Playwright: Philippe Minyana
At: European Repertory Company at the Cultural Center, 77 East Randolph St.
Phone: (312) 635-0809; $20
Runs through: Oct. 30
World War One destroyed two-thirds—that's correct, TWO-THIRDS, of France's male population, many slain right in their own front yards while their horrified families watched. But within every big war are many smaller wars. Inspired by his own grandfather's letters and subsequent interviews with veterans of that terrible conflagration, contemporary playwright Philippe Minyana has forged a microcosmic portrait of life, literally, under fire.
In the course of The Warriors, we meet four characters: three are soldiers returning to their home town. Mole is missing his genitals, blown away by a grenade. Wolf is missing a hand, lost to gangrene following wounds from enemy artillery. Noel is physically whole, but haunted by the memory of an injured civilian girl he nursed back to health, only to bully with his overprotectiveness. The men now seek that same woman, of whom they all share fond recollections, and with her, reassurance of their manly worth. But what can Constance, herself brutalized by wartime atrocities, give them?
Their experiences are recounted against a panorama of minutiae replicating in vivid detail the everyday hardships on the front-lines: influenza, dysentery, stolen food and furtive naps in the beds of families lying dead in their own homes. But Minyana sometimes puts more philosophical ruminations into his characters' mouths than are entirely plausible, given their intellectual capacities as we understand them—a common shortcoming in plays based on sprawling historical events, in this case exacerbated by Roberta F. McConnell's arthritic translation.
Language slightly damaged in transit is European Repertory Company's stock-in-trade, however. Under the dexterous direction of Richard Edward Frederick, a quartet of storefront veterans—Steve Cinabro, Richard Cotovsky, Tim Donovan and Carolyn Ann Hoerdemann—draw upon an extensive array of vocal shadings and imaginative phrasing to restore the human emotion to their wordy text, rendering The Warriors a praiseworthy inauguration to the roster of new dramas comprising the 2004 Playing French series.