SCARRED GROUND
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In an attempt to dramatize this struggle to know the unknowable, Jones has created in addition to Cobb (Craig Spidle) two young adults who both lost their fathers to the Vietnam War. Alexandra (Moon Hi Hanson) and Millard (L. Kent Brown) meet at the wall, where they have come to find their fathers’ names. Alexandra is a desperately frightened black girl from the big city who compensates for her insecurities–in a series of unfortunately interchangeable scenes–by trying to prove herself to Millard. Millard is a simple and glaringly naive Arkansas boy who has never had to really talk to a black person before, has never had to think about a black person as someone “real.” We watch their relationship develop throughout this two-act drama, as each learns to trust someone he would ordinarily avoid.
Clearly Jones wants to dramatize more than simply the attempt to understand war and heal its wounds. He also wants to look at the equally impossible task of understanding another person. Alexandra’s and Millard’s relationship is continually threatened by racism, to which Alexandra seems acutely sensitive and of which Millard seems good-naturedly unaware. Their relationship is also threatened by their own romantic expectations. Though Millard continually reminds Alexandra that they are not romantically involved, he’s also nearly paralyzed with fear at the thought that passing strangers might see them as a couple. And their relationship is threatened by Alexandra’s history of sexual abuse, which has left her terrified and well guarded.
Jones also tries to find dramatic significance in seemingly trivial moments, a commendable device that here falls rather flat. The details that Jones picks seem so trivial that they collapse under the metaphoric weight he tries to place on them. Late in the first act, Cobb convinces Millard to pierce his ear–to make a “permanent” mark on himself, to in effect go through a rite of passage. Not only does such a decision seem particularly mundane for Millard, who has dyed his hair bright pink, but piercing an ear is hardly permanent, a fact that drains the image of most of its power.
