Playwright: Quiara Alegria Hudes
At: Rivendell Theatre Ensemble and Teatro Vista at The Steppenwolf Garage, 1624 N. Halsted
Contact: ( 312 ) 335-1650; $22, $20
Runs through: Dec. 10
BY CATEY SULLIVAN
War is hell. When the physical fighting is over, the mental battles have only just begun. The struggles of each new generation are mirrored by those of their forebears.
Such are the truisms visited by Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue, Quiara Alegria Hudes' eloquently structured but predictable treatise on the impact of three wars on three generations in the same family.
Directed by Lisa Portes in a joint production by the Rivendell Theatre Ensemble and Teatro Vista, Fugue has moments of power and elucidation, but Hudes material breaks no new ground and, thus, fails to ignite much of a firestorm on stage. The most intriguing element of Fugue lies in the way it's built; in telling of their experiences in the Korean War, the Viet Nam conflict and the Iraqi War, respectively, Grandpop ( Gustavo Mellado ) , Pops ( Edward F. Torres ) and Elliot ( Juan F. Villa ) create a fugue in prose. The rhythms ebb and flow, swirling backward and forward as each voice takes a turn illuminating a central theme about the nature of family bonds and war.
Fittingly, Grandpop was a flutist. As he, his son and his grandson describe their experiences at war, the stories are backed by ribbons of Bach unspooling, overlapping, tangling and disentwining in an auditory background that seems to float and curl around the action. It's a gorgeous, evocative effect, albeit one that's muted by the nuts and bolts of Hudes' pedestrian narrative.
Elliot, the grandson, opens the production, fresh from the shower, gung-ho and stoked for adventure as he prepares to ship out to Iraq. Villa captures the preening bravado only 18 year-olds who have never been in real physical or psychic danger can muster, and he's hilarious doing so. As Elliot's father Pops, Torres is more circumspect as he heads off to Viet Nam; once there, he learns quickly enough that bravado is the luxury of the blissfully ignorant. Grandpop goes to Korea to support his wife and newborn baby, heading into combat with little more than idealism and his flute to sustain him.
Hudes' script brings the clichéd-but-true realities of war home to each man: They find camaraderie through great deprivation and dreaming about the comforts of home, learn about suffering and are appalled by man's inhumanity to man. One wishes the playwright had gone deeper into the self-discoveries and discoveries of Grandpop, Pops and Elliot. They don't uncover anything the audience doesn't already know and can't see coming well before the threshold of revelation hits on stage.
In addition to the menfolk, Fugue focuses on Pops' wife Ginny, the nurse who he meets while she is tending him back to health after he's wounded in Viet Nam. A savant about the medicinal properties of plants and herbs, Ginny is somewhat underwritten. One gets the sense that she wouldn't exist without wounded men to administer to.