A Playwright Looking Inside War's Silences

Julie Marie Myatt lives in Los Angeles. She's been a playwright all her adult life. She writes plays such as "The Sex Habits of American Women" and "August Is a Thin Girl." Her friends are, she says, liberal creative types. By geography and temperament, she would seem to live a life about as far removed from the war in Iraq as is possible.

But she's also the daughter of a two-star general in the U.S. Marine Corps, born between his stints in Vietnam. She grew up as a military brat, roaming from one base to the next, always mindful of the silence that veterans kept about what transpires in combat.

It's these two worlds within America that she brings together in "Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter," a surprisingly funny take on a wounded U.S. Marine returning from Iraq to find an empty bus station and an empty heart. Jenny Sutter is 30, lonely, sullen, black, female, mother of two, short of a limb and possessed of a torturous memory of a bomb blast in the combat zone. The play, after a debut at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival earlier this year, comes to the Kennedy Center tonight for a nine-day run at the Terrace Theater.

"There was the draft in Vietnam, so everybody had a cousin, a brother, a husband, somebody they knew in that war," she says in a telephone interview. "But a lot of people don't know [soldiers and Marines] in this war. It's made for an interesting thing, the public silence about it. . . . I think it's time for the country to stop looking at them as the 'other.' "

The play neither glorifies nor vilifies its protagonist; it just looks at her in the long light of a "broken" person scrabbling for a toehold in a once-familiar world that now seems alien. Sutter is not ready to go home and see her young children, so when an eccentric fellow bus passenger heads out to a community of transients and misfits in the California desert, Sutter tags along. The community is the actual Slab City, the former Marine base that has become home to a mostly seasonal crowd of retirees living in RVs, vagabonds, longhairs and people on the margins of the mainstream. (Yes, it's the same place you saw in last year's "Into the Wild.")

The returning soldier -- alone, alienated, lost in the metaphorical desert -- heading to a place that is, well, alone, alienated and lost in the actual desert wasn't by accident. Myatt started with a theme rather than a character, and the first seemed to need the second as a practical and figurative reentry point. Otherwise, as she knew from lifelong experience, returning soldiers land back in neighborhoods that know almost nothing of their daily experience abroad. This creates a gulf of silence, even among family members.

"The silence, that was the understood way we dealt with it," she says of her father's wartime experience. "It just wasn't discussed. I think a lot of military kids would agree, they'd know exactly what I'm talking about, whether your dad was in World War II or Korea or Vietnam. If you brought it up and asked a question, you'd get a 'yes/no' and that was it."

Still, this isn't new territory, as plays and films and stories about soldiers returning home are a subgenre unto themselves. The battlefield, the blood and the killing and the screams and the postures of the newly and unnaturally deceased are all ghosts that live offstage.

Onstage, the tension is in the mind, in the relationships of once-close people trying to find one another again. Of course, the war is never far from the surface. It's a reminder, to paraphrase Leon Trotsky, that just because you are no longer interested in war, it doesn't mean war is no longer interested in you. It lingers, in its corrosive way. When you go to war, "home" is a physical place. When you return, you recognize it to have been only a state of mind.

In cinematic terms, it's the difference between "Platoon," where the primary struggle is between Americans in Vietnam, and "Born on the Fourth of July," where the war is between Americans in America. It's the subject of "The Deer Hunter" and "Coming Home." Everybody wants to go home. Everybody wants it to be like it was when they left, if not better and more precious. The problem is, it never works out that way, because it is the person who is returning home who is changed. Back home, everything is somehow too quiet, too mannered, too . . . proper.

That in mind, Myatt sets her play where loud noises and dysfunction are more comfortable neighbors than in the stifling normalcy of Main Street, U.S.A. The war doesn't dominate in Slab City; it's just another jacked-up experience in a world of jacked-up experiences. The denizens are "broken, not in a way [Sutter] is, but broken," Myatt says. "They're people not quite sure how to get to whatever that next place is."

Myatt's father, retired Brig. Gen. Mike Myatt, came to see the play in Oregon, of course. The man of few words who spent his life in the Marines could hardly contain himself, she says.

"He cried and cried and cried and cried."

Coming home can be like that.

Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter runs tonight through July 27 at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater. Tickets are $25 and can be purchased through http://www.kennedy-center.org.