They've come, 30 strong, to learn about war -- or rather, about how they might fool the rest of us into thinking they know anything about war. On a vintage World War II troop ship in Baltimore harbor, the actors and crew of the Kennedy Center's lavish revival of "Mister Roberts" are hanging on every word uttered by a retired Navy captain, Michael J. Schneider, who has kindly offered them a crash course in being a hand on a Navy vessel.
The course is not a refresher. Not a single member of the ensemble has served as much as one day in the United States military.
A computer-generated rendering of the ship designed for the Kennedy Center production of "Mister Roberts." The set cost more than $300,000 to create.
(Design Andrew Jackness)
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The actors' innocence about the ins and outs of a soldier's life -- in an earlier meeting with them in Washington, Schneider even showed them how to salute -- is some measure of the rather stark divisions in this nation between who serves in the armed forces these days and who doesn't. On a symbolic level, it's significant, too. If these actors have had little contact with the military, the same might be said of the American theater as a whole.
"How did sailors and merchant marines feel about each other?" one of the actors asks as the cast gathers around Schneider on a deck of the John W. Brown, a World War II Liberty ship that is still seaworthy but now serves mostly as a floating museum.
"Good question," Schneider responds. "I think it depended on the ship. Some worked very well. Sometimes there was friction."
Another actor gestures over Schneider's shoulder to an immense firearm mounted on a wall. "Is that a real rifle?"
The Navy man smiles to himself. The rifle is way too big to be anything but a prop. He tells the visitors it was a demonstration tool in weapons training, and then gestures to the rows of normal-size rifles secured in racks on the floor. Those, he notes, are very real.
"And they're locked up," Schneider adds, "because we knew you guys were coming."
The guys laugh appreciatively. This is as close, perhaps, as many of them will ever get to authentic naval atmosphere, and conveying something of the reality of that world is an essential aspect of a successful staging of "Mister Roberts," the World War II dramedy by Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan. Because the 1948 play takes place on a cargo ship in the South Pacific, director Robert Longbottom thought it would be helpful to give the actors, many so young they'll receive their Actors' Equity cards with this production, a close encounter with the gray steel of an actual ship.
"Mister Roberts" is unusual for the theater. As Schneider notes, it's thought of fondly by military people, a prize-winning play that offers a largely sympathetic portrait of their codes and camaraderie. The theater isn't exactly overrun with examples of this. In fact, for a nation whose history is so tied up in the stories of men and women who go into battle -- or just put on a uniform -- it's surprising how few good stories make their way to the stage.
Some have turned up over the years as plays drawn from personal memory (Neil Simon's "Biloxi Blues") or dark comedies (Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski's "Stalag 17"), as gritty antiwar statements (David Rabe's "Streamers") or legal dramas (Herman Wouk's "Caine Mutiny Court-Martial" and Charles Fuller's "Soldier's Play") or even as the foundations of Broadway musicals (Rodgers and Hammerstein's "South Pacific"; Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schoenberg's "Miss Saigon"). But it has been rare -- and in the theater of today, it is rarer still -- for a playwright of the first rank to try to distill the warrior's experience for a live audience.
Among the great works of the nation's marquee dramatists of the past -- Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams -- as well as of such contemporary writers as Edward Albee, David Mamet, Tony Kushner and August Wilson, it is hard to come up with a standout play that seriously delves into the psyche, or even the problems, of American service people.
Perhaps writers for the stage, like the actors on the ship in Baltimore, simply lack the firsthand experience. Or maybe it's a lingering mistrust in theater circles of the military, or a matter of Hollywood cornering the market. From "All Quiet on the Western Front" to "Saving Private Ryan," movies have always given American audiences a healthy exposure to people in khaki. And certainly the epic scale on which wars are fought is more easily conveyed through the sophisticated technology of moviemaking.
Still, you have to wonder, at a time when America is enmeshed in such a controversial incursion overseas, when new stories of what happens to people on and behind the front lines might be particularly relevant, why the theater seems to have gone, well, AWOL.
