s main character. Similarly, Cheryl and Nadine
embody the cultural tendencies to accept violence and to rationalize it, respectively. The
women in the play do not counteract Mark’s violence; they enable it, and as such, they
help to perpetuate a corrosive environment. Mann offers audiences no character with
whom they can comfortably identify. As a result, if spectators are forced to align
themselves with one of the flawed characters, it forces an important self-examination.
In her playwright’s note, Mann admits, “I have no answer to the questions I raise
in the play but I think the questions are worth asking” (34). In this absence of decisive
commentary, we can see the tenuous relationship between the country and its newest
veterans at the beginning of the 1980s, and the country’s unease with its own character.
If we have no answers from the play, what we can see is a reflection of the period’s
anxieties and attitudes; again, an unresolved ending draws attention to the struggle
instead of suggesting a solution. “The central metaphor of the play is portraiture,” Fenn
asserts, “which stems from the human need to externalize, to render in concrete form,
psychological stresses” (223). Mann’s play is itself an externalization of the
psychological stresses created by the Vietnam War’s refusal to fit into the national
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mythology, and the ubiquity in the 1980s of representations of the war (in film,
television, literature, and theatre) can be seen as the country’s attempt to make manifest
its cultural anxieties about its involvement in Vietnam—a purging of the destructive
experience on a national level.
“A Noble Cause”: Conservative Voices in Vietnam War Drama
Theatre’s portrayal of the Vietnam veteran is not at its most sympathetic in Still
Life. Mark is shown to be capable of great cruelty, in both war and civilian life, and his
claims of remorse are undermined by his selfishness and his continued abuse of his
family. While Mann’s play is valuable in drawing attention to the ripple effects of war
trauma on a veteran’s family, it does little to recuperate the veteran from society’s
opinion of him as a ticking bomb; in short, Mark is not a good spokesperson for the
veterans’ movement. As the 1980s progressed, however, the Vietnam veteran would get
a new image in mainstream media, and Americans began to see Vietnam service as a
valuable credential instead of a personal shame. The sexy, dashing protagonists of
television crime dramas Magnum, P.I. and Miami Vice—Thomas Magnum and Sonny
Crockett—both served in Vietnam, character background that implied their extraordinary
survival capabilities and fearlessness (for what could be more intimidating than the
war?). Nevertheless, Gerald Nicosia recognizes that new media representations of the
veteran went only so far in raising the veteran’s cultural status and that “despite the shift
in America’s myth-making, Vietnam veterans themselves deserved most of the credit.”
Refusing to remain “beaten back, ignored, undermined, and co-opted by the right, the
left, and their own government,” Nicosia continues, “Vietnam veterans had shown
unbelievable perseverance, especially in the political arena, where […] they had almost
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never been welcomed. By 1982, pulled up by their own bootstraps, they had become
a political force to be reckoned with” (489).
Veteran playwrights contributed significantly to veterans’ improved political
position, if only by refusing to allow their war experience to be forgotten. Consistently,
their plays speak of the trauma of war—for themselves, for their families, less frequently
for the Vietnamese—forcing the issue into the public consciousness as often as it was
pushed aside. As we have seen, these representations are often troubling, both in content
and form, and they have been met with mixed reviews from critics who preferred a tidier
message about the war. It is the veteran’s desire to be truthful to the war experience,
though, I have suggested, that requires the “messiness” of much Vietnam War drama
because the war was itself messy—ideologically, morally, and politically. The unsettled
issues of the war do not lend themselves easily to representation in a well-made play;
therefore, plays that do offer a neat conclusion tend often oversimplify the issues they
raise and to leave audiences with contrived, reductive endings. To clarify my point, I
turn now to two 1980s plays by non-veterans, both of which plays attempt to elicit
sympathy for their veteran characters but which end up undermining them by offering a
reductive and unlikely solution to the veterans’ struggles. Unlike the large majority of
plays in this study, which engage with the political issues of their historical moment
antagonistically—that is, they challenge government actions, the “official word” on the
war, or mainstream social values—these two Vietnam War plays speak with a
conservative voice, echoing the mainstream message rather than dissenting from it.
Stephen Metcalfe’s Strange Snow (1982) and Sean Clark’s Eleven-Zulu (1983) do not
challenge the war’s legitimacy, or recuperate the veteran, or expose the tragic but
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increasingly undeniable facts about Agent Orange poisoning. Instead, they
encourage the deliberate forgetting of the war and argue that recovery from its traumas
lies in embracing traditional values of domesticity and heteronormativity. In doing so,
these two plays are marked exceptions to the trend of Vietnam War drama to contest
power, but they nevertheless support my thesis that Vietnam War plays reflect the
political and social concerns of the moment because they express many of the
conservative values of the early 1980s.
When President Ronald Reagan was inaugurated on January 20, 1981, he made
clear his conservative agenda for the country. He sought to emphasize religiosity in
public life, suggesting that all future Inauguration Days be declared a day of prayer.
Later that year, when speaking to the Conservative Political Action Conference, he
described his agenda as seeking to “put our financial house in order and rebuild our
nation’s defense, […] to protect the unborn, to end the manipulation of schoolchildren by
utopian planners, and permit the acknowledgment of a Supreme Being in our classrooms”
(96-97). He advocated traditional family structures as the building block of a healthy
society, including in many of his speeches references to his wife Nancy as his loyal
helpmeet, almost always in a subordinate, supportive role. He also aimed to reestablish
the United States’ global reputation as a superpower, which had been damaged by the
ignoble end to the Vietnam War. Using patriotic rhetoric that often obfuscated more than
it explained, Reagan, whom Nicosia calls an “enormously popular, war-glorifying hawk”
(489), strove to inspire Americans to overcome the “Vietnam Syndrome,” a general
reluctance to engage in military action, fearing any conflict may devolve into another
Vietnam-like quagmire. These values—fiscal conservatism, religious practice,
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militarism, and traditional gender roles—informed much of the 1980s; they were
advocated as a remedy for the countercultural “evils” bred in the 1960s, values and
practices that many believed had led the country down the wrong path and resulted in
economic recession and a demoralized nation.
In spite of advances made by women through the 1960s and 70s, or perhaps
because of them, the 1980s was a time of anxiety over the change in gender roles, and the
traditional family of the 1950s was held up as a positive model. Reagan appointed
Sandra Day O’Connor the first woman on the United States Supreme Court in 1981, but
the following year the Equal Rights Amendment failed to be ratified, reflecting that, even
though women were gaining recognition and influence individually, the country was not
yet prepared to recognize them as equal citizens across the board. Strange Snow and
Eleven Zulu reflect these anxieties by portraying women flatly, as stereotypical nurturers
or as sexual objects. The women provide unwavering support to the male characters and
express only their desire to serve as confessors and complements to the veterans, never
resisting or questioning them. These reactionary portrayals reinscribe the belief that “the
love of a good woman” and the comforts of home are all a man needs to put the
unpleasantness of war behind him,
34
minimizing the extent of the veteran’s post-war
suffering and thrusting women into the unrealistic role of savior.

34
This theme is not unique to representations of Vietnam veterans or to the 1980s. The
film The Best Years of our Lives (1946), for example, depicts three returning World War
II veterans struggling with the effects of the war until they settle down with their female
counterparts, whose adoration and attentiveness brings them much-needed peace.
Significantly, the 1980s suggested the same solution to war as the traditional 1950s.

193 
Stephen Metcalfe’s Strange Snow
35
is a traditional, realistic drama that
suggests the possibility of “life after Vietnam” for the veteran willing to put the
experience behind him. Megs, a veteran with real exuberance for life, tracks down his
old war buddy, Dave, for a fishing trip on opening day of the season. Dave’s sister
Martha, a spinsterish schoolteacher with whom Dave lives, is initially displeased by
Megs’s early-morning arrival, but she is soon won over by his flattery and his
appreciation for her domestic ways, which her brother selfishly takes for granted. A
romance blossoms between Megs and Martha, while Dave, angry and prone to
alcoholism, does his best to drive a wedge between the two. Arguments among the
characters reveal that Dave and Megs have both struggled to accept the death of a close
friend in Vietnam, but while Dave has chosen to numb his pain with alcohol and
repression, Megs has dedicated himself to living well in order to make his friend’s death
mean something. Once the source of Dave’s guilt is revealed, he lets his anger go and
apologizes to Martha, who is then free to pursue a relationship with Megs.
Here, the veteran is neither a ticking bomb nor a superhero, but a lost man looking
for a home. John Carlos Rowe and Rick Berg note that, in this period, “The veteran
returning to the ‘world’ from the war was transformed from the psychotic killer of
popular films and television in the 1970s into a misunderstood neurotic struggling to

35
Metcalfe adapted Strange Snow into the screenplay for Jacknife (1989), starring Robert
DeNiro, Ed Harris, and Kathy Baker. The play, which already provides a reductive
solution to veterans’ reintegration problems, is expanded with superfluous scenes and
storylines, including a particularly poor dramatization of combat. The result is a truly
terrible film, especially when it is examined against much more sophisticated cinematic
representations of the Vietnam War and veteran reintegration in earlier films like The
Deer Hunter (1978), Coming Home (1978), Platoon (1986), and Full Metal Jacket
(1987).

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rediscover the virtues of domestic happiness and gainful employment” (7). Megs has
found work at a gas station, lives simply, and is genuinely appreciative of the comforts
Martha offers—home-cooked meals, pleasant conversation, and a little flirtation. He
becomes the model veteran because he contributes to society instead of detracting from it
or demanding help from others. Reflecting Reagan’s conservative social agenda, which
emphasized individual responsibility and limited government, Strange Snow encourages
veterans to become contributing members of their communities as a tribute to their fallen
buddies.
36
Living an honorable, useful life after the war was not the Vietnam veteran’s
right; it was his duty. To do otherwise was to dishonor the men who died. By
constructing the disaffected veteran as wasting the life his friends were denied, American
society could coerce productive behavior out of veterans by fostering survivor guilt.
Metcalfe uses Megs and Dave as foils, contrasting Megs’s enjoyment of life’s simple
pleasures with Dave’s nihilistic behavior, which hurts his sister as well as himself.
Metcalfe (and conservative America) suggests that, by holding a job and remaining
upbeat, Megs does right by the Vietnam dead and makes their sacrifice worthwhile.
Dave, on the other hand, has been spared death in Vietnam only to waste his life at home.

36
A variation of this theme is found in the final voice-over of Oliver Stone’s film Platoon
(1986), which states, “those of us who did make it have an obligation to build again. To
teach others what we know, and to try with what’s left of our lives to find a goodness and
a meaning to this life.” It also appears at the end of Steven Spielberg’s World War II
film Saving Private Ryan (1998) when Tom Hanks’s character whispers with his dying
breath to Ryan, “Earn it.” Ryan is later shown as an old man, surrounded by a loving
family. Overwhelmingly, narrative closure to representations of war is achieved by
suggesting that the deaths were worthwhile, in service of some greater good. When that
greater good is not immediately identifiable, the responsibility is often given over to the
audience to supply its own understanding of it.
 
195 
Megs explains how, after battling war demons for some time, he came to the
understanding that he owed it to his friend Bobby to live well:
Oh, I’ll tell you Martha. Your brother is one sweet bear but ole Bobby
was worth him and me rolled together. (Pause) You wouldn’t a liked me
much when I got home. Crazy. I got in fights a lot, dumb ones, five
against one where I got the piss kicked out a me. It was not a nice time.
And what it got down to was … well … one night I was lyin’ around,
contemplatin’ the rafters, wonderin’ if they could take my weight, and like
… don’t laugh or nothin’, please … I prayed. I felt better. What was
done, was done, y’know? For some reason we’d lost ole Bobby. And it
was up to me to make that reason a good one. ‘Cause ole Bobby, he
deserved that. I think I’ve liked myself a little bit more ever since then.
(297-298)

Megs is saved through prayer and acceptance, tactics that conveniently relieve the
government of any responsibility to the veteran. Advocating prayer as the veteran’s path
to inner peace served both the religiosity of the Reagan Administration’s agenda and its
fiscal conservatism by eliminating the need to fund Vet Centers that offered counseling
services. Veterans could turn to God for free, and thus two important goals could be
accomplished simultaneously. In addition, Metcalfe’s portrayal of Megs’s acceptance of
the war as something he cannot change absolves the government of its accountability for
the war and of its responsibility to its veterans. It puts emotional and economic recovery
on the shoulders of the veteran himself, implying that those veterans demanding
government assistance for veteran reintegration were somehow inadequate. This theme,
which will appear again in Sean Clark’s Eleven Zulu, does a serious disservice to the
Vietnam veteran by suggesting, to both the veteran himself and to American society in
general, that combat trauma can be transcended with relative ease.
Even more troubling is Megs’s insistence that the war in Vietnam and the millions
of deaths that resulted from it were part of some kind of cosmic plan. He tells Martha,
196 
“For some reason we’d lost ole Bobby,” needing to see his friend’s death as the cause
of some desired effect to be realized later. When Dave blames himself for Bobby’s
death, Megs absolves Dave of responsibility by assuring him that Bobby was meant to
die that day:
DAVE: If I hadn’t been scared, if I hadn’t landed wrong…
MEGS: Guy, things happen for a reason!
DAVE: What fucking reason?!
MEGS: I ain’t sure. I’m only working on it. (310)

This way of thinking no doubt provides comfort to those wrestling with injustice; it
allows them to stop looking for answers to an inexplicable situation and to move forward,
offering acceptable—if incomplete—closure. However, it also encourages political
passivity and deflects attention away from both the causes and the effects of the war,
discouraging necessary reevaluation of American ideology and practices. Convincing
Vietnam veterans, who had mobilized to become an extremely influential political group,
to discontinue their struggle for government assistance—to obtain reparations for Agent
Orange-related diseases, for example—was certainly in the Reagan Administration’s best
interest, as was the deflecting the close examination of the United States’ behavior in its
dealings with Vietnam, for both would undermine the government agenda. However,
explaining away the Vietnam War by saying “things happen for a reason” is arguably the
most offensive message in all Vietnam War drama; Metcalfe has reduced the deaths of
millions of Vietnamese and thousands of Americans to a “life lesson.” In general,
interpreting an irrational and traumatic experience as hard-won wisdom to pass to others
is a psychologically useful tactic, but what could Metcalfe be suggesting that the lesson
197 
of the Vietnam War is?
37
That Dave can become a man of integrity? That Megs and
Martha would make a good couple? Strange Snow uses dangerous tunnel vision to
construct perhaps the darkest period in American history as a growth experience for his
characters. Recasting the war as primarily an American trauma is indicative of most
Vietnam War drama after the 1960s, but nowhere is the experience trivialized as grossly
as it is in this exchange.
In an echo of his implication that prayer can save the veteran, Metcalfe suggests
that confession of one’s morally dubious war behavior is the key to veteran healing and
reintegration. The tension between Dave and Megs, and within Dave himself, is released
when the facts of their friend’s death are revealed in the climactic scene. Dave tries to
vilify Megs by telling Martha that Megs was gung-ho in Vietnam and that his
foolhardiness was the cause of Bobby’s death. Megs then exposes Dave as having been
“chickenshit” in Vietnam, his cowardice requiring a rescue that caused both Bobby and
Megs to be shot:
You was scared and tight and you landed wrong and your ankles broke.
Bobby and I came back for you. I got hit ‘cause a that. And I lay there in
the mud with the blood pumpin’ from my chest, blurp-blurp, and I heard
you. No, Bobby! Don’t go back for him! Fuck Megs! Jacknife is dead!
Don’t go back for him, Bobby! But Bobby did go back, huh, Davey?
(307)

This provocation impels Dave to flee the house and to pick a fight with some local kids in
a bar, but when he returns home, beaten up, he is chastened and purged of his destructive

37
Using the war as a learning experience will be the focus of Robert S. McNamara’s
2003 memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, which specifies
eleven lessons to be learned from the United States’ involvement in Southeast Asia. It is
often seen as McNamara’s effort to reduce his guilt for his responsibility for the
pervasive loss of life in the war.
198 
anger. He apologizes to Martha for his selfish treatment of her, admits his
weaknesses to Megs, and finally returns to the bar to make certain that the kids he fought
with are not seriously hurt, a decision that serves as the first step to the reclamation of his
masculinity and dignity. The public airing of the facts of combat serves as a catharsis for
the two men, relieving them of their heavy emotional burdens. By 1982, it was
understood that veterans who talked about their war experiences fared better in their
reintegration process than veterans who refused to do so. The Vet Centers around the
country, in which “rap sessions” were held to facilitate veterans’ psychological and
emotional unburdening, attested to the widespread need and desire of veterans to talk
openly about the war, and a great deal of art was produced by veterans who channeled
their experiences into pieces that helped them express themselves productively.
Ironically, the conservative agenda of the 1980s sought to cut funding to the very Vet
Centers that were assisting veterans to become contributing members of society by
hearing their confessions.
Rather than looking to government-funded Vet Centers for reintegration
assistance, Strange Snow suggests, the struggling veteran should find peace in
heterosexual domesticity. Metcalfe constructs Martha as confessor and savior of Megs’s
troubled soul. After the emotional confrontation between Megs and Dave, when Dave
has fled the house, Megs cries for his dead friend. Breaking the ensuing silence, Martha
invites Megs to visit her classroom at the high school, pulling him back from his
memories of the war, and the two go out on an impromptu date, the traumatic experience
quickly repressed so as not to destroy the possibility of a happy ending. While Martha’s
gesture is meant to console Megs, it also sweeps away the veteran’s expression of grief,
199 
leaving the war undiscussed between them and Megs’s wounds unaddressed.
Metcalfe gives Martha unrealistic powers of healing and redemption, almost priest-like in
her ability to remove the stain of sin merely by listening. Lacking a common war
experience and the training of counselors in Vet Centers, Martha cannot help Megs or
Dave work through their still-unresolved emotions in any truly productive way, but
representations like Metcalfe’s suggest that she (and other women involved with troubled
veterans) can. This suggestion is dangerously reductive. Ignoring the national trend of a
fifty percent divorce rate and an even higher rate for Vietnam veterans, Metcalfe posits
the nuclear family as the veteran’s best hope for recovery and happiness.
38
Not only is
Metcalfe’s solution refuted by sociological evidence, it does a clear disservice to the
struggling veteran, who surely knew that his anxieties could not be eased so simply,
despite the Reagan Administration’s claims of the redemptive powers of family and
church. Veterans with compassionate wives and girlfriends still struggled to reassimilate,
and such relationships were more likely to suffer from the veteran’s psychological
problems than to fix them. The character of Mark in Still Life serves as a
counterargument to the claim that domestic life could redeem the veteran and provide
peace, for he creates an intolerable environment for his family because of his continued
psychological unease. Even after confessing his crimes to Nadine, he has still not

38
Rowe and Berg note that this theme is a clear contradiction to 1960s plays that portray
the family as complicit with the government in pressuring its members to become part of
the war effort: “The nuclear family may not have kept its sons and daughters from going
to Vietnam, but that same family structure was offered as therapy for veterans of the war”
(7). Rabe’s Sticks and Bones and Cowen’s Summertree both show the nuclear family to
be an unsafe place for the veteran or the resister rather than the haven 1980s plays
suggest it is.
 
200 
become an honorable man. If veteran reintegration were as easy as Metcalfe’s play
proposes, there would have been little need for the veterans’ movement.
The narrative closure in Strange Snow is certainly comforting, especially in
contrast to the majority of Vietnam War plays, which emphasize the ongoing unrest of
both the veteran and the society. Zinman, who argues that the lack of closure in most
Vietnam War plays is detrimental to their artistry, notes that Strange Snow tidy
conclusion is an exception to the rule. She sees the play as “societal wish-fulfillment,”
the promise that the veteran need not always occupy a marginalized position but that he
can experience “happy endings” as well (16). Zinman likens Wilson’s 5
th
of July to
Strange Snow, commenting that both plays
offer the enormous consolation that the Vietnam veteran can be healed and
can reenter both private and public life as a healthy man. Thus, the
audience can leave the theater soothed and relieved of the ambivalence
and dis-ease that the other, unresolved plays, actively create. (16)

However, I think hers an inaccurate comparison, one that elevates Metcalfe’s play to an
unmerited level and similarly diminishes Wilson’s by suggesting its ending is as
contrived as Metcalfe’s, which it most certainly is not. As I have argued, Strange Snow
espouses a particularly conservative agenda, and the heterosexual union at the play’s end
is intimated to be the cure for a number of ills. The end of 5
th
of July may be optimistic,
but it is by no means comparatively reductive. 5
th
of July offers the practical suggestion
of accepting the devastation of the Vietnam War as unchangeable in the present day and
living on, in spite of physical and psychological wounds, according to one’s own
conscience. As a teacher, Ken will influence his students by his mere presence, which
speaks of both the suffering of war and the veteran’s ability to contribute to society, and
201 
Wilson challenges the idea that only traditional, heterosexual, reproductive family
structures serve their members. This positivity was a valuable message in the widespread
malaise and disillusionment of the 1970s. Strange Snow, on the other hand, encourages
not acceptance but a cultural forgetting of the war and a reactionary conformity to values
and institutions that have no ability to solve the problems of the vet.
Sean Clark’s Eleven-Zulu (1983) echoes the thematic conservatism of Strange
Snow, but it does so rather unexpectedly in its final scenes, undermining a compelling
mystery and expose of dissention among the troops toward the end of the war. The play
tells the story of a friendly fire incident in Vietnam that escalates into murder among
Americans. Structured as a flashback, Eleven-Zulu is a reenactment of a platoon’s
chaotic struggle to determine how one of its members died, during which time the
soldiers defend themselves against both the elusive enemy and their own fears and
interpersonal hostility. At crucial points in the action, the women in the soldiers’ lives—
mothers, girlfriends, fantasy women—appear as figments of the men’s imaginations,
offering support or comfort or giving the audience character context. At the end of the
play, as the action returns to the postwar period, the truth about the friendly fire death is
revealed, allowing civilian life to proceed unburdened by the ghosts of Vietnam.
While ostensibly an examination of the Vietnam War’s corrosive internal
fighting, Eleven-Zulu is actually Reagan-Era propaganda on the ability of
heteronormative relations and traditional family values to redeem both the Vietnam
veteran and the nation. The play exposes some of the ugliest aspects of military life in
Vietnam: mistreatment of the Vietnamese, “fragging” of platoon leaders, racism among
the troops, and deliberate misrepresentation of causes of death. As such, it has the
202 
possibility to be an important counterargument to revisionist claims of the United
States’ military’s righteous behavior in Southeast Asia. However, this contestatory
aspect of the play is undermined by the work’s reductive ending, which encourages a
generalized denial of the entire war experience. That denial, Clark’s play suggests, is
necessary for both the nation’s and the individual’s survival, and it is facilitated through
relationships with women, whose presence diffuses the bellicosity of the veteran.
This message is seen in the play’s final scenes, as women wipe away the pain of
war with soothing words and the promise of home. The climax of the play comes as the
personal altercation between two soldiers reaches its violent end. Phillips, angry over
having been wrongfully demoted for abusing a Vietnamese woman, kills Ruiz, the
sergeant who pinned his own crime on Phillips. Another soldier, Hoover, kills Phillips
while trying to disarm him of the knife he used on Ruiz. The rest of the platoon rallies
together to prepare an official report that will explain the deaths—including the friendly
fire fatality—as the results of an enemy attack. Appearing in order to calm Hoover’s
nerves is his mother, Sarah, an unfortunate stereotyping of the long-suffering black
woman, who encourages him to forget the recent events entirely:
SARAH: Shh…ain’t nothing we can do now, Honey. We just got to live
with what we got.
HOOVER: It ain’t right, Mama.
SARAH: I know it, but we can’t change what happened. Shh… we just
got to do it different next time. (61)

Not unlike Martha’s reaction to Megs’s confession in Strange Snow, Sarah hears
Hoover’s laments, but she does not really listen to them. Instead, she encourages him to
use the experience as a lesson but otherwise to repress it, literally shushing him when he
tries to express his grief and confusion. Sarah’s reaction to her son’s confession reflects
203 
the desire of many Americans in the 1980s simply to repress the Vietnam War
experience altogether, to chalk it up to a tragic mistake and to refuse any further
examination of its causes or effects. The country would surely not make the same
mistake in its next war, her words suggest, but nothing can change what happened in
Vietnam. This way of thinking was politically useful in the Reagan Era, for it facilitated
the historical revisionism of the Vietnam War; it did not serve the government’s purposes
to have the country thinking too critically about the militarism and defense spending
Reagan championed.
The same sentiment ends the play, as Robert confesses to his wife Yvonne that he
is the one responsible for the friendly fire death that began the murderous night:
ROBERT: I was going down the hill and he was coming up and he wasn’t
supposed to be there and I couldn’t tell who he was and he didn’t stop
when I told him to and I shot him. I just shot him.
YVONNE: It’s okay.
ROBERT: It doesn’t make sense.
YVONNE: It doesn’t have to. It’s over and you can’t take anything back.
It happened then and you’re with me now. I want you to be here for me.
ROBERT: I need you.
YVONNE: And I need you and that’s what matters.
ROBERT: (pause) Are you getting cold?
YVONNE: Yes, I am. Let’s go home where it’s warm. (62)

What comes as a surprise to the audience—Robert’s responsibility for his fellow GI’s
death—does not deeply affect Yvonne at all. She shows no compassion for the dead
soldier, his family, or even for Robert, who has carried his guilt for ten years. Yvonne’s
response to Robert’s confession is to sweep the whole thing away—Robert’s mistake as
well as the war itself. As we have seen before, Yvonne does nothing to help the veteran
work through his feelings, but instead wants only peaceful domesticity regardless of the
cost. She displays no regard for a system of morality that extends beyond herself, no
204 
sense of accountability; she wants only to keep her life stable and to push disrupting
ideas away. The play depicts three Americans killed by members of their own platoon
and the official report of those deaths falsified to protect those responsible. Rather than
make a critical commentary on this unfortunate incident, which likely occurred in
Vietnam with dismaying frequency, the play advocates the characters’ obfuscation of the
facts because of the domestic stability that obfuscation allows. A return to normalcy,
Clark suggests, is more desirable than personal (and national?) accountability.
Again, veteran reintegration is shown to be achievable through confession and
heterosexual union, both of which purge American society of the destabilizing influences
of the war and reestablish traditional foundations for the national recovery. This
reactionary message vastly oversimplifies the struggle of the veteran to cope with his
participation in the war. It suggests that the guilt of murder is relatively easy to
overcome and that there will be no consequences for repressing such destructive
memories. It also casts women in the unrealistic role of altruistic savior and denies their
personal suffering as frequent victims of the domestic violence that resulted from
veterans’ unresolved psychological difficulties. The message of Eleven Zulu and Strange
Snow served Reagan’s conservative agenda by making recovery from war trauma the
veteran’s (and his woman’s) responsibility, not the government’s. It was up to the
veteran to put the war out of his mind and to dedicate himself to traditional values in
order to survive it, not to wallow in memories and grudges at society’s expense. The
proliferation of representations of veterans healing themselves could pressure—even
shame—veterans into self-sufficiency, or at least into silence.
205 
It is significant, I suggest, that, unlike the majority of Vietnam War drama in
the postwar period, these two plays are written by non-veterans. Their simplistic
representations of veteran readjustment do not take into account the severity of combat
trauma, and they propose that denial is healing instead of destructive. A veteran
playwright, on the other hand, would recognize that the lingering effects of his combat
experience would be more likely to disrupt domesticity than to be soothed by it. The
hollow ring of Strange Snow and Eleven Zulu attests to the difficulty of imposing
narrative structure and conservative values on a story that will conform to neither. The
next three plays I examine return to the approach of Tracers and Still Life in expressing
the veteran experience through fragmentation and veterans’ own testimony.

The 1990s: Reimagining Vietnam and Recognizing the Forgotten Veterans
The next plays I examine return to the technique of documentary theatre used by
Berrigan and Mann, but they make minor modifications to the tradition by incorporating
poetry, memoir, and classical drama into their transcripts of interviews with veterans.
The dominance of the documentary technique in Vietnam War drama of the postwar
period attests to the endurance of the cultural authority ascribed to the veteran in the late
1970s and through the 1980s as an eyewitness to the war’s destruction. More and more,
playwrights turn to the words of veterans for the foundational material of their plays, a
desire to “get it right” informing the plays more than a need to express personal political
viewpoints. Marilyn Shaw’s Iowa Stories and Chris Ellsbury & Jennifer Terry’s
206 
Vietnamese Chess
39
are examples of “interpreters theatre,” which combines different
kinds of texts into one script, each individual work informing the others to create a
multilayered commentary. Shirley Lauro’s A Piece of My Heart is yet another variation
on the documentary technique; Lauro draws veteran testimony from a book collection of
interviews but writes her own dialogue and creates an original plot. Despite the
variations on the documentary technique in the evolution of Vietnam War drama, the
intention remains the same: to highlight and preserve the voices of those whose stories
add depth to cultural understanding of the war and to recognize average men and women
as repositories of invaluable knowledge and experience.
A teacher of Communications Studies at the University of Northern Iowa,
Marilyn Shaw wrote Iowa Stories (1990) to educate a younger generation about the
experience of the Vietnam veteran, after realizing that the generation of Americans born
in the early 1970s, of which her teenage daughter was a member, knew very little about
the Vietnam War and was unsure where to turn for accurate information. “I didn’t want
the story reported by news media and information released to the public by the

39
 Vietnamese Chess (1993) was written by Chris Ellsbury and Jennifer Terry, two
University of Northern Iowa Communications Studies students who were cast members
in Shaw’s Iowa Stories. Vietnamese Chess resembles and functions similarly to Iowa
Stories, so I include it as a footnote instead of treating it separately. The play is
structured as a life-size chess game, in which the actors playing “pieces” are moved by a
caller and two movers, emphasizing their powerlessness, their relative value, and their
expendability. The theme of strategy is particularly relevant, as the war is defined in later
years as a strategic mistake rather than an ideological one. Veterans and their families are
depicted as at the mercy of the fates, controlled by powers they do not comprehend, again
absolving veterans of wrongdoing by constructing them as victims. A pastiche of poetry,
memoir, classical drama and collected veteran testimonies, Vietnamese Chess emphasizes
the universality of war and the common suffering of loss. Notably, it makes an attempt to
recognize the Persian Gulf War of 1991 in its textual references.
 
207 
government,” Shaw explains, “but the story of those men and women who were
actually there” (7). Her stated intention is evidence of the public’s awareness that the
government’s and the individual’s accounts of the war were often vastly different and
that testimony from veterans could illuminate impersonal facts in textbooks and archival
sources. “The mission of Iowa Stories,” she continues, “was to assist the public in
gaining a more in-depth knowledge and a better understanding of the contributions that
Iowans made during the Vietnam Conflict” (7). The play was performed 23 times in
1990 (Shaw calls the run the “Tour of Duty”), primarily in Iowa high schools and
colleges. The targeted audiences attest to the playwright’s goal of education, but Shaw
notes that students were not the only ones to learn a good deal about the war from her
play; it also served to educate the families and friends of veterans who were shielded
from the realities of the veteran’s experience or who actively chose to avoid knowing
about it. Learning of the war’s personal costs to loved ones in some cases reunited
families estranged by failed communication (Shaw 8).
Iowa Stories is a collection of testimonies from men and women who served in
Vietnam as soldiers and support personnel. The testimonies are interspersed to express
different characters’ observations and opinions on similar aspects of the war. They speak
about their induction, basic training, war service, and readjustment to civilian life in a
manner that echoes Tracers’ fragmented yet linear depiction of the soldier’s Vietnam
journey; however, while Tracers includes dramatized scenes in which actors respect the
theatre’s “fourth wall,” the actors in Iowa Stories always address the audience, creating
an intimate (if somewhat static), confessional atmosphere that encourages sympathetic
identification with the characters. In some cases, scenes being narrated by one character
208 
are acted out silently by the others, but for the most part, the monologues dominate
the play.
Despite Shaw’s stated desire that her play be used for educational purposes, she
also stipulates that her play makes “no attempt to take a political stand or to come to a
resolution on the merits or failings of this conflict” (9). Thus the educational aspect of her
play is limited to relaying the personal struggles of a few Iowan veterans, not to the
examination of the national political issues that engendered the war or to the political
battle veterans waged for recognition of their rights after the war. Obviously, one play
cannot hope to communicate the complexity of the Vietnam War, and I have taken issue
with critics who look for such inclusivity in earlier Vietnam War drama, but in 1990,
Shaw has the opportunity present a more complete picture of the veteran’s experience
than she does, especially if she aims to use her play to educate. Shaw claims that the
stories she chose to include in Iowa Stories “possess a universal theme,” but nowhere
does she articulate what that theme is. Most of the testimonies can be summed up by one
in particular: “I just want them to accept the fact that you can hate the war, but don’t hate
the warrior, because the warrior is just doing what he was trained to do. The warrior
doesn’t like the war to begin with. That’s why he’s a warrior…to stop the war” (59).
This active avoidance of the politics of the Vietnam War is typical of its postwar drama.
Once the cultural conversation becomes centered on the American veteran, political
questions about the war’s legitimacy have the unintentional effect of devaluing his
service; thus, since few Americans want to be seen as failing to “support the troops,”
discussions of the war in the 1990s and afterward largely avoid detailed analysis of the
Vietnam War’s politics.
209 
However, regardless of Shaw’s claims of political neutrality, Iowa Stories
expresses a fairly clear conservatism. Many of the characters argue from the revisionist
perspective that the troops’ efforts were undermined by a government that would not
grant the Armed Forces the resources or permission that would have allowed them to win
the war:
40

I have a boy. I asked him if he wanted to go with me to the Vietnam
Veterans Reunion. I said to him, ‘This was the big one.’ But he said to
me, ‘But, Dad, you lost.’ I said, ‘We didn’t lose; we just quit.’ Just
think… even little kids think that. We didn’t lose; we just quit. I knew
the minute they started pulling those troops out of there, it was gone. It
was over. If they would have just let us attack! You can’t win a war
without attacking. They wouldn’t hardly let us go into Cambodia. If they
would have let us land in North Vietnam and taken away their resources,
we could have won the thing. (74)

Of course, one cannot know for certain if the conservatism of the play is a result of
regional similarities, or of Shaw’s authorial decision-making, or of a national trend
toward historical reinterpretation of the war. My feeling is that all three of these factors
are relevant. Political demographics show that people who live in the same area tend to
have similar views on issues; thus, it is likely that Shaw’s interviewees—all coming from
local communities—shared a number of common concerns and viewpoints; the political
range of Shaw’s sampling may have been limited to begin with. However, the stories she
selected for her play, which make no mention of the war’s more controversial issues
(Agent Orange, napalm, My Lai), raise few, if any, challenges to traditional American

40
This sentiment found its most famous spokesperson in Sylvester Stallone’s portrayal of
John Rambo in the film Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985). When embarking on a
mission to rescue Vietnam War POWs, Rambo asks his commanding officer, “Do we get
to win this time?”
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ideology. Even Shaw’s use of the phrase “Vietnam Conflict” rather than “Vietnam
War” in the play’s introduction is a suggestion of her conservative political leanings.
More importantly, though, I argue that Iowa Stories is an example of a large-scale
cultural negotiation of the impact of the Vietnam War on the American mythology and
the United States’ continuing militarism, one voice in the national conversation working
to reimagine the war as something less destructive to the American identity. Shaw’s play
does not mouth conservative Reagan Era rhetoric so much as it works to change the terms
of the argument in regard to the Vietnam War, de-emphasizing national ideology and
foregrounding personal experience. A recurring theme in American Vietnam War drama
in the post war years is that of futility, as if the terrible consequences of the war for both
sides would have been worthwhile had the United States won (and what would “winning”
even mean? We don’t know.). One of the final speeches in the play expresses a
grudging respect for the Vietnamese but intimates that a more obvious military goal
might justify their elimination:
I have some regrets that we were unable to clearly determine the purpose
for it so everybody could listen up and say, ‘Hey, we weren’t all that
wrong.’ There were family structures, there were these people we were
talking about… you didn’t grow to love them, but you respected their
culture. […] So, I kind of felt today that I would never want to do
anything similar to that again under those circumstances, and I would not
let our government commit us to foreign soil without a very clear
statement to the purpose or goal. I feel that’s where we have been let
down by politicians. (68-69)

This character suggests that if someone (the military? the government?) could articulate a
purpose for the war, American actions could be justified, to some extent anyway. “We
weren’t all that wrong,” he wants to be able to say, perhaps knowing that a clear claim of
righteousness is too much ever to expect but that pinpointing a purpose for the war would
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mitigate the national “wrongness.” What is occurring in the 1990s, in part through
the drama that still engages the Vietnam War, is a complicated cultural rationalizing of
the Vietnam War to allow for a rebuilding of the national identity.
The final scene of Iowa Stories reinforces this traditional patriotism, ending the
play on a note of optimism and national unity. Whereas other postwar plays end with
images of the Wall or of other poignant reminders of the war’s destruction, Iowa Stories
ends with a presentation of the American flag, which all the characters salute. Shaw
allows that “any type of patriotic music will do” to end the play (76), disengaging the
testimonies the audience has just heard from the controversial specifics of the Vietnam
War era and instead recontextualizing them as a part of more generalized nationalism.
This move allows the play’s audiences to associate the Vietnam experience with national
pride, reinterpreting the war for a new generation of Americans.
The Vietnam veterans movement, which began in 1967, expanded its membership
considerably at the end of the 1970s when it discovered an overlooked group of
veterans—women. In her influential Vietnam War memoir Home Before Morning
(1983), Army nurse Lynda Van Devanter describes her first meeting in 1979 with two
prominent members of Vietnam Veterans of America, Bobby Muller and Joe Zengerle,
and their sudden revelation that women were indeed veterans too:
Bobby and Joe looked at each other across the table and then they both got
big grins on their faces. ‘Holy shit,’ Bobby said. He backed his chair
away from the table, rolled in a circle, and then popped a wheelie.
‘Women veterans! We forgot all about women!’ For the next ten
minutes, he kept looking at me and repeating, ‘Women veterans, of
course.’
Joe merely stared and shook his head. ‘My God,’ he kept saying. ‘The
thought never crossed my mind.’ (341)

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If the fact that women were also Vietnam veterans came as a shock to the founding
members of a veterans’ rights group, it is not surprising that the majority of American
society was similarly unaware of the war’s effects on women. Along with Van Devanter,
activists Lily Adams, Rose Sandecki, and many others worked to draw attention to the
physical and psychological suffering of women who had served in Vietnam, and who in
the postwar years endured the same symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, Agent
Orange poisoning, and social displacement as did the male veterans. Writing in 1983,
Van Devanter explains the early results of the Vietnam Veterans Women’s Project that
she founded just after her meeting with Muller and Zengerle:
We’ve been able to show the public that women deserve better treatment.
Before we stared the Women’s Project, the VA had not, in more than half
a century of existence, ever published anything that gave the least idea that
women were entitled to veteran’s benefits, although the Armed Forces had
been spending millions annually to bring women in to the services. In
1981, the VA published its first booklet on a study of women’s use of VA
educational benefits. I began teaching counselors in the Vet Center
training programs, and the centers began doing outreach to women vets.
More and more of them came into the centers for counseling.
That’s only a fraction of what’s needed. But it’s a start. (357)

This long-overdue recognition of women as Vietnam veterans would not come to
the New York stage for another eight years, when Shirley Lauro’s A Piece of My Heart
(1991) premiered, speaking for the nurses, Red Cross workers, intelligence officers, and
entertainers who supported the troops overseas. Lauro’s play is a hybrid script, a mix of
documentary theatre and fictional drama; the credit on Lauro’s title page states that her
play is “suggested by”—rather than adapted from—“the book by Keith Walker.”
Walker’s book, A Piece of My Heart: The Stories of Twenty-Six American Women who
Served in Vietnam (1985) is a collection of interviews from which Lauro has taken the
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facts of several women’s testimonies and formed them into her own characters and
plotting. Her dialogue closely resembles the narratives in many places, but she does not
quote them directly; therefore, her play is not exactly documentary theatre.
41
Lauro does,
however, follow the documentary tradition, in that she does not presume to invent
characters and their war experiences but instead relies on authoritative voices for the
basis of her dramatization.
Following the model set by Tracers, A Piece of My Heart follows several veterans
through their Vietnam experience, from their decisions to serve the war in their various
capacities to their troubled homecomings and readjustment difficulties, culminating in an
emotional celebration at the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The
beginning of the play highlights their naïveté and idealism, their desires to do their
patriotic duty or to gain life experience. Since women were not drafted, most women in
Vietnam had volunteered to be there (although the play notes that occasionally women’s
preferences to serve elsewhere were ignored, and the women were sent to Vietnam
involuntarily in order to meet staffing needs). The women experience a “baptism of fire,”
as they are thrown into the chaos of the war with little preparation and are immediately
expected to bear their share of the work burden. The audience follows them through their
wartime service and “back to the world,” as they experience reintegration problems
similar to those of their male counterparts. They endure hostility from antiwar protestors

41
 Yet another variation on documentary theatre is Wesley Balk’s The Dramatization of
365 Days, in which Balk utilizes selected portions of Ronald J. Glasser’s memoir 365
Days to provide the text of the play. Balk terms his work “chamber theatre,” different
from both “documentary theatre” and “interpreters theatre” in that it uses as its dialogue
published material from non-dramatic literature, instead of non-literary sources like
interview transcripts, news stories, or court records, and it pulls from a single source
instead of from a collection of several. 
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and other civilians, alcoholism, trouble holding jobs, and PTSD symptoms. The play
makes a valuable argument about the similarities of both the male and female experiences
in Vietnam. The women did not suffer the men’s guilt of having killed people, but they
suffered the despair of losing so many patients and friends, and frequently of saving
patients from death only to condemn them to lives with terrible injuries. When they
returned home, they also missed the intensity of the war and the respect they received by
performing well under pressure. Like the men, women felt the futility of the war effort
and could not reconcile the loss of life with their traditional American ideals.
To express these psychological stresses, Lauro utilizes an approach common to
other theatrical representations of the Vietnam War—the theme of fragmentation, which
we have seen in a number of Vietnam War plays from each decade. Lauro’s structure is
fluid in that there are no distinct scene changes, but the stories of the characters are
tightly interwoven and are told in flashes that move quickly from one to the next. The
women shift seamlessly from one character to another without the aid of costuming or
makeup changes—a revival of the technique of “transformation” introduced in 1966 by
Megan Terry in Viet Rock. Thus, each woman is the protagonist of her own story but
plays the supporting characters in the other women’s stories. This approach attempts to
replicate the war experience, which consisted of disparate violent events unlinked by
cause-and-effect or made coherent through a larger meaning. However, the thematic
fragmentation is taken to another, rather problematic, level by Lauro’s deliberate
fragmentation of her characters. Her suggestions for production include the following
advice about the play’s characterization: “The women are dislocated, fragmented.
Something about them looks alike. In some way all add up to one woman as all tell the
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same experience. As if one person split” (9). It appears that Lauro is attempting to
communicate the similarity of women’s experiences in Vietnam service; whatever their
role, Lauro suggests, they were faced with unrelenting pain and death, and additionally
experienced both an exhilarating elevation of status and respect and various levels of
sexual discrimination. Unfortunately, Lauro’s interweaving of the characters, their acting
“transformation,” collapses each individual woman’s identity and homogenizes the
experience rather unfairly. In men’s accounts of their Vietnam service, they are quick to
specify that each GI’s experience was unique, that, as Di Fusco puts it, “everyone had a
different Vietnam.” Even throughout the structural and thematic fragmentation of
Tracers, the characters retain their distinct individual identities. To blur the women’s
identities suggests that they should not be considered individuals, but rather a collective,
whose war experience was interchangeable.
While the play heightens public awareness of women’s experience in the war, it
does not go so far as to recognize the experience of the Vietnamese. In only one moment
does Lauro let a character recognize the terrible plight of Vietnamese civilians caught in
the crossfire between American and Vietnamese forces. Sissy, a nurse, is taking care of a
pregnant woman who has been badly injured in a rocket attack. One night the woman
miscarries in the hospital, and because of the damage done to her face, her older son does
not recognize her when he is brought to her bedside. As a result, the authorities take the
boy away. This account is relayed to the audience in a moment, as a statement of fact,
one tragedy among millions. Other representations of Vietnamese in the play perpetuate
the vilification of them: the hooch maid turns out to be an enemy spy, and a young Viet
Cong patient is revealed to have caused the deaths of five American GIs the nurses were
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unable to save. Leeann refuses to care for the boy responsible for the American
deaths, saying, “No! I’m not here to take care of any gook!” (74). When she is ordered
to do so, she locks her hands around his throat in an attempt to kill him. As she is pulled
away from the boy, she shudders at her uncharacteristic violence, but as is common, the
war itself is blamed for her actions, the perversion of the Vietnam War as the cause of all
American atrocities, not racism or cultural misunderstanding or superiority complexes. If
1991 marks a widening of the definition of veteran to include women and the extension
of social recognition and appreciation to women for their service, it does not yet mark
American acceptance of the damage done to the Vietnamese. A Piece of My Heart
destabilizes the concept of the Vietnam veteran as solely a male identity, but it
nevertheless reinforces the representation of the Vietnam War as primarily an American
experience.
The final scene of the play occurs at the Wall, the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in
Washington D.C, where the women participate in the dedication celebration along with
the male veterans. All the women leave tokens behind at the Wall, honoring the young
men who touched them during the war—a soldier friend whose parties offered temporary
escape from the daily horror, a patient who stood out among many. In the play’s final
moments, Leeann is recognized by a man on crutches, a double amputee, now walking
with prosthetics, who remembers her as the nurse who cared for him. He gives her a lei
of yellow ribbons to welcome her home, and they embrace to end the play. It is a gesture
of appreciation and recognition of service, the sharing of a mutual joy at having lived
through the horrors of the war. However, it is also unfortunately suggestive of the
conservatism of Strange Snow and Eleven Zulu in the 1980s, in that it posits the
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heterosexual embrace as the cure for war trauma. While not all the women are
shown to end up in heterosexual pairings—in fact, one character’s interaction with a
close female friend is suggestive of a lesbian relationship—Leeann is a central figure in
the play, and her prominence in the action encourages audiences to identify with her in
particular. Therefore, her joining with a man at the end of the play reinforces a rather
conservative agenda and comments that, even though women have performed on par with
men in Vietnam, back at home, they should expect to return to subordinate statuses. The
reductive ending undermines the portrayals of female strength in the body of the play.
While great strides had been made in 1991 toward the implementation of
veteran’s benefits for women and the establishment of women-centered rap groups and
counseling services, it was still unusual to recognize women’s military service as
comparable to men’s, even though there are eight women’s names on the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial (Mithers 81). While the Wall was built in 1982, the Vietnam
Women’s Memorial was not constructed until 1993, reflecting the nation’s delayed
recognition of women who served in Vietnam. It is likely, though, that A Piece of My
Heart contributed to its construction in a small way by helping to draw national attention
to the sacrifices and struggles of women in the war.
After 1980, Vietnam War drama rarely attempts to confine the war story to
traditional storytelling structure. Playwrights choose instead to present the experience
through a multiplicity of voices—contradictory, pained, defiant, self-justifying, self-
destructive, but primarily veteran—trying to get at the heart of the war experience by the
accumulation of perspectives rather than trying to encompass it into one. When a
playwright does otherwise and returns to traditional dramatic structure and simplistic
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plots to speak of the war, as in Metcalfe’s Strange Snow, the resulting play appears
hollow and reductive in the complicated social environment of postwar America.
Tracers, Still Life, Iowa Stories, and A Piece of My Heart all utilize the voices of veterans
and the fragmentation of narrative to express the war experience. The plays’ focus on the
veteran experience is indicative of the nation’s change of agenda, from the ideological
revolution of the 1960s to identity issues of the 1980s and 90s. The ripple effects of the
war, the playwrights attest, extend far beyond the combat veteran—reaching Vietnam
support personnel, military spouses, and even children of Vietnam veterans
42
--but
political issues are rarely examined significantly. The emphasis is on the recuperation of
the veteran and the recognition of the suffering of the American people; concerns like
reduced funding for the VA, Agent Orange-related medical issues, the responsibility of
the government to the veteran, and especially the ideology of the war unfortunately go
largely unconsidered. The troubling result of Vietnam War drama’s myopic focus on the
experience of the American GI is that the medium historically credited with challenging
power largely reinforces American solipsism. At the turn of the millennium, American
drama had not yet made a significant shift in the way it represents the Vietnam War.
The Twenty-First Century: The Ghosts of the Vietnam War
On February 3, 1994, President Bill Clinton ended the trade embargo against the
Republic of Vietnam, which had been put into effect at the end of the war in 1975. The
decision sparked a number of protests from veteran groups, who saw the new relationship
between the two countries as a final insult to those who had fought and died in Vietnam.

42
 One play I do not discuss but that would make a useful contribution to a longer study is
Lanford Wilson’s Redwood Curtain (1993), which portrays a young Vietnamese
American girl’s search for the GI father she has never met.
219 
Vietnam has since become a valuable trade partner to the United States, and for the
most part, there have been few artistic representations of the war in recent years. There
have been new wars for the United States to fight, and more and more frequently,
Hollywood has chosen to refight World War II in its films and television series rather
than explore Vietnam again. In drama, however, there is at least one more work. The
final play of this study, Steven Dietz’s Last of the Boys (2004), is about the legacy of the
Vietnam War—its continuing divisive effect on American society and its haunting
influence both on those who returned from the war and on those whose loved ones never
made it home. It is about a friendship that ends and a war that does not (Dietz 62), an
intimate story as well as a national one.
The complex plot resists easy summarization. Ben is a Vietnam veteran who lives
alone in California’s Great Central Valley. He has actively sought isolation, but
welcomes his friend and war buddy, Jeeter, for his annual visit. Jeeter brings his new
girlfriend Salyer, whom he plans to ask to marry him, and some mementos he collected at
Ben’s father’s funeral, which Ben did not attend himself. Ben and his father had been
estranged for years over his father’s change of heart about the Vietnam War. Originally a
war supporter and a close friend of Robert S. McNamara from days working together at
Ford Motor, Ben’s father became disenchanted with the war after receiving letters from
Ben—who served partly to impress his father—about its genocidal nature. Ben never
recovered from his father’s change of heart, and as a result “channels” the spirit of
McNamara in order to reinforce his own pro-war beliefs. The ghost of a young soldier
also moves through the action; we discover that he is the father Salyer has never met and
whom she seeks knowledge of by becoming involved with Vietnam veterans. In a
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moment of mean-spiritedness, Ben tells to Salyer a personal and treasured story of
Jeeter’s as if it were his own, undermining his friend’s attempt to impress his new girl. In
retaliation, Jeeter tells a horrifying war story about Ben. The antagonism escalates into a
destructive fight, in which Ben assumes the role of McNamara and Jeeter pillories the
Secretary for refusing to oppose the war even when he knew it was futile. After
“meeting” her father for the first time, Salyer returns home with her mother, who arrives
to collect her, and Jeeter leaves his friend. The final image is of Ben, alone, ironing the
flag from his father’s coffin.
At the heart of Dietz’s play is the presence of McNamara, Secretary of Defense
under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and the man considered largely responsible for
the orchestration of the Vietnam War. Ghosts are a theme of the play; the ghost of
Salyer’s father and the spirit of McNamara both participate in the action, but more
figuratively, the “ghost of Vietnam” haunts all the characters. The war is the defining
experience for each person, and as such, it never really leaves him. In explaining his
recent “vortex” experience, meant to help an individual channel a spirit, Jeeter tells Ben,
“We become the people we need” (16). Ben is representative of the people who continue
to believe that Vietnam was in service of some greater good. His loyalty to McNamara,
so great that he actually channels his spirit, is born out of a need to justify his actions in
Vietnam, to interpret the evil as necessary to achieve the good. Without that explanation,
the waste of life and the tragedy of the mission is simply too much to bear; however, his
adherence to his pro-war beliefs isolates him from those he loves—his father and Jeeter,
who both view the war as a terrible waste. Gerald Nicosia recounts a story about a
disabled veteran who refused to repent for his slaughter of civilian Vietnamese, justifying
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their murder as “deserved” because of the number of American friends the veteran
had lost. A veteran who had denounced such atrocities did not attempt to contradict the
man, saying, “He wants to feel good about what he did. It’s not my place to put him in
his place” (624). Rationalizing one’s actions as appropriate gives meaning to events and
protects an individual unbearable grief. Similarly, Ben holds tight to his belief in the
necessity of the war in order to shield himself from guilt. This attitude persists in
America today, not only among veterans but also among service personnel and citizens,
who do not see the Vietnam War as a mistake or an ideological inconsistency.
In 1995, McNamara published In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of
Vietnam, a lengthy explanation of his decision-making in regard to the Vietnam War, and
in it, he clearly articulates lessons he believes are provided by hindsight. The book
stirred up a good deal of controversy when it was published; a New York Times article,
which Dietz uses as an epigraph to his play, is critical of McNamara’s profession of
regret:
His regret cannot be huge enough to balance the books for our dead
soldiers. The ghosts of those unlived lives circle close around Mr.
McNamara. Surely he must, in every quiet and prosperous moment, hear
the ceaseless whispers of those poor boys in the infantry, dying in the tall
grass, platoon by platoon, for no purpose. What he took from them cannot
be repaid by prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late.

McNamara admits to “mistakes” in his wartime decision-making, but he did not voice
those concerns during the war years, not even after he had resigned from the Johnson
Administration. In Last of the Boys, Dietz holds McNamara accountable for his failure to
voice his concerns about the war publicly while there was still time to save lives. The
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climactic argument between Ben and Jeeter is an indictment of McNamara’s
reticence to speak out (at this point Ben has channeled McNamara):
BEN: I went before the committee and I told them—
JEETER: Who told them?!
BEN: I did. I told them. (Fierce, crying out.) I am the Secretary of
Defense and I am responsible for these lives!—And I believe that a new
air campaign against the North would not only be futile—it would involve
risks to our nation that I am unable to recommend.
JEETER: (Applauding.) Oh, BRAVO.
BEN: (Overlapping.) The war in Vietnam is acquiring a momentum of its
own that MUST BE STOPPED. (Jeeter gets right in Ben’s face—)
JEETER: And you reached this conclusion as early as nineteen sixty-
FIVE, isn’t that true?—
BEN: I believe that it—
JEETER: (Overlapping.) –And YET: You remained in your position till
November of sixty-SEVEN—TWO YEARS after you determined the war
could not be won. And never in those two years did you come forward.
Never did you publicly state your strong opposition to the war—ISN’T
THAT TRUE?! (There is no response. They are eye to eye. Breathing
hard. Quiet, taut.) And in those two years alone: What was the body
count? (Beat.) What were the names? (55)

Jeeter’s accusation resonates on two levels: 9,378 men were killed in Vietnam in 1967
alone, and Jeeter holds McNamara responsible for all of them, but we also find out during
the course of the play that one of the men who would have been saved is Salyer’s father.
Had the war ended before 1967, the young soldier who haunts the characters would not
have died; Salyer would have her father; Salyer’s mother would have her true love. The
effect of one man’s decision is given visible consequences.
Dietz’s dramatization of Ben’s mystical “possession” by McNamara creates a
wish-fulfillment fantasy in which McNamara is held accountable for his wartime
decisions, providing a measure of catharsis for both characters and audience members.
After the ghost of the young soldier reveals his identity, he gives one of his dog tags to
Ben. As McNamara, Ben gives the tag to Salyer and says simply, “I’m sorry”; Dietz’s
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stage directions read, “There it is. Finally.” McNamara has apologized to the family
of a dead soldier, if only in a fictional setting. At the end of the play, Salyer, who has had
every inch of her body covered for the duration of the play, removes her clothes to reveal
to her father her naked back and arms, covered with tattoos—the names from the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Kneeling in grief, she provides the image of the Wall so
many Vietnam War plays use in their final moments. The fact that the names are tattooed
on her body enhances the final image with an additional layer of meaning—the children
of the soldiers are yet another memorial of the war; her existence is a living memorial of
her father.
Premiering September 7, 2004 at the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, New
Jersey, Last of the Boys made a strong commentary against the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan being fought at that time. Artistic Director Emily Mann (author of Still Life
and director of the McCarter Center production) attests to “choking back sobs at the end”
of a reading and saying, “We have to do this. We have to open the season with this
before the election” (Sales 20). The election to which she was referring was the 2004
presidential race between President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry, in which
ending the wars was a key issue.
43
However, in spite of the play’s relevance to the
historical moment in which it was first performed, Dietz assures us that he did not mean

43
 Part of that debate was the issue of John Kerry’s participation in the antiwar movement
during the early 1970s. Kerry had made an influential speech to Congress at the Dewey
Canyon III demonstration in which he asked, “How can you ask a man to be the last one
to die for a mistake?” (Nicosia 138). The Bush campaign constructed Kerry’s opposition
to the Vietnam War as anti-patriotism, and at the same time, the campaign managed to
minimize the issue of Bush’s service in the National Guard during the war years, an
assignment that helped him avoid combat duty in Vietnam.
 
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to use his play to comment on the United States’ latest war. In an interview with
Peter Bonilla of Philadelphia’s Interact Theatre Company, he clearly states, “I am not
commenting on the Iraq war. I will, if you want me to, and it will be no surprise to you
what I say—but that ‘comment’ is not contained in the text or intention of the play. Any
connection belongs […] to the audience and them alone” (1). Dietz explains that Last of
the Boys grew out of his interest in McNamara, whom he describes as “the most
fascinating” personality of the Vietnam Era because of his “particular talents and
liabilities” (Sales 19). Dietz set out to write a play about buddies from the Vietnam War
because doing so allowed him to explore his questions about McNamara and the enduring
influence of the 1960s on American culture:
There was no Iraq war when I began this play. There was however an
ongoing debate about Vietnam—no matter how covert each political party
tried to make this debate, or make the issue ‘go into history.’ Iraq brought
this debate out of the shadows, but the timing of that did not generate the
play. […] Sadly, world events provided a visceral context for it. (Interact
1)

Thus, Last of the Boys is a Vietnam War play, not an Iraq War play, but like many
Vietnam War plays performed in recent days, it resonates strongly with current events;
Dietz’s choice to remind audiences of the tragic waste of life in Vietnam and of the
human mistakes that might have prevented it cannot escape comparison.
Last of the Boys gives voice to the enduring division in American culture over the
Vietnam War. There are those who will insist that it was right and necessary, poorly
executed perhaps, but a failure of strategy, not of values. Then there are those who decry
the war as a terrible mistake and mourn the lives lost for nothing. Vietnam War drama is
not likely to reconcile those positions or to provide meaning for such a disputed event.
225 
What Vietnam War drama reminds us is that war is a personal story, located in
individuals. Theatre minimizes spectacle, closes distance, and encourages identification,
allowing audience members to experience war issues in powerfully intimate, often
transformative ways.
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CONCLUSION

In Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama, David Mamet
claims, “It is not that great art reveals a great truth, but that it stills a conflict—by airing
rather than rationalizing it” (46) (italics Mamet’s). I will not go so far as to call the plays
I have examined here “great art”—perhaps a few of them may be considered so—but I
argue that they all aim for this goal. Vietnam War drama airs the conflicts engendered by
the United States’ long intervention in Vietnam, and by doing so, gives the nation—as a
collective and as individuals—hope to survive it. It is tempting to look to Vietnam War
drama to provide a great truth about the war, especially when the drama is written by
veterans; their firsthand experience gives them a unique knowledge, and perhaps they can
enlighten us. I have argued here that critics often devalue the contributions Vietnam War
plays actually make by expecting them to provide a truth they cannot. However,
Americans cannot make sense of the Vietnam War, despite years of trying to do so
through justification and revision. The experience disrupts both the American national
mythology and the human cognitive process of structuring events into cause-effect-
conclusion relationships, what Mamet calls our “survival mechanism” (8). As a result, it
looms large in the American cultural consciousness, haunting generation after generation,
resisting assimilation, unable to be easily reconciled with familiar systems of belief. The
drama that airs the conflicts arising from the war evolves as the United States’
involvement in Vietnam does, and thus it is important to view the plays one by one, as
voices of individuals preoccupied with specific war issues, not as self-contained histories
or comprehensive analyses. They are each but one component of a complicated, forty-
year-long conversation that shows no signs of coming to a decisive end.
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In the introduction, I raised questions about and proposed several hypotheses
for the unique development of Vietnam War drama as a genre. I would like to return to
those questions as I conclude my study.
1.) Who defines what constitutes Vietnam War drama? No one does this
definitively. Bibliographies of Vietnam War drama are sometimes quite limited, listing
only well known, published plays, and other times they are extremely inclusive,
collecting as many representations of the war as possible, even when the war is only a
minor event in the play. I have found no consensus that establishes criteria by which to
delimit the genre. Instead, critics set their own parameters for academic studies, choosing
to examine plays that appeared only within a designated time frame, or plays that have
the war as its primary dramatic conflict, or plays of significant critical acclaim or run
time. A play may be a Vietnam War play because of its direct or indirect engagement
with the war’s issues, even if the signifiers of the Vietnam War are not present (Kopit’s
Indians and Heller’s We Bombed in New Haven are two examples), and so it is incumbent
upon the individual critic to argue for each play’s relevance to his/her study.
2.) Can Vietnam War plays transcend their historical moment? Do any of the
plays retain relevance now that the Vietnam War era is over? Yes and no. All plays are
bound to their historical moments to some extent. Audiences must make allowances for
differences in values, customs, language, and social concerns between their own society
and that of the play. As I have argued, Vietnam War drama is inextricably linked to its
historical moment; it responds to the cultural crises of the period in which it appears, and
separating a play from its historical context results in a necessarily reduced understanding
of its function. In some cases, a Vietnam War play’s present-day relevance may be
228 
limited to that of an historical document, evidence of the concerns (and a
measurement of the intensity of those concerns) of at least a few individuals at a given
time. Barbara Garson’s MacBird, for example, attests to the New Left’s objection to
Johnson as the country’s leader, an objection felt so deeply it manifested itself in an
inflammatory insinuation of treason. Present-day audiences may be entertained by
Garson’s play, and they may learn more about the counterculture movement than they
had known before, but they are unlikely to be significantly moved by it, for the issues it
raises have been concluded a long time ago. In other cases, however, a Vietnam War
play retains its relevance well past the period of its premiere, sometimes because the
issues of the play are enduring—American imperialism or social violence, for example—
and other times because it is possible to make important connections between the
experience of the Vietnam War and a current war. The Trial of the Catonsville Nine
enjoyed a run at the Actor’s Gang Theatre in Culver City in 2009, 5
th
of July appeared at
the Long Beach Playhouse in 2009 as well, and Tracers has been staged several times in
Los Angeles since 2007. Theatre companies and audiences still find many Vietnam War
plays moving and relevant, especially those that raise questions of antiwar activism and
veterans’ concerns, which resonate strongly during the current Iraq and Afghanistan
Wars.
3.) Can plays actually create social change? Rabe and Mamet would say they
should not even try, that if they do try, they are inferior plays—tracts rather than art.
Their effectiveness is certainly debatable, and limited at best. Obviously, no single play
stopped the Vietnam War. It is not likely that any play in any historical moment can
claim to have significantly altered political events. However, the theatre allows for a
229 
sharing of views that can shift public opinion—slowly, perhaps, but significantly.
The airing of the conflict Mamet speaks about is crucial to discussion, and the theatre
does this especially well. The public dialogue surrounding particularly strong plays—
like Tony Kushner’s Angels in America—unites like-minded people and informs,
sometimes transforms, those who entered the theatre unaware. Theatre can shape the
dialogue as well as respond to it. The power of art to effect change may be limited, but it
is certainly a contributing factor.
The scope of this dissertation is limited to reading selected Vietnam War plays in
relationship to the significant political and social issues present during their creation. My
goal has been to show that the plays are significantly more interesting and revealing as
historical documents when read as participatory voices in the cultural conversation that
occurred when they were created than they are when removed from their contexts and
read thematically. Because I wished to raise awareness of the large number of plays
written about the Vietnam War, which do not receive the popular or critical attention that
Vietnam War films do, I have mentioned films in this study only in passing, citing them
as popular representations of the war to which the drama offers important correctives.
However, given the opportunity to expand this examination, I would like to see Vietnam
War films occupy a larger portion of the discussion. My interviews with David Berry
and John Di Fusco led me to see that, in at least two instances, Vietnam War plays were
created in part to provide counterarguments to representations of veterans and of the war
already in the mainstream. While I do not claim that all Vietnam War plays function this
way, I have no doubt that a more detailed comparative analysis of Vietnam War plays
and films would yield useful results. Because theatre and film function so differently—
230 
by encouraging audience identification with a particular character, by either isolating
a spectator or uniting him with his fellow audience members, by relying to varying
degrees upon mainstream economic support—their messages and influence differ as well,
and I have not yet seen a study that focuses on putting these two media in dialogue with
one another.
In addition, I believe an expanded analysis of genre could enhance this study even
further. The hypotheses I proposed in my introduction for Vietnam War drama’s unique
generic development sparked my search for information about other such subject-based
theatre genres. In other words, were there studies of the war play or Holocaust play, for
example, the way there are studies of the gangster film or the horror film? As I build on
this dissertation, I look to incorporate analysis of other war plays—World War II, Iraq—
for generic similarities to Vietnam War drama and for relevant differences, and to seek
out groups of plays dealing with other historical events for information about their
generic commonalities. Do war plays utilize common techniques and structures? How
do they differ thematically? Is Vietnam War drama unique among plays about other
wars? Do plays that treat other historical events (such as the Holocaust) cohere as a
genre the way Vietnam War plays do? This broader understanding of both historical
drama and genre development will enhance my project by situating Vietnam War drama
within a larger context.
I have noted throughout this study that the American playwrights I consider do
not give adequate attention to the experience of the Vietnamese. I recognize that
American playwrights generally aim to tell American stories, and they should not be
expected to cover all aspects of the war in every play (I have specifically stated that
231 
critics do playwrights a disservice when they look for such inclusivity in a single
play). However, I also recognize that a number of the plays I selected reinscribe
conditioned American responses to the war—casting the war as primarily an American
tragedy, failing to represent the Vietnamese fairly (or at all). In The Viet Nam War/The
American War, Renny Christopher examines the ways in which American literature and
films about the war devalue the Vietnamese culture and minimize the Vietnamese
presence in the war. Her argument is insightful and compelling, but she does not include
any drama among her examples. I believe building on her work by examining how the
issues she raises apply to dramatic literature would be quite productive.
Drama continues to be powerful in expressing the complicated nature of war, and
regrettably, there are still American wars to dramatize. Sean Huze’s unpublished play
“The Sand Storm” is a collection of ten monologues about the Iraq War. It was
performed at the Elephant Theatre in Los Angeles in 2005. Huze enlisted in the Marines
the day after the 9/11 attacks, and his play includes testimonies from fellow Marines
about their service, their readjustment difficulties, and their changed ideological
perspectives. “The Sand Storm” resembles many of the later Vietnam War plays in both
form and content, reminding us that the issues of the Vietnam War are not issues of the
past. In noting the persistent presence of the Vietnam War in American culture, Steven
Dietz warns, “The lessons learned and blame bestowed will continue to vary, but the
point remains: Vietnam refuses to be history. It threatens to be destiny” (Interact 1).
232 
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Asset Metadata

Creator Caron, Erin Toth (author)

Core Title Vietnam War drama 1966-2008: American theatrical responses to the war and its aftermath

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 05/07/2010

Defense Date 03/24/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag American Literature,Drama,genre,OAI-PMH Harvest,Theatre,Vietnam War

Place Name USA (countries), Vietnam (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Braudy, Leo (committee chair), Houston, Velina Hasu (committee member), Nguyen, Viet Thanh (committee member), Rowe, John Carlos (committee member)

Creator Email tcaron@csulb.edu,toth@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3048

Unique identifier UC1198472

Identifier etd-Caron-3674 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-343083 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3048 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Caron-3674.pdf

Dmrecord 343083

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Caron, Erin Toth

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu