The Actors’ Gang presents the gripping anti-Vietnam War drama
By Ed Rampell
The mood was set opening night when octogenarian author/activist Gore Vidal rolled up in his wheelchair to Tim Robbins at the Actors’ Gang’s theatre lobby, extending his hand to the troupe’s Artistic Director, intoning the word: “Solidarity.” Inside, in front of the stage, flanked by Robbins and Managing Director Elizabeth Doran, Vidal and another wheelchair warrior, Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, spoke out against today’s wars before the curtain rose for the evening’s play.
The Trial of the Catonsville Nine is a dramatization of one of the most celebrated acts of resistance against the Vietnam War, which Vidal had been a vocal opponent of. Six years ago this February, at a Sunset Blvd. rally Vidal also spoke out against the then-impending invasion of Iraq as part of the largest mass demonstrations in human history. Robbins, too, publicly opposed attacking Baghdad, and so, in a sense we have gone full circle from Indochina to Iraq -- although the imperial swan song unfortunately remains the same.
While French students and workers revolted in that merry month of May 1968, two priests, Daniel (Andrew E. Wheeler) and Philip Berrigan (Scott Harris), and seven other Catholic activists forced their way into Local Board 33’s selective service office in Catonsville, Maryland, seized 378 draft files and proceeded to burn the records.
The play opens with a pantomiming of this defiant action, while the rest of the production is largely Daniel's free verse dramatization of the court case against the zealous defendants, who came to be called the Catonsville Nine and to help rally the growing movement against the Vietnam War, lending the cause a spiritual dimension.
Like Philip, Daniel has been an apostle of nonviolent civil disobedience, a righteous leader fighting the good fight in the prophetic, liberation theology tradition of the “worker priest” movement. Although it is true that Daniel is indeed a poet and writer, he is first and foremost an agitator for social justice and peace -- indeed, he’s believed to be the “radical priest” Paul Simon refers to in "Me and Julio Down By the School Yard." So Daniel’s 1971 adaptation of the verbally rich trial transcripts are primarily by an activist interested in persuading audiences with a work of agitprop intended to inform and inspire action, not to entertain. Daniel is a prophet first, priest second and playwright third.
A trained bard with a deep dramaturgical background might have been able to take the court’s transcripts and turn the words into theatrical action to be performed on the boards. This was far easier with that other celebrated sixties’ court case, the Chicago 7/8, which was filled with many moments of low comedy, thanks largely to the Yippie antics of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and moments of high drama provided in particular by Bobby Seale, whose demands to represent himself led, unbelievably, to the Black Panther being bound and gagged by the judge. But the Catonsville Nine’s courtroom proceedings had neither the vaudevillian panache or Shakespearian tragedy of their Chicago brethren’s trial. Whereas Daniel’s closing words after the verdict is pronounced are: “This is the greatest day of our lives,” Rubin, with his usual pop cultural flair, likened being one of the Chicago 7/8 defendants to “winning the Academy Award” of activism.A key commandment of writing for stage and screen is: “Don’t tell me; show me.” The playwright needs to bring the words alive with passion and action. Daniel, however, is more interested in delivering a sermon of the stage that will move the audience to take action against evil, and his rewriting of the trial transcripts results in a play that seems at times to be talky.
But having said that, what wonderful words they are, spoken with great passion and conviction, clarion calls Americans so desperately need to hear today -- and one may add, words expertly delivered by the Actors’ Gang. The dialogue, at times, is poetic, tackling the great moral questions of existence that are the basis of all great art. The ethereal Daniel asks: “What would it mean to be a Catholic” in 1968 America. At times, it’s as if the words tumble off of angels’ tongues or Gabriel is sounding his horn. Philip tells the court the Nine took action “to bear witness, first by blood, then by fire.”
Much to the chagrin of the beleaguered judge (Adele Robbins) the various defendants try to explain how different facets of Washington’s foreign and domestic policy – the CIA overthrow of Guatemala’s reformist Arbenz government (which led Che Guevara to join Castro’s guerrillas), the apartheid-like treatment of blacks at home, you name it – drove them to their civil disobedience. But nothing is more moving than the description of napalm, the burning jelly that indiscriminately burnt women and children, as well as Viet Cong. Stepping into the lion’s den, Daniel declares that the defendants acted “to save the innocent from death by fire.” Another member of the Nine declares: “I wanted to let people live.” One of the two female defendants explains: “I want to celebrate life, not death.”
The Catonsville Nine were true Christians, not the phony kind that had backed George W. Bush and his bloodthirsty wars. (A difference between Vietnam and Iraq is that President Lyndon Johnson claimed he was fighting communists. Bush’s main rationale for attacking Iraq was those fictional Weapons of Mass Destruction that never materialized. Whether one agreed with LBJ or not, at least it was true that there were indeed communists in Indochina.) If you want to see real Christians, look no farther than the Berrigan brothers and their acolytes, not those phony baloney backers of Sarah Palin and John McCain, who has made a career out of being a war criminal, attacking a country that never posed a military threat to our borders.
Sibyl Wickersheimer’s set design literally sets the stage for this play: a huge flag hangs from the ceiling, with a parachute behind it. (Wait till you see what these “un-Americans” do with Old Glory!) The sparse set’s seats, etc., are sometimes suggestive of a courtroom, at other time of the pews of a church, which is what one suspects the Berrigans hoped to turn the courthouse into, as they bore witness against the war machine and its lackey, the judicial system.
The skilled, tireless actors perform admirably in multiple roles, alternating between playing defendants, witnesses, attorneys, prosecutors, et al, as the ensemble troupe rousingly brings alive a history that is, alas, still very much with us. For this reason, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine remains very topical and a must see, as the war in Iraq drags on and the Obama administration plans its Afghan surge, while beefing up military spending.
In its agony, ecstasy and glory, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine dares to remind us that at the core of the Judeo-Christian ethic is the edict that, from Hanoi to Baghdad to Kabul to Gaza, “thou shall not kill.”
The Trial of the Catonsville Nine plays at the Ivy Substation, 9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 p.m. and Sundays at 2:00 p.m. through March 21. For more info call 310/838-GANG or log onto www.theactorsgang.com.
