Review: American Volunteers at FronteraFest [theater]

Somehow American Volunteers manages to weave these four discrete strands - not to mention five other characters, each with an accompanying subplot - into a complex but coherent structure. Such an impressive structure, in fact, that its overall complexity tends to overshadow its individual components: The main roles are so boldly drawn and clearly defined that the actors seem swept along by the overpowering script, and their interactions can feel stilted and unnatural, as though they’re trading self-contained soliloquies rather than actually speaking to each other in dialogue. But the playwright’s poetic verve and sheer pleasure in language (especially of the Elizabethan variety) largely compensates for this potential flaw, giving each successive speech and the work as a whole the flavor of a loosely adapted Shakespearean tragedy.

American Volunteers is a play about war - but it’s also a play about plays about war. As such, it never ceases to call attention to the gleefully contrived nature of its owns presentation. The sprawling cast moves about the stage in comically awkward battle scenes, bunching up in invisible doorways like cartoon stooges before launching into off-stage Afghan homes with wooden stick-guns aloft. The script’s diction veers from Army Ranger patois to Shakespearean meter on a dime (sometimes superimposing the two modes). And in one definitively meta-theatrical moment, the ranking officer even goes so far as to remark, as he watches a degenerating firefight from an off-stage balcony position, “Real war is nothing like this.” In real war, he says, soldiers keep their thoughts to themselves; they save their bawdy marching songs (with which the play abounds) for “state side” performances. Such spectacles, his companion agrees, are mere traces of actual combat, like “chalk lines on pavement.” But the inevitable breach between performance and reality is exactly what this play is all about - and exactly what makes it so unsettling.