Prophecy — East Fourth Street Theater, New York, NY (6/6/10)

Written and Directed by Karen Malpede

Forty years ago, Edwin Starr’s “War” was a Billboard Top 100 hit, an explicit denunciation of armed conflict: “War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing,” he trilled.

Karen Malpede’s Prophecy takes this sentiment as her starting point. Her latest play, an ambitious, layered look at the damage wrought by centuries of strife on the battlefield—and in the personal relationships that ensue once military action is over—is bold and dramatic. It’s also shrill.

Numerous stories unfold simultaneously. Jeremy Thrasher [Brendan Donaldson], recently back from fighting in Iraq, is studying acting at a well-respected New York conservatory. His teacher is former Broadway actor Sarah Golden [Kathleen Chalfant]. A monologue Golden instructs Thrasher to deliver—the Tiresias speech from Sophocles’ Antigone unwittingly sends him into a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder-induced rage. Golden is shocked by the violence of his in-class outburst, and in short order not only has to help him deal with the trauma he has experienced, but also has to re-examine her own past, including a volatile relationship with Lucas Brightman, a former student who fought in Vietnam and later died. Golden and Brightman had been lovers and Thrasher’s struggles bring Golden face-to-face with a host of complicated recollections and emotions from the early 1970s.

At the same time, Golden and her husband of many decades, Alan [George Bartenieff], are having difficulties. As the director of a refugee aid organization, Alan is often busy “saving the world,” making Sarah feel as if her work as a teacher is frivolous. Also distressing, many years back Alan had an affair with his assistant, Hala [Najla Said]. But it was not just lust that propelled Alan into bed with Hala. A Jew whose father saved hundreds from Hitler’s ovens, Alan felt a tremendous need to propagate, to do his bit to replace those lost to the Fuhrer’s genocide. Sadly, Alan and Sarah cannot reproduce; Sarah became infertile following an illegal abortion performed years before, prior to Roe v. Wade. After taking up with Hala, Alan’s dream was realized—after one miscarriage, Hala carried to term and delivered a daughter, Mariam, who she reared in Lebanon.

Out of sight is apparently out of mind and Sarah and Alan rarely talk about either Hala or the child anymore. In fact, Alan doesn’t meet Mariam [Najla Said] until years later when, as an adult, she lands on his doorstep and threatens to blow him to smithereens with a bomb she says is hidden in her purse.

And that’s not all: Turns out Sarah’s boss, Dean Charles Muffler, [Peter Francis James] was Lucas Brightman’s commanding officer in Vietnam and his possible role in Brightman’s death lurks over the two-act production. What’s more, Thrasher’s PTSD triggers long-buried feelings in Muffler and he is once again tormented by memories of
serving in the country.

These themes give Prophecy incredible, palpable intensity. Despite this, Prophecy weaves a cloth of far too many threads. The similarities between U.S. involvement in Vietnam and Iraq are noteworthy, but on top of themes including marital fidelity, the desire to reproduce, the meaning of friendship, the Holocaust, successful mentoring, how best to assist refugees, the threat of terrorism, and the lasting impact of war on both those who fight and those who are fought against, it’s too much.

Still, Prophecy delivers an urgent message. Like Edwin Starr’s “War,” it reminds us that nothing good comes from military combat. “They say we must fight to keep our freedom,” Starr sang. “But Lord knows there’s got to be a better way.”

Indeed.

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

Prophecy runs at the East Fourth Street Theater through June 20.

Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century

By Susan Zeiger
NYU Press

When men are shipped out to foreign locations to engage in wartime activities, it seems inevitable that they will become romantically and sexually involved with foreign women. In Entangling Alliances, Susan Zeiger explores this phenomenon, examining governmental, military, and societal responses to American soldiers’ desires for sex, companionship, and marriage while engaged in combat overseas. She argues that the changing ways Americans treated war brides over the course of the twentieth century demonstrates shifting American sensibilities regarding foreign policy, race, and gender. More than anything, because war brides involved an exchange of women across cultural and national boundaries, American discourse about war brides was ultimately about what constituted American manhood, men’s relationships with women, and the role of the nation in its relationship to other countries.

During World War I, the military preached sexual abstinence while devising methods to keep American soldiers and local women apart, in particular African-American soldiers and white European women. The army’s response to marriage requests vacillated until an official policy was handed down that marriage was a personal, not military, question. Meanwhile, domestic policy concerns in the U.S. triumphed over an internationally-oriented political outlook; xenophobia for newcomers was inevitable and Americans wondered if these foreign women could become good American wives. Though many predicted the demise of these marriages, evidence reveals that the majority made it.

In World War II, military policy differed depending on location. It encouraged marriage in Great Britain and Australia, both Allied countries with similar cultural backgrounds to white middle-class America. Likewise, American society welcomed these brides, suggesting that American women should emulate their domesticity and loyalty to husbands. Alternatively, the military encouraged prostitution, rather than marriage, in both Italy and the Philippines, while American society viewed these war brides as less desirable immigrants. Zeiger argues that both policies—encouraging prostitution or marriage—“shared... the intention to preserve and extend male control over women.” She also points out that though many of these local women showed independence and an assertion of personal freedom by going out with American men, sometimes against their family’s wishes, their stories “end with marriage and dependence.”

Race played a huge role in war bride stories post-WWII and throughout the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Congressional policy actively limited brides from Asian countries, outright barring Japanese spouses for several years, while all interracial couples faced social discrimination and, occasionally, found that their marriages were not legal when they moved from one state to another.

Zeiger argues that the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam saw the “demise” of the war bride as a phenomenon considered and debated by the American public. The military did not provide transport to war brides the way they did in WWI and WWII, and it actively encouraged prostitution rather than marriage, extending its WWII policy of creating red-light districts where prostitutes were regularly examined by medical officials and given “safe” ratings to prevent the spread of venereal disease. Korean and Vietnamese wives were not written about widely in the American press and they have not written about their post-war experiences in America, the way war brides from earlier eras have done. They have been, Zeiger writes, “all but invisible in American culture.” Demographic information suggests that these Asian war brides tend to be isolated, even in comparison to other Asian immigrants though they have sponsored family members to come to the U.S., unlike earlier war brides. Though Asian war brides were an untold story, there was a lot of media attention paid to the mixed-race children left behind in Vietnam and, sometimes airlifted out and brought to the U.S. Zeiger argues that the story of Amerasian children, and the efforts to bring them to the U.S. allowed Americans to re-conceptualize the war, seeing both Amerasian children and American soldiers as victims in the story. “The American nation becomes father and, also, paradoxically, child. Vietnam, the mother, the war bride, is not part of this reconciliation.”

Entangling Alliances is a compelling read, illuminating twentieth century social struggles encountered by men and women on both domestic and foreign soil over questions of gender, race, and nationality. Though Zeiger argues that the war bride phenomenon died out with the Korean and Vietnam wars, clearly, soldiers still took wives and fathered children with Korean and Vietnamese women. More recently, stories of male American soldiers marrying Iraqi women have been exploited in the media. Because Zeiger only covers the period from WWI up through the Vietnam War, she leaves a perplexing question unexplored: What has happened with female soldiers and local men in the conflicts that the U.S. has engaged in the last twenty years? Have female soldiers, like male soldiers, engaged in romantic and sexual conquests with non-U.S. citizens? I suspect their experience has been radically different than their male counterparts.

Review by Jessica Powers

The Lotus Eaters

By Tatjana Soli
St. Martin's Press

When I read a book that keeps me enthralled to the final page, that is so absorbing I have to tear myself away from it, I find myself amazed (and envious) that anyone can be so gifted. That’s how I felt after reading The Lotus Eaters.

Having attended my share of writing seminars, I realize you can’t really soar as a writer until you have truly mastered the craft; however, some writers seem to have talent that defies reason. A few paragraphs into this novel, I realized Tatjana Soli's powerful prose would haunt me.

I rarely read war novels, but the plot of this one intrigued me. The main protagonist is Helen Adams, a young American photojournalist covering the Vietnam War, and in Helen, Soli created a character that is complex, courageous, and real—yet flawed at the same time. Both Helen’s father and brother were in the military, and her brother lost his life in a Special Forces operation in Vietnam. Helen always felt excluded by the camaraderie between her father and brother, and she is plagued by the sense of having something to prove. This lingering demon has driven her to being in the midst of this historic point and place in time, and Helen is willing to risk almost anything to get a defining, iconic photo. Many of the characters in this novel are addicted to war, like a drug that must repeatedly enter their bloodstream.

Within hours of arriving in Vietnam, Helen meets Sam, a legendary war photographer, and Linh, a Vietnamese photographer and translator. Sam becomes a mentor and guide to Helen, who quickly learns that women are not welcome in the macho world of war. Linh helps her to navigate the murky landscape of a dangerous country that is shifting on a regular basis. Helen's human interest assignments also shift as her willingness to take risks proves her mettle as a serious photojournalist.

She had proved to herself what she hadn’t known before; that under the right circumstances she could be brave. An unknown gift, strange and random, like the ability to play an instrument or be good at a sport.

Soli's prose is gripping, moving, and unflinchingly places you in the middle of the action. I had to stop reading from time to time because the story affected me in a way that was hard to shake off. Told through the multiple viewpoints of Helen, Sam and Linh, we get a 360-degree view of the nightmare that is war and the bond these individuals developed with each other.

I was deflated and relieved when I turned the final page of The Lotus Eaters. It was unlike any other book I’ve read recently: beautiful and somewhat unsettling. If you want to know how to write a great novel, ask Tatjana Solis.

Review by Gita Tewari