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After repressing thoughts on the subject for the better part
of a decade, America is just beginning to deal with the
Vietnam war and its impact on our culture and collective
conscience. Or, perhaps more correctly, America is beginning
to deal with not having dealt with Vietnam -- which seems to
me to be the real theme of Michael Cimino's film The Deer
Hunter. As horrible as hero Robert De Niro's experience in
Vietnam is his refusal or inability to talk about it back in
the States.
Recognizing the reluctance to deal with Vietnam is where
Elizabeth Swados begins in her new show Dispatches
(playing at the Public Theater in New York), a rock musical
based on Michael Herr's best-selling book of the same name.
The idea of a rock musical about Vietnam may strike some as
absurd; to fans of Herr's book, it may seem sacrilegious. It's
possible that Swados purposefully invites this skepticism. Dispatches
is staged like a rock concert, with onstage musicians,
scaffolding for speakers, an electronic marquee and a cast of
11 youngsters in fatigues. This concept comes from a passage
in the book ("Out on the street I couldn't tell the
Vietnam veterans from the rock 'n' roll veterans. The '60s had
made so many casualties, its war and its music had run power
off the same circuit..."), but it nonetheless seems
distancing at first, almost trivializing. Vietnam as shallow
pop entertainment? Have we absorbed the war, one grumbles,
without digesting it? The device, however, proves to be only a
tool for lunging into material painful, confused and
complicated. The astounding achievement of Dispatches
is that it begins by peering through a telescope at Khe Sanh,
1968, from the safe space of America, 1979, places you
face-to-face with the scared, lonely kids fighting a senseless
war, and leaves you reduced to tears of rage and grief. It's a
sort of sneak attack.
Michael Herr is a writer who went to Vietnam to cover the war
not for a newspaper but for posterity. Accordingly, his style
is more literary than journalistic. In lieu of attending
Pentagon propaganda briefings, Herr hung out with the Marine
"grunts." Looking beyond the olive-drab uniforms and
helmets emblazoned with cliched battle slogans, he found a
different story in every man: the crazy-eyed, pill-gobbling
soldier on this third tour who admits, "I just can't hack
it back in the World"; the guy who carries an oatmeal
cookie from home wrapped in three pairs of socks for good
luck, though the others tease him about it ("When you go
to sleep, we're gonna eat your fucking cookie"); the
officer who mentions that he misses the nightmares he used to
have, with an implied sadness at having adapted so well. The
movies always depict war as constant combat, heroic action,
strength under stress. Herr captures, more than anything else,
the prolonged day-to-day inaction of Vietnam -- the language,
the atmosphere, the reliance on music and drugs, the
camaraderie that had nothing to do with patriotism and
everything to do with survival.
In addition, Herr addresses the peculiar nature of war
correspondence, that unsavory task of reporting atrocities in
newsprint prose, of taking pictures instead of pulses, of
extracting some truth from one's own romanticized danger and
voyeurism. "I went there," writes Herr, "behind
the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look
at anything, serious because I acted on it and went, crude
because I didn't know, it took the war to teach it, that you
were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for
everything you did." I can imagine this passage from the
book leaping out at Elizabeth Swados, whose temperament is, in
many ways, perfectly suited to Dispatches. The young,
awesomely talented and prolific composer/director has a
passionate social concern that could be termed excessive --
she feels responsible for everything. Fortunately, she
also has as much courage as anybody currently working in
musical theater.
What Swados did with Dispatches was select passages and
set them to music in a variety of styles, supplementing the
songs with dialogue and spoken text from the book. Because of
the book's episodic arrangement -- it is literally a series of
"dispatches" -- it translates naturally into a form
similar to, but more cohesive than, Nightclub Cantata;
and Swados's musical eclecticism retains the multiplicity of
voices and personalities involved. The overall fractured
structure of the show -- the staging is loose, busy and
multileveled; the choreography improvised; the music a steady
flow from pop to country to rock to Asian, with the marquee
providing captions -- certainly accommodates Herr's composite
portrait of Vietnam better than a compact Dateline: Hell
adventure plot would. Besides, Swados has a special sympathy
for people who are both victims and survivors. Like her Runaways,
like the Auschwitz Jews in Nightclub Cantata, like The
Trojan Women (which she scored for director Andrei Serban),
the Marines in Dispatches become vessels for her
righteous and eloquent -- if unassailable -- anger at
injustice and inhumanity.
I have only a couple of reservations about Dispatches.
Swados's characteristic humorlessness is sometimes a problem,
robbing lines like "Vietnam was what we had instead of
happy childhoods" of their grim comic potential. And
while I thought at the time that most of the music was very
exciting, I realized later that it was Herr's exquisite
writing, and not Swados's score, that gripped me most; the
actors' best moments usually occurred during monologues rather
than songs. (The 11-member cast is excellent, especially Paul
McCrane, Gedde Watanabe, and Rodney Hudson; some have
complained about Swados's using women in the show, but it
didn't bother me -- after all, this is theater.)
Nonetheless, the songs I remember best -- the C&W tune
"Song of the Lurp," rocker "Helicopter,
Helicopter," and ballad-like "Bourgainvillea"
and "Beautiful for Once" -- share a melodiousness
that is a marked improvement over the composer's usual nervous
rhythms and recitative.
It's true that Swados's rock music is less authentic,
especially when compared to the music Herr specifically
mentions hearing in the trenches (Stones, Mothers, lots of
Jimi Hendrix). And she'll no doubt be ridiculed for admitting
to the New York Times that she had to go back and study
rock music of the period -- one of the liabilities of being
more a child of the '70s than a "'60s casualty." But
there are distinct advantages to Swados's distance from the
era. Like Milos Forman, who succeeded in the impossible task
of making a meaningful film of Hair, her approach to
the '60s is not nostalgic but inquisitive. And it is Swados's
passionate curiosity, combined with Herr's verbal grace and
rock 'n' roll energy, that enables Dispatches to build
so forcefully to the devastating discovery that "Vietnam
Vietnam Vietnam, we have all been there."
Boston Phoenix, June 1979
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