Dagger of Pain

By T.E.K.

G.R. POINT

by DAVID BERRY

All wars are alike in that men, women and children are wounded, maimed or killed. But a lost war hurts the most because it pinpoints the aching futility of dying to no apparent purpose. The mood of the present hour is to forget about Viet Nam. Amnesia is the U.S. antidote for history.

In his first play David Berry, who served in Viet Nam, deliberately chooses not to forget. Berry surmounts the tiresome truism that war is hell. He seems to say that a nation that sent off its young men to the killing ground of Southeast Asia with complacent arrogance is itself hellish, not least in shirking its collective moral responsibility.

The G.R. in G.R. Point stands for "Graves Registration." These soldiers are the garbage men of combat. They package their own dead in black plastic bags for shipment back to the States. The men develop their own techniques for dealing with death. Cynical Deacon (Frank Adu) sells photos of the latest enemy kills as if they had been bagged on safari. Simple-minded Straw (Donald Warfield) tends the bodies with gentle piety. Others deal in raw humor or are narcotized by whores. The linchpin of the play is Micah (John Heard), a college boy for whom Nam, as they call it, is agonizing shorthand for the delayed initiation rite of manhood.

In G.R. Point, Manhattan's Phoenix Theater has taken a gallant gamble on a playwright who extracts the dagger of pain from his own chest and plunges it into the playgoer's heart. T.E.K.

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