Sometimes the easiest way to offend is to avoid being offensive. Boots On the Ground, Trinity Repertory Company’s docudrama about local effects of the Iraqi War, leans so far to one side to try to keep balanced that it topples right over. Apparently it was assumed that opposition to the war is such an obvious elephant in the room that it hardly needed to be acknowledged.
Staged in the intimate downstairs theater through May 21, the text dramatized by five actors is drawn from nearly 200 hours of interviews with 70 Rhode Islanders, 23 of whose words are presented here. Co-created and written by Laura Kepley and D. Salem Smith and directed by Kepley, the attempt was to hold a mirror to people asked about the war.
However, while opposition to the war is noted briefly in passing here and there, the editing process resulted in sticking closely to perspectives of soldiers in Iraq and their supportive families at home.
Such points of view are all well and good, but it’s hard to believe that not one articulate opponent protesting the war could be found to interject the political background against which these soldiers, each one admirable, give voice. What about the lies that prompted all this self-sacrificing fervor? After all, at one point a soldier drops the astounding observation that “almost everybody was there as payback for 9/11.” Never mind politics — dramatic conflict alone should demand picking up on this notion.
Surely for those idealistic soldiers putting their lives on the line, a complete picture would be no insult — not to mention that the play would then be a fuller and more accurate document decades from now.
All that said, Boots On the Ground skillfully carries out its narrowly focused aim. The Rhode Island National Guard is the fourth largest employer in the state, the program points out, and has deployed 3800 soldiers so far in the biggest mobilization since World War I. How they see Gulf War II is amply represented.
Providing a platform for their views, literally, Beowulf Boritt’s set design is ingenious in its simplicity. A slightly raised square of polished wood is surrounded by sand that at times represents Iraqi desert and at times Rhode Island. Gradually, desert and beach accumulate on the pristine surface, making the common ground of the play messier and messier.
The shape-shifting actors move smoothly from character to character. There is the regular Army couple (Richard Donelly and Anne Scurria) who drop everything and fly to Las Vegas to get married, after his commander drops a strong hint that they’d better do so soon. There is the hospital worker with the military background (Rachael Warren) who signed up with the Army reserve before a call-up was likely, figuring on a “free lunch.” A teenaged soldier (Stephen Thorne) is as delighted to be surfing every day, before he deploys, as he is to be assigned to sniper school. (We hear no more about that lethal work, which likely aged him pretty quickly.) On that score, about killing someone, we get a heart-stopping description from a 21-year-old (a spellbinding Joe Wilson Jr.) who turns the corner and is face-to-face with an armed Iraqi his own age, as both freeze and then fire together.
