Our Man in Arlington

Vietnam has become a major presidential campaign issue in the past few months. While we may wish it were not so, old war wounds and the personal and political animosities they engender are very slow to go away.

Arlington’s Signature Theatre’s remarkably moving and intense One Red Flower is a singularly powerful theatrical experience, the current relevance of which I am sure was unanticipated when composer and playwright Paris Barclay began to put it together eighteen years ago.

The book of One Red Flower is based on the letters of more than 100 soldiers that were collected for the New York Vietnam Veterans Memorial and included in the much acclaimed Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam first published in 1988.

It may seem unusual that this material would generate a musical rather than a play. Paris Barclay, who was in the audience with a group of family and friends and who participated in an excellent “talk-back” with the audience after the production, explained it simply. “Musicals were what I knew how to do.”

As unusual as it may sound, it works very well. The music adds both poignancy and intensity to a very emotional theatrical experience. The set and the sound superbly reflect the sights and sounds of the war. The set consists of a series of gray walls, some of which are leaning against the others as in a bombed-out building, or a street that has been all but destroyed by bombing and hand-to-hand combat. The sound gives us all of the stunning dissonance of war from helicopters flying over the audience (and crashing) to the sounds of bombs, mortars, and rifles that make the members of the audience feel as if they are participants, not just observers. The music is beautifully sung by the performers and played by an excellent behind-the-scenes orchestra.

There are seven characters: six male soldiers played by Stephen Gregory Smith, Clifton A. Duncan, Joshua Davis, Charles Hagerty, Kurt Boehm, and Josh Leftkowitz and a woman, Florence Lacy, who plays a mother receiving the letters from one of the characters. Their performances are uniformly excellent.

The characters are very different from one another both in their social backgrounds and their political views of the war. The unique experience of war, however, brings them together with a bond that none of us who have not experienced war can fully understand.

During the play, three of the soldiers die and a fourth becomes a POW who commits suicide four months after he returns home after the war. (The name of the soldier on which this character is based was recently added to the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, reflecting a reversal of a Pentagon rule that postwar suicides were not considered casualties of the war.)

The play ends with the two surviving soldiers and the mother meeting at the wall, with the others standing silently behind the scrim on which the wall is projected. You will seldom, if every, experience a more moving scene.

While there are several political monologues and dialogs in the play portraying both sides of the Vietnam debate (though clearly favoring the anti-war side), the play transcends politics. It is really a cry about the fundamental irrationality of all war, regardless of the political context. It joins the great war literature going all the way back to the Iliad and including books such as The Red Badge of Courage, All Quiet on the Western Front, A Farewell to Arms, Johnny Got His Gun, and The Naked and the Dead, to name just a few.

You might get the impression that I really liked this production. You would be right. I strongly encourage you to see Signature’s One Red Flower. It is an intense theatrical experience that you will never forget.