Dead Men, Lively Play

In Flanders fields.

— John McCrae

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[img]168|left|||no_popup[/img] In the ultimate act of civil disobedience, six dead soldiers refuse to be buried, defying both their generals’ orders and the heartbroken entreaties of their wives, girlfriends, and mothers. A first reading of Bury the Dead would see this disturbance of the natural order as an anti-war screed, which on one level it is. Bury the Dead throws barbs at generals – and, by implication – armchair generals – who remain out of harm’s way while frontline troops die in the pursuit of that extra few feet of previous territory – a few more gallons of oil, in today’s parlance. In criticizing the ease with which the Powers That Be send young men and women in uniform to their deaths, Bury the Dead offers a prickly critique of war as an instrument of foreign policy. But the play is as much an elegy for the life not fully lived as it is a condemnation of war’s senseless brutality. When each of the six dead soldiers is given a chance to speak, as best he can and certainly with great poignancy about the rule-breaking drive to stay above ground, the explanation inevitably centers on the persistence of memory, on the inability to let go of life.

The burden, of course, isn’t on those soldiers to justify their understandable clinginess, but on a world that ultimately can’t even be bothered to remember the dead. The persistence of memory, the will to live, that something beyond simply disposing of corpses and consigning once living human beings to the anonymity of time, the settling of accounts – Bury the Dead doesn’t allow for the possibility of burial until the living come to terms with the finality of death in life.

Unfortunately, Shaw has no more idea as to what to do with his undead soldiers than any of his “living” characters. Bury the Dead anticlimactically runs out of steam and leaves the audience to fend for itself. This isn’t to say that an ending as unresolved as the soldiers’ existential status isn’t appropriate, only that a simmering premise never quite reaches, let alone exceeds, the boiling point. But both a vision of the dead coming back to a kind of life, not to eat brains in classic zombie-horror fashion, but to make the living question themselves, Bury the Dead is – despite its simplicity – a timely reminder. Though written in 1936 and arguably not the strongest production put on at the Ivy Substation this year, the premise of Irwin Shaw’s first play is easily loaded with metaphorical relevance to today’s international conflicts. And this is part of The Actor’s Gang’s brilliance; the uncanny ability to put on robustly produced, well-acted plays that resonate strongly with current affairs.

So what if the Iraqi war dead – the ninety thousand civilians, the thousands of American and allied troops – refused to go gently into the earth? What would we do?

The Actor’s Gang presents Bury the Dead by Irwin Shaw. Directed by Matthew Huffman. Associate director: Richard Herd. Starring Seth Compton, Rick Gifford, Aaron Conte, Simon Anthony Abou-Fadel, Bob Kudrat, George Ketsios, Adam Jeffeeris, Andrew Wheeler, John Pick, Brandon Hanson, Brian Allman, Erin Anderson, Stephanie Carrie, Heather J. Thomas, Mary Mackey, Colin Golden, Jesse Luken, Annemette Andersen, Donna Jo Thorndale and Jon Bruno. On stage at the Ivy Substation until Sept. 13. Call 310.838.GANG or visit www.theactorsgang.com for information and tickets.