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ANTI-WAR PLAY LIST by Alisa Solomon
Below is a list of plays with anti-war themes that could be read at your
theater. Almost all of these plays are published in single volumes by French,
DPS, or Methuen; when they can also be found in anthologies, some
bibliographic info is provided. Feel free to add to the list!
*Aristophanes, Lysistrata
On March 3, join scores of groups worldwide reading this 2500-year-old
uproarious anti-war comedy, in which the women of Greece withhold sex
from their husbands until the men agree to end their civil war. For
details check www.lysistrataproject.com. (這是去年的活動)
Aeschylus, The Persians (472 BC) This brief tragedy is not only the West's
first history play, it is also remarkable for presenting to a Greek audience
an honorable and sympathetic representation of enemies who were defeated only
eight years before the play was presented in a war the Greeks regarded as
thoroughly justified. The play shows the Queen and a Chorus of Persian elders
anticipating news from the front, and then learning about the defeat of their
armies on the shores of Greece. The Queen rouses her dead husband, who had
led a doomed expedition against the Greeks a decade before, who consoles her
and the Chorus, but predicts yet another disaster. The vanquished Xerxes soon
returns alone, and joins the Chorus in a final lament. Characters: 3 men, 1
woman, Chorus of Persian elders. Short full-length.
Tariq Ali & Howard Brenton, Collateral Damage (1999)
As NATO bombs Kosovo, in North London Leonie prepares a lavish 50th birthday
party for Daniel. A gulf opens up between the couple as they debate the war,
Leonie urging peace and diplomacy and accusing Daniel of "post-socialist
Third-Way machismo." Characters: 1 man, 1 woman. Full-length.
Maxwell Anderson & Laurence Stallings, What Price Glory? (1926)
Captain Flagg and Sergeant Quirt, inept and oft-drunken officers, fight over
a lusty local peasant girl in a French farmhouse commandeered as a U.S.
Marine company headquarters in the first act of this comedy exposing the
futility of war. In the second act, the company moves to the front lines
and a lieutenant breaks down, saying he'll order his platoon out even if
Flagg shoots him. "What price glory now?" he asks. "Why in God's name
can't we all go home? Who gives a damn for this lousy, stinking little town
but the poor French devils who live here?" Characters: 26 men (doubling
possible), 1 woman. Full-length.
*John Arden, Serjeant Musgrave's Dance: An Un-Historical Parable (1959)
In this chilling and powerful drama set in the dead of winter in the 1880s,
Sgt. Musgrave and several charges -- deserters, all, it turns out -- arrive
in a British mining town with the task of gathering recruits for Britain's
colonial army. Instead they reveal -- in word and deed -- the gruesome truth
of war. Characters: 13 men, 2 women (much doubling is possible). Full-length.
In John Arden, Plays: One (Grove).
Fernando Arrabal, Picnic on the Battlefield and Guernica (1950s)
The absurdist playwright Arrabal responds to the Korean war in Picnic on the
Battlefield, in which naive parents visit their son, a soldier at the front
of a war, for a picnic. They invite his captive, a soldier from the other
side and the son's mirror-image, to join them. "When did you become an
enemy?" they ask. "Were you born an enemy or did you become one?" (3 men,
1 woman; one-act) In Guernica, a woman like Beckett's Winnie is buried
under the debris of her house, which has collapsed in a bombing raid. She
bickers with her husband as the rubble piles higher. (1 man, 1 woman;
one-act.)
Daniel Berrigan, Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1970)
Daniel Berrigan was one of nine men and women who seized and burned Selective
Service records with homemade napalm in Catonsville, Maryland in 1968 and
were arrested and charged with willful injury to government property. Using
official court records, Berrigan assembled this dramatic account of their
trial, focusing on the backgrounds and motivations of the nine defendants
and the issues their action was meant to raise. Numerous characters; can
probably be performed by as few as 6 actors. Full-length.
Edward Bond, The War Plays
In this trilogy -- Red Black and Ignorant, The Tin Can People and Great
Peace, Bond imagines the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. According to
London's Time Out: "The first -- a quick, telling chronicle of a life
destroyed before it ever got lived -- puts forth Bond's notions of
contemporary cultural corruption and conditioning. In play two the
demoralized inheritors of a ravaged earth try to rationalize an existence
predicated on death. The third play enlarges the issues by focusing on a
post-apocalyptic Mother Courage for whom schizoid suffering becomes a
survival technique."
*Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children: A Chronicle of
the 30 Years' War (1939)
The mother of all anti-war plays,Brecht's masterpiece follows Mother Courage
as she traipses across battlefields in the 17th Century, trying to profit
from the war devastating Europe. She loses her two sons and her daughter as
she wheedles with recruiters, soldiers, and officers. Selling boots and other
goods, she sings, "How can they march off to the slaughter / With baggage,
cannon, lice and fleas / Across the rocks and through the water / Unless
their boots are in one piece? . . . O Captains, do not expect to send them /
To death with nothing in their crops. / First you must let Mother Courage
mend them / In mind and body with her schnapps." Characters: 20 men, 5 women
(much doubling possible). Full-length.
Howard Brenton, The Romans in Britain (1980)
In this vicious and ugly depiction of imperialism, Brenton compares the
Roman conquest of Britain to British rule in Northern Ireland. (Along
with its theme, the play's nudity and violence sparked such a controversy
when it opened at London's National Theater two decades ago, that it was
debated in Parliament and the theater's funding threatened.) The first
part of the play takes place in Britain in 54 BC at the time of Caesar's
invasion: Roman soldiers brutally subjugate the Celts. The second part
jumps between Britain in 515 AD and modern Ireland. "What nation ever
learnt from the suffering it inflict on others," asks an Irish woman
activist. "What did the Roman Empire give to the people it enslaved?
Concrete. What did the British Empire give to its colonies? Tribal wars."
Full-length.
*Caryl Churchill, Far Away (2000)
Churchill's brilliant and unsettling play hurtles from a scene in which
bucolic serenity is punctured by a girl's troubling questions to total
Manichean war, in which peoples, animals, and even the weather have
taken sides. As Una Chaudhuri writes in an essay at www.hotreview.org:
"The first two acts of Far Away stage the progressive rending of the social
contract, first through lies, and then through non-sequiturs so disturbing
they make one nostalgic for lies. In Act One, a woman . . . answers her young
nieceA1s questions about the brutality the child has witnessed right outside
the house, deftly covering each violent and bloody detail with banal
explanations. It is chilling to see how easily moral and political
concerns can be deflected, how easily the habit of not seeing what one
sees can be cultivated. In Act Two, things have gone much further. The
girl, now a young woman, learns fast how to not even ask questions, how
to keep on doggedly talking about the wrong thing." Characters: 1 man, 2
women, 1 girl. One-act.
Tom Cole, Medal of Honor Rag (1975)
A satiric look at the hypocrisy of military honor, set in an army hospital,
staged as a confrontation between an African-American veteran, traumatized
by atrocities in Vietnam, and a white psychiatrist. Characters: 3 men (2
central roles, one guard). Full-length. In Coming to Terms: American Plays
& the Vietnam War, ed. James Reston (TCG, 1985)
Euripides, The Trojan Women (415 BC)
Euripides wrote this denunciation of imperialistic war, in the form of a
bleak lamentation by the women of Troy for their fallen city, just as Athens
was preparing to go to invade Sicily. It is set, stage directions say,
shortly after the capture of Troy: "All Trojan men have been killed, or
have fled; all woman and children are captives. The scene is an open space
before the city, which is visible in the background, partly demolished and
smoldering." The Greeks are departing, taking captured women with them and
killing the sons of Trojan warriors. Hecuba protests as her daughters are
taken and her grandson slaughtered -- "What help? / Tear face, beat bosom.
That is all / my power now." -- and Helen is shipped home by Menelaus with
a sentence of death. Characters: 4 men, 5 women, plus chorus of Trojan women;
full-length.
George Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer (1706)
In this near-farce, Farquhar savages England's early 18th-Century Press Act,
which allowed for the involuntary recruitment of men with no means of
support. On such a mission, Captain Plume returns to Shrewsbury from the
triumphant battle of Blenheim to recruit soldiers for his regiment -- as
well as mistresses for his bed. As Sylvia Balance tries to thwart his
efforts and win Plume for herself alone, the debauchery, corruption, and
abuses of military heroes is comically exposed. Full-length.
Charles Fuller, A Soldier's Play (1982)
Not precisely an anti-war play, Fuller's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama
examines racism in the US military and beyond as a Black officer arrives
in a Louisiana army camp in 1944 to investigate the murder of a Black
sergeant. As his investigation finds ample motive among the troops, and
as his white counterpart acquires a grudging respect for him, the officer
uncovers the depths of both institutional and internalized racism.
Characters: 12 men. Full-length.
Amlin Gray, How I Got That Story (1979)
In this brisk and bracing episodic play, set in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, a
Reporter reenacts and narrates his encounters with a range of local and
military figures as he tries to cover the war for TransPanGlobal Wire
Service, finding himself embroiled in corruption, atrocity, and political
intrigue. Actors: 2 (one playing the Reporter, and one many parts as the
Historical Event). In Coming to Terms: American Plays & the Vietnam War,
ed. James Reston (TCG, 1985)
Sara Kane, Blasted (1995)
"Set in a hotel room in Leeds A- 'the kind that is so expensive it could
be anywhere in the world,' as stage directions put it A- Blasted dares to
show how the most extreme brutalities derive from the most mundane ones,
and how smoothly and quietly moral standards shift to accommodate them. Kane
accomplishes all this in a spare, propulsive, and even witty story of a
middle-aged male tabloid journalist who has repaired to the room with his
good-hearted and simple-minded former girlfriend. His everyday exploitation
of the girl is exceeded by a soldier who bursts in fresh from a raging civil
war. Bosnia has come to Britain, Kane suggests, and mass rape is implied in a
single abusive act. ThereA1s no bald didacticism, though, as such a summary
might imply. Part of the playA1s brilliance is its thoroughly dramatic
story-telling. As momentously as Aeschylus or Shakespeare, Kane stages
beatings, mutilation, cannibalism, and rape, creating a theatrical experience
at once repellant and irresistible." (from Alisa Solomon's essay on Kane in
the Village Voice, Nov. 2000) Characters: 2 men, 1 woman.
Adrienne Kennedy, An Evening with Dead Essex (1973)
In this disturbing play about representation, rage and broken American
promise, a Black theater troupe (with a white slide projectionist) works
on a piece about a Black Vietnam War veteran who opened fire randomly on
people in New Orleans from the roof of a hotel and was shot down by 100
bullets fired from a helicopter. Characters: 6. One-act. In The Adrienne
Kennedy Reader.
*Joan Littlewood & the Theatre Workshop, Oh, What a Lovely War (1963)
Basing her text on actual WW1 songs recorded by the BBC, Littlewood developed
a poignant and powerful satiric revue. In sketches, songs, and hammy star
turns, the show traces the jingoism, stereotypes and mass slaughter of the
"war to end all wars" -- and it's often downright hilarious. Numerous
characters; much doubling possible. Full-length.
*Emily Mann, Still Life (1980)
The Vietnam War is the backdrop to violence at home in this unflinching
documentary play in which an ex-Marine and Vietnam Vet, his wife, and his
friend testify to the traumatic memories of violence. Mann dedicates the
play to "the casualties of war -- all of them." Characters: 1 man, 2 women.
Full-length. In Coming to Terms: American Plays & the Vietnam War, ed. James
Reston (TCG, 1985)
Sean O'Casey, The Plough and the Stars (1926)
Basing his title on the flag of the Irish Citizen's Army -- one of the two
militias that led the Easter Rising of 1916 that was brutally put down by
the British -- O'Casey examines the myth of romantic nationalism. The play
follows the diverse residents of a Dublin tenement in the months leading up
to the rebellion -- a fiery socialist, a young couple, a funny handyman, the
oft-drunken mom of a boy fighting in the British army in WW1, a prostitute.
Provoking heated controversy among supporters of the Rising (O'Casey himself
was a member of the ICA), the play asks, along with Yeats's famous "Easter
1916," "was it needless death after all"? Characters: 9 men, 5 women, 1
child; some doubling possible. Full-length. In Sean O'Casey, Three Plays
(Macmillan).
Suzan-Lori Parks, Devotees in the Garden of Love (1991)
In this poetic and satiric play, George waits with her mother, Lily, for an
unknown suitor to carry her off to a happy ending after he returns from the
front. Dressed in wedding gowns, George and Lily follow the skirmishes from
a hilltop, watching through binoculars and on TV as the battle rages between
the ThisOnes and ThatOnes. Meanwhile, they practice etiquette and discuss
the true meaning of devotion. Characters: 3 women. One-act. In Suzan-Lori
Parks, The America Play and Other Works (TCG)
*Irwin Shaw, Bury the Dead (1935)
In this lyrical and haunting work, an army unit is turned upside down when
a group of killed soldiers refuses to be buried. Despite the commands of
generals, dispatches from the government, the pleadings of their wives and
mothers, and the collusion of the press, the dead soldiers will not succumb
to the folly of war. Characters: 20 men, 8 women, much doubling possible.
Short full-length.
Wallace Shawn, Aunt Dan and Lemon (1985)
Though not an anti-war play per se, Aunt Dan and Lemon offers a chilling
and profound examination of the seductiveness of racism and fascism as a
young recluse named Lemon recalls the influence of her Aunt Dan, a woman
with passionate, disturbing, and frighteningly alluring views of Nazism:
Worth revisiting in the era of the USA Patriot Act. Characters: 7 women,
6 men, doubling possible. Full-length.
Naomi Wallace, In the Heart of America (1994)
Past and present blur in this powerful drama as two women search for
soldiers: one, Fairouz, a Palestinian-American, seeks her brother --
or at least his body -- after his service in the Gulf War; the other,
the ghost Lue Ming, pursues Lt. Calley, responsible for a massacre in
her village during the Vietnam War. Characters: 3 men, 2 women. Full-length.
In Naomi Wallace, In the Heart of American and Other Plays (TCG)
- Alisa Solomon
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