by Robert Brustein

Vietnam and Iraq have a lot in common besides the expenditure of so many innocent young lives. Both are proper names used to denote not just a country but also a seemingly endless armed conflict. Both wars were initiated by means of trumped-up evidence--Vietnam through a manufactured provocation in the Tonkin Gulf; Iraq through the pretense of weapons of mass destruction and an imaginary link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. And both eventually made some American presidents very unpopular. So far as American film and theatre treatments are concerned, however, there the similarities stop. Within months of the American presence in Vietnam, the theatre was generating a number of radical plays protesting Lyndon Johnson's conduct of the war. A lot of those plays were performed at the Yale Repertory Theatre between 1966 and 1972. The first was an Open Theatre production of Megan Terry's Viet Rock, a musical and satirical critique that treated an unlawful foreign adventure as an absurdist romp. (In the cast of that show was Jerome Ragni, writing the book of the anti-war musical Hair between rehearsals.) Macbird was Barbara Garson's cheeky, punchy, and utterly irresponsible takeoff on Macbeth, inspired by the notion that Johnson had murdered Kennedy, and for the same reasons that Macbeth had murdered Duncan, in order to achieve power and eliminate his enemies. Yale didn't produce that play though a few people still think we did (maybe because I participated in its first reading at a Columbia University protest in 1965). Macbird became a long-running off-Broadway hit that brought Stacey Keach to public attention for the first time. The third anti-Vietnam war offering worth mentioning was Joseph Heller's We Bombed in New Haven, also performed at Yale. This was not specifically about the Vietnam war, as Catch 22 was specifically about the World War II Italian campaign, but there was no mistaking its contemporary resonances, especially in the last scene where an Air Force Captain, also played by Stacey Keach, looking for new recruits, keeps turning away his own son. The boy continues to show up at his father's door until the Captain is forced to send him to his death. The students in the audience responded by shouting "Hell, no, we won't go." Hollywood got interested in the Vietnam war some years after it was over, the first significant film on the subject being Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now in 1979. Coppola treated the war like a descent into the heart of darkness (indeed, the movie was based on Conrad's Heart of Darkness), featuring drug-soaked orgies of sex and slaughter, with hordes of helicopters buzzing like angry wasps around a Vietnamese village as the soundtrack played "The Ride of The Valkyries." This was followed by Oliver Stone's Platoon, in which it was difficult to know whether the enemy was the Vietcong or an American platoon sergeant. And this in turn was followed by Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, another descent into the heart of darkness and the mind of military discipline. All of these movies (and there were many more) dealt primarily with the dehumanization of American soldiers under inhumane conditions. And what about Iraq? The recent cancellation of a documentary student drama about the war by the principal of a Connecticut high school makes us realize how rarely this subject shows up on stage. There have been a few good plays inspired by 9/11, notably Theresa Rebeck and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros's Omnium Gatherum, about a dinner party from Hell, which may actually be taking place in Hell after the destruction of the World Trade Center. Sam Shepard also wrote a crackerjack play, largely overlooked, called The God of Hell about the repression of civil liberties in George Bush's America. It features a CIA agent who comes to a Red State farm looking for a government scientist who went into hiding following a nuclear meltdown. The agent is disguised as a salesman peddling patriotic tchotchkes, including Pat Boone's recording of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," and cookies colored and cut in the likeness of an American flag. By play's end, the CIA-man is leading the hooded victim up from the cellar by an electric wire attached to his penis, having pinned plastic American flags all over the farmhouse. It is a ferocious satire on torture, repressive regulations, and invasions of privacy following 9/11. It suggests that if patriotism, as Samuel Johnson once said, is "the last refuge of scoundrels," then the Patriot Act may be their last referendum. You may be able to name examples of the theatre's treatment of this war, but I can't, except for a few one-person shows on the condition of Iraqi women. As far as movies are concerned, there have been, apart from a few excellent documentaries, no feature films of any real consequence about the current Iraq war, though it is a subject currently unsettling the nation's conscious and unconscious mind. The best celluloid probes into this part of the world are Three Kings directed by David O. Russell and Jarhead directed by Simon Mendes. The first is about the way we abandoned the Kurds. The second about the way we abandoned our soldiers. Yet, both focus on the first Iraqi war, Operation Desert Storm, whipped up by Bush II's father, George the First. I can think of no movies regarding Operation Iraqi Freedom, the war generated by the Axis of Evil (by which I mean George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld). What explains this curious lapse regarding an issue roiling the halls of Congress, the editorial pages of newspapers, and the souls of American citizens? Perhaps the current situation is too bleak and crazy for any major artist to absorb it into a creative metaphor. Or perhaps we need more time to gain a firm and objective purchase on our current condition. Or perhaps we are all too demoralized and exhausted by an administration too obstinate to listen, too defensive to change, and too brutalized to feel. But not to worry. Cultural retribution will surely come. After all, Catch 22 was written sixteen years after the ending of the war it so ferociously satirized.

These remarks were delivered at a recent panel session at Suffolk University on "Vietnam and Iraq."