Tag Archives: iraq war

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Breathtaking “Black Watch” Brings Magic to All-Too-Familiar Tragedy of War

The familiar and strange merge at The National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch (at the Paramount through May 5, ask about a 2-for-1 offer on tonight’s and Wednesday’s performances). The result is exciting, disorienting, wonderful theatre. The show is a familiar type of documentary theatre derived from interviews with soldiers of the eponymous regiment. It sprang to life as the must-see hit of the 2006 Edinburgh Festival Fringe and has been on a worldwide tour ever since.

Much of Black Watch’s popularity stems from simple, highly effective visuals of astonishing beauty. Such moments thrust it out of the realm of stolid documentary theatre into a higher and more affecting place.

The Paramount’s lobby is there in all its grandeur, as is the house, only the orchestra level floor has been stripped bare without a bit of seating. A block of risers fills the front third of the house. This production uses an “alley staging,” in which the audience is on two sides with the stage running between them. The presence of audience behind the performance brings an inherent self-consciousness to the production that is also evident in the content. This is another way in which Black Watch is both familiar and strange.

Form reinforces content throughout, as in the opening scene in which a researcher creating the piece conducts interviews with former soldiers. The soldiers’ responses come to life in lectures on the regiment’s history, missives to the home front, and scenes of life in camp. Their forms range from unadorned monologues to song (mostly from the regiment’s traditions) and even dance theatre.

In terms of plot the documentary reveals a regiment with a significant history that is fading due to dwindling recruitment. The soldiers repeatedly note that they were trained to defend the homeland, not invade and occupy Iraq (though they’ve served everywhere from the Crimea to the Caribbean…and Mesopotamia). They blame the recruitment problems on public dissociation from a mission seen as a mistake. In the end, a single individual’s final break with the regiment emerges from the collective tale and comes to stand for the story of the regiment as a whole.

Movement is the most powerful theatrical element here (well, that and the sound which is at times deafening). The particulars of this regiment’s history and the Hollywood-scale pathos of its disbandment in the midst of an impossible mission are unique, but the disenchanted soldier’s story feels conventional. It’s the abstracted movements that lift the show into a magical realism, conveying more emotional truth than the plot could do on its own. The credit for the choreography goes to Steven Hoggett, who won an Olivier (British equivalent of the Tony Award) for his work.

Black Watch is a great work of theatre and a brilliant spectacle, integrating advanced multimedia with ancient theatre craft. Unfortunately the bulk of the audience at the Paramount finds that their sightlines are obstructed by the relatively shallow rake of the seating. Nothing that occurs on the floor is visible from the downstage seats and with constant mortar shelling the cast spends more than a little time prone. (On the other hand, a slight wobbling in the platform as the audience exits may make one grateful that the rake isn’t more steeply pitched.)

The accents are challenging but not nearly so much as the lexicon. The script does not shy from Scotsmen’s inveterate reliance on the word “cunt” as a nearly all-purpose expletive. It’s also littered with a litany of more obscure terms that can be tricky to guess at by their context.

Black Watch is truly an ensemble piece with the cast operating as a machine of equal parts. Nonetheless there are some standout performances including Benjamin Davies as the volatile Stewarty; Stuart Martin as the goofy central everyman, Cammy; and Stephen McCole (the bullying Magnus from the film Rushmore) as Officer and Lord Elgin. However even calling out these three fine performances begs mention of the others until the entire cast has been named and the show recounted in minute detail.

The power of Black Watch may have waned in the aftermath of the George W. Bush administration that inspired a rush of overtly political plays. With increasing distance from that time we feel less culpable, the alley staging loses some of its import, and the story becomes more of a fable than an immediate tragedy. Still, even without the agitprop pique, the staging and Hoggett’s choreography will take your breath away.

Arts & Entertainment, Literature

Joshua Mohr’s Damascus and Keeping on the Sordid Side of Life

Novelist Joshua Mohr talks with novelist Jonathan Evison at the University Book Store, on November 17, at 7 p.m.

Joshua Mohr

Joshua Mohr is sort of a handful. His debut novel, Some Things That Meant the World to Me, has the title of a poetry chapbook, and the soul of one as well, though on the spectrum it’s more Bukowski than Wordsworth, as the the blurb from O, The Oprah Magazine, clarifies.

It’s hugely ambitious, in that Mohr wants to tell the story from the point of view of someone with dissociative identity disorder, and you probably do not want to listen to this person tell you about what exactly happened in their childhood. It’s against your better judgment that you keep turning pages, even as “Rhonda” makes staggeringly poor life choices.

Mohr writes out the sordid heart of San Francisco–specifically, the Mission District–and if you’ve spent much time by the Bay, you’ll recognize that unsettling warm-sewer-whiff-in-the-street urbanity that permeates his books. It’s a radical empathy with, or even in preference for, the stinky side of life that, mostly unseen, underlies everything.

In Damascus, Mohr returns you to a down-and-outer Mission bar with the shards of twenty mirrors glued to its painted-black ceiling, “transforming Damascus into a planetarium for drunkards: dejected men and women stargazing from barstools.” In the first two pages you meet Owen, the bar’s owner, who has a Hitler-‘stache birthmark beneath his nose; Shambles, the patron saint of handjobs; and No Eyebrows, a middle-aged man dying of cancer and on the run from responsibility of any kind.

So far, so San Francisco. You simply have to make your peace with the fact that San Francisco’s human flotsam and jetsam (Rhonda makes a cameo appearance) is of a more captivating sort than many places–and with Mohr’s penchant for mixing ripped-from-the-journal reportage with prose poetry:

And other things were happening in the world, of course. Because there always are. There has to be. A couple who’d tried to conceive a child for years finally succeeded. A son estranged from his mother for almost twenty years picked up the phone and called and apologized for his role in their corrupted history. A seventeen-year-old girl’s cancer when into remission. Separated spouses decided to keep struggling through their knot of marital woes. A sunflower bloomed in Fargo, North Dakota. It rained in Orlando, Florida.

The book is bipolar, in that partly it tracks the unlikely, hermetic romance between no-strings Shambles and no-hope No Eyebrows, and partly it observes how the Iraq War intrudes into the  Mission District of 2003–a performance art installation meant to honor dead soldiers (but featuring dead fish) attracts a more muscular critique than anticipated.

“Screw the critics,” Revv said, pushing the beers across the bar to them, then coming back around and planting himself. “You made real deal art so don’t worry whether any academic dimwits get it or not. Let them snicker at cartoons in The New Yorker. The joke’s on them.”

It’s not the academic dimwits who object, though, but returned-from-Iraq soldiers, hypersensitive to civilian slights to their honor. It doesn’t seem like it can end well, yet, again, you keep turning pages.

Mohr’s writing is appealing because it is raw and unfiltered, overheard on the street or from the next bar stool, but it can also seem merely unvarnished, with its joints showing. I’m of two minds about that artlessness, but there’s no denying the effect, that it conjures a reality that stains you with the underarm sweat of the Mission, and the naivete of 2003, when no one would have believed eight more years of war were in store.