Bury the Dead
The Actors’ Gang has resurrected a play that would seem to have been just written. Bury The Dead was actually written and produced in 1936, the brainchild of a young writer named Irwin Shaw, who would go on to write screenplays, stories, and novels like The Young Lions. This play must have been a shocker when it opened. Its viewpoint, as well as its frank language and depiction of the wounds of war, may not be so surprising nowadays, but Bury The Dead comes across in this production as a still powerful indictment of the ritual of war.
It’s a simple story: a war is waging somewhere (in 1936 the U.S. was not at war but everyone was probably fearing the imminence of a conflict, what with the Nazis across the pond), and two grunts, supervised by a nasty sergeant, are digging a grave for six dead soldiers. They haul the bodies into the grave, but the soldiers suddenly stand up in the grave and speak. They tell the gravediggers that they refuse to be buried. The sergeant calls in the captain, he calls in the generals. Commands are barked out but the soldiers will not lie down in their graves. Newspapers and radio carry the story. The Army tries every threat, uses religion, and even brings in the wives, mothers, sisters, and sweethearts of the dead men to plead with them. But the six dead men refuse to behave like dead men. Although they do not roam the streets like vampires, they tell everyone that they feel they have not had a chance to live. And furthermore, they refuse to validate the theatre in which they received their mortal wounds.
“A man can only die contented when he dies for himself,” says one of the dead men. Wars are fought by those who are forced to fight battles created by the powerful. These soldiers, who in civilian life, worked on farms, or in garages for $18.50 an hour, fathered children or did not father children because of poverty, loved women or argued with them, were not the men who made the decision to fight the “enemy” nor did they decide who the enemy was. Therefore, they did not die contented.
Needless to say, Shaw’s play is didactic as all get out and the dialogue is freighted with opinion. There are times when the play, with the dead soldiers one by one stating the author’s viewpoint, seems on the verge of being a stilted propaganda piece. But it is to the credit of Matthew Huffman’s balanced direction and some amazing performances by the large ensemble, that Bury The Dead finds the human touch that helps put Shaw’s rhetoric across.
This is especially true in the extended scene, late in the play, where the women talk to the soldiers. It’s actually a series of blackouts, each between a soldier and a woman from his life, and each vignette gives us a more rounded portrait of the soldier in question. In one riveting bit, a soldier (Jesse Luken) who died from a shell that exploded in his face, tries to keep his mother (Annemette Anderson) from seeing the way his face looks. This one sequence says more about the horror and pointlessness of war than a hundred editorials.
Huffman and his actors also bring out every shred of black humor that they could find in Shaw’s text. It helps. No, it is not in bad taste-rather, we are reminded of how absurd war is. Many laughs are gleaned from a sequence in which a general commands the dead men to lie down in the grave because they’re supposed to follow orders! “It’s your duty to America to lie down and be buried!” Jack Webb’s “The D.I.” wouldn’t have laughed, but we can. How far can authority be taken before it becomes the behavior of the desperate?
Bury The Dead runs without an intermission. Despite the theme and the grueling emotions, it doesn’t need the break. The performance attended by this reviewer ended with a very long accolade of applause. If Bury The Dead was a surprise success in the pre-World War II climate, it is a welcome revival now, when we are hoping to get out of an unnecessary war and avoid entering another one.
Bury the Dead runs until September 13 at the Actors’Gang Theatre at the Ivy Substation, 9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City, 310.838.4264.