Overview
NOTICE: Please be advised, this title is from the Samuel French Vault and is made from a scan of an archived manuscript. We hope you’ll treasure this glimpse into theatre history.
Through dialogue, music, chant, dance, pantomine and image, Megan Terry's groundbreaking play satirizes attitudes toward the war in Vietnam. It attempts to present the very complicated, tragic, and helplessly divided atmosphere that prevails in America, and to look at hapless emotions in a hopelessly complex mythology of war. With the technique of "transformations" the play unfolds. People change from flowers to individuals to machines, from one character to another, from character into actor into bystander and back to character or abstract image or comment; women change to men and back to women again. Americans change into Vietnamese into Viet Cong and back to American soldiers.
The line of the play follows several soldiers from birth, to induction, to indoctrination, to overseas, to battle, to fraternization and to death. Along the way we meet their mothers, their instructors, their superiors, their elected officials, their friends and their enemies, their tormentors and finally their ghosts. A strong ensemble spirit emerges via the actors' technique and interaction with one another and with the audience. The form of the play is constructed so as to manifest the reality of theatre – not as a replica of or comment upon life but as a part of life – and thus restore its urgency and relevance.