Somber 'Still Life' of war's demons

SHAWN CHENG/YH

Still Life, written by Emily Mann and directed by Zachary Jacobson, JE '02, clearly has no interest in making its audience comfortable. The play opens to an empty stage with a blank white screen on the back wall; for 15 full minutes the audience listens to tape recorded news reports and personal recollections from the Vietnam War.

The rest of the show is a series of live personal testimonies from three characters: Mark (Nate Schenkkan, BR '02), a young war veteran, Cheryl (Adele Bruni, TD '02), his wife, and Nadine (Megan O'Sullivan, PC '01), an older woman with whom Mark has an ambiguous, quasi-romantic relationship. The actors face the audience and tell fragmented and overlapping stories about their lives since Mark's return from Vietnam; intermittently throughout, the screen in the background displays haunting photographs from the war which, ostensibly, Mark has picked out to show us.

Cheryl and Mark, we learn, married shortly after he returned from the war. He was a celebrated and decorated young soldier, she a naïve and cheerful Catholic girl who occasionally, in keeping with the social culture of the time, experimented with speed. In deciding to marry Mark, she ignored her father's warning that "he was weird." But it wasn't until later on in the marriage, Cheryl tells us, that she realized exactly how weird Mark was. He started beating her brutally. He insisted that she engage in bizarre sexual practices. He painted sadistic pictures of her and hung them in the basement. When we listen to Mark speak, we find it hard to believe that he could be such a beast—he is introspective and self-aware, morosely admitting to the atrocities Cheryl describes. It seems, indeed, that Cheryl is right when she tells us that "the war is the base of our problems"; the sexual thrill that Mark got out of killing, out of the soldier's power, has followed him home to the private sphere and changed him—and his personal relationships—forever.

It is the sophisticated and jaded Nadine, though, who speaks the wisdom of the play. Mark has taken to Nadine because, as she says, "I accept everything he's done"; she is neither surprised nor appalled by Mark's experience during the war. While Cheryl takes a somewhat simplistic view of the connection between the war and her husband's beastly behavior, Nadine speaks the harsh truth: violence, even the horrendous animal violence of war, is inherent in all of us. It is only through meaningless and "terrible" clichés that we are able to both justify warfare and hide the violence seething in ourselves. The war didn't change Mark: it simply brought his true nature to the front. If the war is the base of our problems, then we are the base of the war. As the actors stare out into the audience, we feel the implications in ourselves. As Nadine says, "He calls himself a time bomb. But so are you. Aren't you?"

O'Sullivan is striking as Nadine, and the directing is well done, albeit austere—the entire show is a collection of monologues. The script is somewhat tedious and often lacks subtlety, such as when Nadine tells us straight out that this is a play about "the violence in myself, and in him, and in all of us," and in the end the show is a little too long for its own good. Nonetheless, the play does leave us disturbed and thinking—not only about the monstrosities of war, but also about such potential in ourselves.

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