In a time of war and with Veterans Day upcoming, Nick Anselmo, director of the theater program at Mercer County Community College, felt it was important to examine the topic of war strictly from the persective of what war does to humanity. The theater department is mounting “Vietnam: Letters & Remembrances,” featuring students from Mercer’s drama department, including West Windsor resident Danielle Madera. “Vietnam” opens at the Kelsey Theater on Mercer’s West Windsor campus on Friday, November 5 at 8 p.m., and runs in repertory with “Antigone.”
“Vietnam” was adapted from the book, “Letters From Vietnam,” edited by Bill Adler and published in 2003. The play consists of “real letters written by real soldiers,” says Anselmo. “It’s honest writing from people who were there and remembrances from the war memorial (in Washington, D.C.).” He says he decided to present the play so that “young people really get a sense of what war is. The play is not an anti-war piece,” he insists. “It’s not anti-Bush or anti-Iraq, it’s more about the humanity, the loss of life more than war being about any political agenda. And I couldn’t imagine a better way for my students to get in the shoes of those people than to bring those letters to life.”
Here, says Anselmo, are letters written by young people “the same age as my students.” Some of the letters, he says, “are from average kids talking about being away from home for the first time.” Then, he says, there are the letters they wrote to deliver to their homes “just in case.”
Madera, a 2002 graduate of High School South, is one of eight ensemble cast members who play soldiers and nurses who spent time in Vietnam, as well as the friends and family who lost loved ones in the war. She will graduate from Mercer in May, 2005. Her older sister, Nicole, a 1999 graduate of High School South, also attends Mercer and will graduate in January, 2005. Their younger brother, Jesse, is a sophomore at South.
“I didn’t do any theater in high school,” Madera says, “but I’ve always taken voice lessons.” At Mercer, however, the 20-year-old found a real outlet in the theater, and is now a speech and theater arts major. She says she wants to be an actor when she graduates.
Madera portrays the multiple roles of nurses who served, as well as those who waited back in the in the United States for their husbands, brothers, lovers and friends to return. And if they didn’t, they got those “just in case” letters.
“One of my monologues is a song,” Madera says. “It was a poem a mother wrote about her son — how the son had so much life, how he was involved in so much and he had so much to offer. And he died.”
In preparation for the play, Anselmo took his cast to the Vietnam memorial in Washington, D.C., and says, “I think it had an impact on them.” Madera agrees. “I’d been there before but this time it was so different.” To see the names of the people that she and her fellow cast members portray in the play among the names on the wall made it more real for her.
One of the people that Madera portrays leaves behind a little trinket at the wall, and she says that when she saw all of the gifts left behind at the real wall — “the hats, notes, photos — it was really emotional.”
Anselmo isn’t sure how the visit to the memorial will affect or inspire their performances, but Madera knows that it has. “It’s surprising,” she says. “You think of them as older, because they’re older now. But they were so young. You see the pictures at the wall and they were so young. I have a brother who is just a few years younger than me and if the draft were reinstated, he would be drafted. That made me see it in a whole different way.”
Anselmo, who just turned 40, says of the Vietnam war, “I was seven when the war ended.I wasn’t very cognizant of what was going on then. It seems so important to look back at it.” Madera echoes Anselmo’s perspective when she says that her parents, Christine, a workshop and events coordinator for Blue Tulip, and Juan, a database architect with Sanford Bernstein in White Plains and New York, were also a little too young for the war to have had much of an impact on them.
But even as boomers age and the hot-target age group for entertainment dollars has no significant memory of the Vietnam war, the trend toward theater, television, books, and movies about that war shows no signs of slowing down. Anselmo cites the recent production of the new play “The Last of the Boys,” which played at McCarter’s Berlind Theater in September, and the current play at Trenton’s Passage Theater, “Willie B. Came into the Sun,” both of which deal with issues borne of Vietnam.
To what does Anselmo attribute this fascination with the Vietnam War? “When you forget about politics and ideology and sound bites,” says Anselmo, “it just comes down to young people fighting and dying for a cause they may believe in. But who really wins? We need to be more careful with life.” As one of the letters in the play suggests: “There are no winners in war, only losers.”
“Vietnam” plays in repertory with “Antigone,” adapted by Lewis Galantiere from the play by Jean Anouilh. Originally produced in Paris during the Nazi occupation, the work underscores the duty of citizens to speak out when their government becomes oppressive. Anselmo says that the two plays work well together because they “pose questions about whether blind observance to leadership is what a democracy is all about. There are no winners in war,” he says.
Will the shows change minds? Madera isn’t sure but says, “We are just trying to represent as honestly as possible what happened.”
— Deb Cooperman
“Vietnam: Letters and Remembrances,” Kelsey Theater, Friday, November 5 at 7 p.m; Saturday, November 6 at 8 p.m.; Thursday, November 11 (Veteran’s Day) at 7 p.m. and Sundays, November 14 and 21, at 2 p.m. “Antigone,” Fridays, November 12 and 19 at 7 p.m.; Saturdays, November 13 and 20 at 8 p.m., and Sunday, November 21 at 5 p.m. $8 for adults; $6 seniors; $5 students. A panel discussion with three Vietnam veterans takes place on Sunday, November 21, between the 2 p.m. performance of “Vietnam” and the 5 p.m. performance of “Antigone.” 609-584-9444.
