PVT. WARS
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A play about soldiers coping with physical and emotional wounds? A play that questions America’s political and moral mission and its support of its fighting men? James McLure’s Pvt. Wars seems a shocking anachronism in the parades-and-platitudes atmosphere of post-gulf-war America. This is the kind of show politicians have in mind when they talk about the “Vietnam syndrome” and how the war with Iraq ended it. Originally presented in 1977 as a one-act and lengthened into two acts a decade later, Pvt. Wars portrays the odd comradeship that develops among men who have in common only the fact that they’ve fought and bled for their country–whether they knew why or not.
Set in the psychiatric ward of a veterans’ hospital, McLure’s play evokes Robert Altman’s film MAS*H in its deliberately uneven mixing of humor and sadness. The three characters are perfectly mismatched: Sylvio, a swaggering Italian American fixated on women and his own macho prowess; Gately, a gentle Georgia cracker resolved to maintain faith in the American system of “free enterprise”; and Natwick, an odd man out among these odd men, a Long Island preppie and probable latent homosexual whose intelligence and education make him acutely aware of his inadequacies.
