All I can tell you is that Michael Weller has been reading one too many Marvel Comic Books.
What a play this could have been. It is the story of two vets returning from Iraq. Both are missing limbs and disfigured – one horribly. It is the sort of story that the Bush administration would like you not to know. The press, for all intents and purposes, has obliged. We hear about the wounded, some of us do, the wounded whose numbers are in the tens of thousands. We don’t see them, though, unless they are our neighbors or relatives. It is just the sort of story that makes the theatre live up to its purpose – to be, as Olivier once said, “an outward and visible sign of an inward and probable society.”
Instead of soldiering directly into this story, however, Weller takes us on a detour. One of the men, you see, is not really alive. He has come back from the dead to, well, um, I think to go on a mission. To add insult to injury, Weller leaves the truth of the vet’s condition for us to figure out.
Phooey. Horse Hockey.
There ARE three scenes that are worth seeing, if only you didn’t have to watch the rest of the play unwind like a rag of wet cement. The soldiers make it back to the zombie’s wife, and the soldier who isn’t dead (are you getting confused yet?) is the lead man. When he appears on her doorstep we meet a widow who has been abandoned by the Army and is loaded to the gills with meds. Verging on neglecting her newborn because of her inability to concentrate, she is in a new relationship with a soldier who abuses her. A tall order, but in the hands of Lisa Joyce this woman and everything she represents leaps off the stage right at you.
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