Voices of Protest

Inevitably, the war in Viet Nam has turned playwrights into polemicists. Last week three different antiwar plays attacked the problem -- often with high emotion, sometimes with low taste.

> In London, Peter Brook's Royal Shakespeare Company opened at the Aldwych Theatre with a jazzy, quasi-musical melange of mixed authorship called US. The title stands for U.S., as well as us, meaning the British; but the show plays more like Marat / Sade Goes to Viet Nam. In a series of unrelated psychedelic scenes, it portrays America's role in the war as hypocritical at best, barbarian at worst.

Shockers abound. A butterfly is burned alive, and a Buddhist monk pantomimes immolation. An American G.I., in the form of an enormous skeletal death god, hangs in front of the proscenium with blackened doll babies in its eye sockets, a Superman shield on its chest, barbed-wire guts and a six-foot bomb in place of genitalia. An American colonel is satirized as being "anti-Communist, anti-queer, anti-drink, anti-cigarettes." At the end of the first act, the entire cast appears onstage wearing paper bags over their heads. Whimpering, they stumble over the footlights and into the auditorium, pressing members of the audience to lead them out through the doors. The high point of the evening is a song called Zapping the Cong:

I'm really rocking the Delta From coast to coast.

Got 'em crawling for shelter,

Got 'em burning like toast.

And the President told me

That it wouldn't take long,

But I know I'm in heaven When I'm zapping the Cong.

I had a dream about going

With Ho Chi Minh,

But I'll only be crowing

When I'm zapping Pekin.

Zap . . . Zap . . . Zapping the Cong.

Zap . . . Zap . . . Zapping the Cong.

Director Brook explains that he is not taking sides on the morality of the war. His concern, he says, is for the Englishmen whose life is ipso facto affected by U.S. foreign policy. "Here you have the basic conflict that is at the root of all drama. The Englishman is concerned about Viet Nam -- and that is a lie, because he isn't. And he's not concerned about Viet Nam -- and that is a lie, because he is." How the Englishmen felt about US, however, was not quite so ambiguous. The first-night audience responded with a smattering of applause and departed, bewildered as the paper-bagged actors.

> In New York, Macbird, a ham-handed attack on Lyndon Johnson that makes no sense, flashes no wit, and deserves no mercy, was beginning negotiations for rental of an off-Broadway theater in which it plans to open in November. It presents the President and Lady Bird as latter-day Macbeths, murdering anyone who gets in their way, opposing "the Wayne of Morse," and chattering in very blank verse. Heaved together by a 25-year-old former Berkeley student named Barbara Garson, the play and its message are exemplified in Macbeth's lines to his chief of war, Lord MacNamara:

What crap is this, "We're trying to subdue"?

Since when do we permit an open challenge

To all the world's security and peace?

Rip out those Reds! Destroy them root and branch!

Not surprisingly, MacBird and his lady engineer the assassination of a leader named John. Don't look for the Kennedys on opening night, if there is one.

> In New Haven, Yale Drama School Dean Robert Brustein turned the University Theater over to Viet Rock, a "presentation," by 34-year-old Seattle-born Playwright Megan Terry. Improvisation--which is to say absence of craft--is the technique of the evening, as seven G.I. recruits are followed from birth to induction center to a saloon in Saigon where they find that war is hell and that the military tend to turn civilians into soldiers. "Viet Nam may be the second in a series of contained wars in which our best young men go and get ground into the dirt," explains Playwright Terry. "I am trying to express my feelings about how we are all really related and how we must begin to feel responsible for one another. I want my audience to feel rather than think."

The Yale Daily News gave Megan Terry full marks for her humanistic impulses but argued that she had succeeded only too well. "The revue nibbles at both sides," wrote Undergraduate Robert Benard, "deploring well-nigh everything but offering no discernible point of view, and, most important, no implied alternatives. What she has done; really, is to anthologize several cliche comments on the war."

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