Tracers

Tracers: Lost in the Roar of Battle

Mary Moody Northen Theatre,

through July 14

Running Time: 3 hrs

It's a jungle in the Mary Moody Northen Theatre at St. Edward's University. It's also a bunker and a barracks, home in 1984 and the front line in 1968 Vietnam. With healthy doses of blaring Hendrix, Doors, CSN, Neil Young, and Springsteen, director and sound designer Stephen Balgooyen and his youthful cast bring us the horrors of war live and in living drab green.

Conceived by John DiFusco and written in 1980 by a bevy of vets, the script occurs in a series of monologues, flashbacks, and flash-forwards as we follow a group of young men through basic training into the heart of the war and back out again to an ungrateful United States. When it was written, it may have seemed fresh, groundbreaking even, but now it gives us exactly what we've come to expect from the war genre and the Vietnam genre in particular: a callow draftee, a gung-ho enlistee, a sadistic training instructor, a tense patrol, heat, rain, booze, cigarettes, pot, heroin, booze, weapons, helicopters, prostitution, bodies and pieces of bodies (did I mention booze?), with plenty of fucks, fuckin's, and other assorted vulgarities thrown in for verbal spice. One of the many monologues actually uses some version of the word "fuck" almost every other word.

It's difficult material, and director-designer Balgooyen doesn't exactly help his youthful cast. Sometimes the sound design overwhelms the dialogue so that you can't hear or understand a single thing that's being said. This may have been purposeful, but it rendered large sections of the script unintelligible. At other times the actors shouted their lines, and the unfriendly acoustics swallowed up the sense. At still other times, the tempo was so slow and deliberate it seemed as though the actors were trying to play up the dramatic aspects rather than simply allow the play to speak for itself. One scene in particular, between a doctor and a soldier who had been bitten by a rat, worked quite well because the absence of the often-overwhelming sound and the slow tempo combined to allow the effectiveness of the text to shine through. But this was an exception.

Most disturbing was what seemed like Balgooyen's effort to have his cake and eat it, too. A large American flag dominated one corner of the theatre. At the end, the audience was asked to rise and honor the men who served and died to protect the freedoms we all enjoy. I felt coerced. Three hours of the injustice and terror of war and then being asked to face the symbol of wars past and present and acknowledge its righteousness? I felt trapped in a Bush conundrum. If I didn't stand, would I be seen as exercising "the freedoms we all enjoy," or would I be seen as an agitator, a communist, leftist, pinko, socialist, anarchist, or some other knee-jerk label? With everyone else, I stood, feeling angry at being so blatantly manipulated and ashamed at my own lack of conviction.

My mistake. I won't let it happen again.