Playwright: Nick Whitby
At: Writers' Theatre, Glencoe
Phone: ( 847 ) 242-6000; $45-$55
Runs through: April 3
At the heart of To the Green Fields Beyond lies a conundrum: the play is about war, the terror it engenders, the bravado it provokes, the suffering it causes. The play wants us to know that no one understands these things better than war's heroes and star players: the soldiers on the line of battle. It also wants us to know that no one but these military insiders can truly grasp the depth of despair ( and the heights of unity ) that lie in the experience of war. The play offers two outsiders to illustrate the inaccessibility of the experience: a journalist who wants to capture what the experience is like ( and never can, because he's not truly a part of things ) and a prostitute, provided for the men's 'release.' The only succor she can offer is a kind of shorthand to love and comfort. Like the mothers, wives, daughters, and lovers who await their men's return from battle, she can never understand truly what they're going through. It's significant that the prostitute is French and she and the men are unable to verbally communicate because of the language barrier. What is truly at play here is a much larger barrier than words.
Getting back to that conundrum, though: it would take superior effort to make us, the audience, understand what it means to be at war when one of the main points of the play is that outsiders can never truly comprehend the experience. Perhaps no Chicago director could rise better to the challenge here than Kate Buckley. Buckley has already established a reputation for herself for working with mostly male ensembles ( Among the Thugs comes immediately to mind ) and for cutting straight to the quick of the terror of being an outsider. Buckley ( in bringing Whitby's remarkable script to life ) does the near-impossible: she lets us into the world of these WWI soldiers, on the eve of battle and lets us feel empathy. She allows us inside the skins of these men, so that we can touch their hearts and minds, wrapping ourselves around the macho bravado that thinly masks their terror, the camaraderie intensified by the threat of death just ahead, the feeling of loss that, again, manifests itself when they realize that no one outside their little battalion can know what their plight is all about.
To the Green Fields Beyond is truly an ensemble piece, and Buckley and her cast deliver remarkable work here. In a good ensemble, no one person grabs the spotlight; the very definition of the term is that the entire cast is equally good, all of the cast create characters for whom we can feel … and, in a brief period, love. This is an A-plus ensemble, working together like, well, a deeply unified regiment.
Buckley succeeds because she allows the script and its characters to just be, never pushing any of the play's imagery or symbolism to the forefront, as a lesser director might do. She allows the poetry and despair of the play to come slowly to us, so that we can turn it over in our minds. One case in point is the way one character describes the troops' training for being in a tank together as being in a large metal circle; in one image giving us the unity of the troop, and its exclusivity. And, of course, the play's final moment, which manages to sum up all the romantic notions of war ( patriotism, machismo, courage ) and fell them all with one single, whispered blow that ultimately indicates the futility and tragedy of any war.