The power of theater is pressure-packed into Beowulf Alley’s production of “Last of the Boys” by Steven Dietz. A quintet of actors directed by Susan Arnold keeps up the intensity from start to finish, pushing us through angry confrontations and twisted nightmare memories to tell a ghost story that began with Vietnam.
Seldom this season has any local company presented such a solid effort to reach such a compelling conclusion. The finale comes screaming out of the darkness, full of battle noise and desperate sobbing, a truly poetic conclusion packing many kinds of impact.
The Vietnam War experience has affected everyone in some way, whether pacifist or warrior, boyfriend or husband, girlfriend or wife, parent or grandparent. Like that ghost from a train-wrecked life experience will haunt you forever, so is the ghost of Vietnam haunting all of us. A ghost more powerful than any exorcist.
Just as America’s own civil war still has a seductive fascination, so will the Vietnam War continue to define our nation’s evolution as a grand experiment in democratic government. At the end of World War II everyone believed the United States was the greatest country in the world. Now lots of people aren’t so sure.
Two of them are Ben (Gabe Nagy) and Jeeter (Clark Andreas Ray), bonded by their Vietnam wartime experience decades earlier. Each has taken a different pathway to escape the same ghost.
Ben’s life is the most tattered. He lives alone in a trashed-out trailer in a trailer park contaminated by toxic waste. In the yard is an empty flag pole with sandbags stacked around the base. His estranged father was a highly-ranked government official assisting Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense during Vietnam. Ben can’t forgive or forget. Though his father died recently, Ben didn’t attend the funeral.
Jeeter idolized Ben’s father. Jeeter not only attended the funeral, he packed a suitcase full of items from Ben’s father and brought the suitcase back to Ben – who promptly threw it in the trash.
Jeeter has grown up to be one of those renegade college professors who makes his living talking about Vietnam. At a California college, Jeeter teaches a course called “The Sixties.” He feeds the ghost, embellishes it, makes it bigger and stronger with each passing lecture.
Not that Jeeter is successful in life. He’s still looking for love in all the wrong places, hitting on Salyer (Royah Beheshti) at the funeral for Ben’s father. Compulsively, Jeeter insists to Ben that Salyer is marriage material.
Salyer is also piled high with eccentricities. Only a really desperate guy would want her for a wife. She seems rather helpless, actually.
But when Salyer’s mom Lorraine (Mary Davis) shows up to bring Salyer back home, convinced the younger woman could never function on her own, we start hoping Salyer can somehow escape.
There is a convoluted plot, and a memory ghost who looks like a young soldier (Lucas Gonzales). Logic is not a part of the program. Neither is the ghost. Just like our own memories of the war, we take what we need or what we can’t escape.
In the fantasy parts, a very effective sound design by Rachel Davis recreates the helicopters, rockets, artillery fire and chaos of war that rattle the theater. As dream sequences, these are particularly effective.
While everyone will come away from Beowulf Alley with a different interpretation of the play, no one will be unaffected. That title, “Last of the Boys,” also implies it is time to grow up. Out on the street, after the play is over, it won’t be that easy.
Performances continue at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 1:30 p.m. matinees Sundays, to April 25. All performances are at Beowulf Alley Theatre, 11 S. Sixth Ave. Tickets are $18 online, $20 at the door, with other discounts available. For details and reservations, 882-0555, or visit www.beowulfalley.org
