Theater: A Healing Art

 

[I’m going to explore the notion that theater has the power to heal under the right circumstances.  I’m not thinking of anything magical or supernatural, though perhaps spiritual in a secular sense, and almost certainly psychological.  I’m also not going to claim that all theatrical performances are healing events, or that all the ones that are, are intended to be.  

[The healing qualities of theater aren’t an alien concept.  The Aristotelian concept of catharsis, the cleansing that tragic drama brings about, is well known to even the most casual of theater students, for instance.  I recently read an essay about a modern production of an Indonesian wayang (shadow play) that was devised to heal the residents of Bali after the terrorist bombing there on 12 October 2002 disrupted the natural balance that is sought for in Balinese Hinduism, the Balinese religion (I. Nyoman Sedana, “Theatre in a Time of Terrorism: Renewing Natural Harmony after the Bali Bombing via Wayang Kontemporer,” Asian Theatre Journal [Univ. of Hawai’i Press] 22.1 (Spring 2005): 73-86).

[I’ll be confining myself here to performances in the United States with reference to American drama and theater.  You can be sure, however, that the same concepts and principals operate in all Western theater and almost certainly in non-Western theater as well.]

Last 10 July, I posted a collection of articles on Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret, a play by former U.S. Army Special Forces lieutenant colonel Scott Mann about combat service in Afghanistan and its effects on the GI’s and their families.  In a 7 July interview with Mann on CNN News Central, Jim Sciutto, chief national security correspondent and a co-anchor of News Central, Mann labeled the play and its production “a very, very healing program of storytelling and shared experience.” 

In “Retired Green Beret Scott Mann Examines ‘Holistic Horror Of War’ In ‘Last Out’” by Brian McElhiney in the Stars and Stripes of 2 July 2023, Gary Sinise, whose charitable foundation subsidized a national tour of Last Out, said of the 1980 play Tracers, a progenitor of Mann’s play by and about Vietnam vets, that “The healing play that they’d made was very, very positive for them, and Scott did the exact same thing.”

In a 1992 interview, Leonardo Shapiro, the experimental theater director about whom I’ve written many times now in Rick On Theater, pronounced, “[I] see theater not as a secular entertainment but as some kind of healing ceremony . . .” and later wrote, “The theatre is a healing art.”

What do they mean by “healing theater”?  How is theater a “healing art”?  To begin with, none of these people is alluding to psychodrama, the psychological therapy technique—with which healing theater bears some superficial similarities.

The principal differences between healing theater and psychodrama are significant, however.  First, we’re talking about a type of theater, not a type of therapy.  Healing theater happens in a theater (or some space that’s used as a theater) and it’s open to the public, whether paying or admission-free.  The performers may be professional actors or amateurs, but they’re usually rehearsed and follow a script or scenario with no more improvisation than any theatrical performance.

Second, psychodrama effects the participants, who are patients; but healing theater works on both the participants, from the writers and creators to the actors, crew, and production staff, and the spectators.

Shapiro wrote in 1993 that the Navajo sings, which he learned about as a boy at summer camp in Minnesota, became his “clearest model . . . for healing theatre.”  So, let me say a bit about the Navajo sings to which Shapiro likened theater’s healing properties (see “‘My Mind Restore For Me’: Navajo Healing Ceremonies,” posted on Rick On Theater on 15 May 2013).

Many American Indian societies, including the Navajo Nation, don’t see disease as biological, physiological, or psychological maladies, but as a reflection of disharmony in society or the world.  This is then manifested in a person’s illness.  The healing rite requires repairing this environmental disorder.  The Navajo healing ceremony includes prayers, songs, sandpaintings, sweat baths, ritual bathing, face- and body-painting, and other ritual practices dedicated to accomplishing this. 

The healing chants, or songs, not only cure the patient, but also benefit the patient’s family, everyone else who attends the ceremony (that is, the audience), and the entire Navajo Nation.  The ceremony attracts spirits who return balance and harmony to the society or the world. 

Shapiro mounted Roadkill, a protest against the damage done by automobiles both to the city environment and to human bodies, in 1992.  It was the final event of the First Annual Eco-Festival whose text was by playwright Karen Malpede, and it was billed as “A street piece created as a healing ceremony.”

The idea kept cropping up throughout his career.  Of his company’s production of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1988), the director characterized it as “an exorcism of our own damned cynicism, our own devils, our own false contracts”—clearly forms of societal discord.  (See my discussion of this production in “Faust Clones, Part 1,” 15 January 2016.)

Shapiro conceived 1989’s Strangers as a “healing ceremony which contains within it a narrative of destruction and mourning for the family [at the center of the narrative] as a vehicle of human culture and civilization.”  (I discuss this play in “Shaliko’s Strangers,” 3 and 6 March 2014.)

I even think that a reason for the significance Shapiro placed on Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, which became the director’s last production in 1996, was connected to his notion of theater as a healing art. 

Seagull was extremely significant to Shapiro from his earliest days as a theater enthusiast—before he made it his life’s endeavor.  He expressly chose the Chekhov play for what he knew would be his final production.

Certainly the play deals with several of Shapiro’s career-long concerns—the place of the artist in society and the sacrifice of children, most pointedly—but hidden within the text is Konstantine Treplev’s statement (from Jean-Claude van Itallie’s 1973 translation):

Then, when Spirit and Matter merge harmoniously, become one—the reign of Universal Will shall begin. 

It also seems to me that one effect, perhaps serendipitous, of his work on the production was a tangible example of theater as a healing art.

Shapiro was dying of inoperable bladder cancer when he embarked on the production.  His prognosis when he was diagnosed in July 1995 was six months, but he lived for a yead-and-a-half—until Seagull was rehearsed, presented in Albuquerque (the home base of the young company staging the play), took the show to Baltimore (where Shapiro’s Shaliko Company premièred its first production in 1973), and returned to New Mexico.

The director was in considerable pain, which most observers could plainly see, but he persevered because, he said, “I’d rather do something beautiful than dwell on my symptoms.”  The artistic work couldn’t cure the cancer, he knew, but it could make the life he had left tolerable and even rewarding.  It could heal Shapiro’s spirit.

The healing chants of the Navajo Indians are also transformative, which is a characteristic that Shapiro also saw in modern western theater.  The sick person is transformed into a Holy Person by the performance and the society is simultaneously transformed.

Theatrical theorist Antonin Artaud also saw theater in this light: 

I shall seek out what has been preserved and is reappearing, the old mythical tradition of the theater in which the theater is regarded as a therapy, a way of healing comparable to certain dances of the Mexican Indians.

The Navajo healing ceremonials combine song, dance, and pantomime to make simple dramas.  The texts of the chants are long, epic passages about the legendary heroes and Holy People of the tribe.  The ritual songs and ceremonies comprise what the part-Cheyenne writer Frank Waters (1902-95; see “Frank Waters,” 4 May 2012), who focused on the Native American experience, called “myth-dramas,” a little like medieval European mystery or miracle plays, which are passed orally from one generation to the next to preserve the legends and traditional history of the tribe.

This is the connection Leonardo Shapiro saw between theater and the healing powers of Native American art.  And whether one sees this as a spiritual or psychological process, it’s the benefit that Scott Mann, Gary Sinise, and Shapiro, and many others, find in theatrical performances beyond either entertainment or edification.

On 2 and 5 September 2022, I blogged on The Last Cyclist, the reconstruction of a 1944 cabaret from the Terezin concentration camp.  I didn’t say so in my report, but I believe that this performance of Karel Švenk’s (1917-45) satire, was another example of theater as a healing art—and it accomplished this on two levels almost 80 years apart.

When Švenk (1917-45) wrote his cabarets, he often included one song, composed as the finale for his first Terezin cabaret, called the “Terezin March.”  It appeared in the reconstruction of The Last Cyclist because it “was so energizing and electrifying, it so captured the hopes of people living with a sense of numbing despair.”

As reported in my post “‘Performing for Survival – Cultural Life and the Theatre in Terezin’” by Bahar Akpinar (7 March 2022), in the cabarets, “Life in the camp is treated lightly with a powerful sense of humour, rendering the play, as if it were, ‘a joyful resistance[.]’”  This was the healing effect of the cabarets for the concentration camp inmates and the cabaret performers.  It helped make it possible for the prisoners to persevere even under the horrendous circumstances of the camps.

At Terezin, Švenk had resolved “to strengthen and raise the morale of the prisoners.  Which he did, using laughter and satire as his most potent weapons.”  For 21st-century audiences of the reconstruction of The Last Cyclist, I think the effect is two-fold.

For the largely non-Jewish casts of the reconstruction productions, it was an inspiration to learn more about the Holocaust.  Adapter Naomi Patz and director Edward Einhorn attested that the participants were extremely moved by their involvement in The Last Cyclist.  Fighting anti-Semitism, which has grown in both frequency and intensity in recent years, depends greatly on consciousness-raising, especially among non-Jews. 

As we’ll hear with regard to Last Out and Tracers, the telling of the stories of peoples who have suffered is a way of relieving the pain and salving the wounds.  It works on those who do the telling and those who participate by hearing the telling, like the observers at the Indian healing ceremonies are returned to harmony just as the person sung over is. 

In the present-day performances of Cyclist, the audience in the house at the West End Theatre Off-Off-Broadway or the one at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in the film play the part of the Terezin inmate spectators at the final dress rehearsal; the film’s viewers, by extension (assisted by the camera work), do so as well.  In the words of Neil Genzlinger, who reviewed the 2013 Off-Off-Broadway staging, this was “theater as a chance to bear witness.”  Jews and non-Jews in the audiences of Cyclist benefit from the healing forces of the story-telling. 

As Jennifer Farrar of the Associated Press put it:

. . . watching the crude but well-performed and affecting production that opened Thursday night at the West End Theater, one can’t help thinking about what it was like to actually be trapped in the horrific situation of the original performers and their fellow inmates in those rehearsal audiences.

Theater about immense tragedies like the Holocaust and the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan, about victims and sufferers like Jews imprisoned in death camps or soldiers who saw too much violence and death, aren’t the only healing experiences the art can provide.  After the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York City, residents here suffered their own forms of PTSD.  The city closed down and many New Yorkers holed up at home, afraid to venture out.

As David Romàn remarked in his 2002 essay “Introduction: Tragedy” in Theatre Journal, “going to see a show was linked with ‘getting back to normal,’ as if theatregoing was a routine daily activity.”  The New York Times asked in its review of Urinetown, whose Broadway première, postponed a week, had been scheduled for the night the theaters reopened: “Can we laugh and thrill to a musical at a time like this? . . .  When every individual spirit as well as the national one can use all the bolstering it can get, “Urinetown” is not just a recommended tonic.” 

The answer is yes.  When Romàn saw Urinetown, he had this to say of the experience: “What was most interesting about the show was the readiness of its audience to enjoy the performance.” 

One Broadway performer, Tamlyn Brooke Shusterman, a dancer/choreographer and producer, a former Rockette, saw it this way:

Two nights after Sept. 11 and the terrorist attacks, Broadway reopened, and I returned to the theater to put my fears on hold, suit up in sequins and sing and dance the classic American backstage musical “42nd Street.”  I was worried that it was too soon and too disrespectful to go back to work.  Not to mention that I was still scared of the city and unsure about what was going on.  How could I smile at a time like this? 

When I got to the Ford Center for the Performing Arts [now the Lyric Theatre], I was comforted at the sight of all my co-workers – a sign of life as it was before Sept. 11.  There was an announcement that the families of the brave firefighters and police officers who had rushed to the World Trade Center had been invited to join us at the theater by the show’s producers.  It was overwhelming to realize that they would be our first audience since the tragic events of only two days before. Nerves were taut and tears were in everyone’s eyes.

Michael Cumpsty, one of the stars of the show, gave a short curtain speech thanking the audience for being there (about 900 people filled half the theater).  He said how grateful we were to share their company at such a time and that we hoped to relieve their minds for the next several hours.

The orchestra started and from behind the curtain, where the ensemble (including myself) was uncertainly waiting to begin, we could feel a sigh of relief from the audience.  It was as if the great sounds of the orchestra playing [original 1933 film score composer] Harry Warren’s music were calming and comforting the anxious people, promising them that their worries were in someone else’s hands for even a brief time.

When the curtain went up, the crowd let out an enormous burst of applause, more thunderous and heartfelt than on opening night.  It was so surprising that a group of us onstage started to cry.  But as I looked at the crowd, imagining their pa6.in and filled with my own, I felt a great desire to succeed, to take their minds off this unstable world for a short while and guide them into the world of theater.  That was what they wanted.

Suddenly, I realized, I was experiencing exactly what I had read about in textbooks.  The original 1933 movie version of “42nd Street” was a musical created to help raise the spirits of Americans during the Depression.  And it seemed extremely important to do the same that night.  I even understood the value of the American chorus girl. Sometimes, wearing patent-leather shoes and girlie costumes has made me feel frivolous.  But that night was not about what I might want to say as a woman.  It was about escaping reality.  About beauty, music and comedy.  And it worked.  The laughter that Thursday was so rewarding.  It was not disrespectful; it was necessary.

At the end of the show, we waved the American flag.  Hearing the applause, seeing the uplifted faces, the flag rippling in the air, was immensely moving.  What the audience was applauding was not our talents but our attempts to help in any way possible.  That this gave them some comfort made me very proud to be a performer.

Shusterman was describing for the New York Times the healing she felt as a performer, what she saw in her fellow cast members, and what she sensed from the spectators.  And 42nd Street isn’t an account of the event that had knocked all these people off balance.  What helped restore them to some measure of psychic harmony was the capacity of theater to form a community, even a temporary one. 

David Romàn had a similar experience, from the perspective of the theatergoer rather than the performer, when he saw The Full Monty.  He found that

what struck me most about the production was the sheer virtuosity of the performers—including the musicians in the pit—their professionalism, their sense of purpose in performing for us.  In the end, I too joined the standing ovation that was so effortlessly offered to the company by the full house.  I was very pleased to be in this audience and the next day’s Urinetown’s audience, even if the shows themselves weren’t completely satisfying or memorable.  Perhaps it didn’t really matter what show I was attending that weekend.  Most likely, I would have experienced the same feelings of audience connection and inflated enthusiasm at any show that hadn’t closed in the theatre district in the wake of September 11th.  These felt like little triumphs for all of us, a slight shift in the mood and tone of the city and its people.

Romàn defined the essence of his theater experience in the aftermath of an unthinkable tragedy by noting, “Liveness was at the core of these events.” 

The performing arts offered people the chance to be with other people and experience themselves together. In this sense, we were as much audiences for ourselves as we were for the performances.

As my friend Leonardo Shapiro characterized this phenomenon: “Culture is a story told around a fire.  It is the conversation between the young and old.  It is the fire on your face and the cold on your back.  The link between your experience and mine.”  

He was assuredly speaking of theater, as he pointed out, “Americans quite desperately need some place to gather around the fire and tell each other stories and their dreams. . . .  Theater is meant to be a place where you act out your dreams and fantasies . . . .”

In the American Theatre magazine of December 2002, Linda Frye Burnham, a writer who focuses on performance and community art, chronicles a communal theater project “to pull Union County [South Carolina] back from the brink of disintegration.”

The back story is that in 2000, Union County was in financial straits because of the collapse of the textile industry, leading businesses and schools to close as towns across the county faced bankruptcy, forcing young people to flee the area looking for work elsewhere, shrinking the local population. 

Not only that, but the town of Union, the county seat, was nationally notorious as the home of Susan Smith, who drowned her two children in 1994 by driving her car into the town lake.  She then invented the story that an unknown black man had taken her car and kidnapped the children, and the area had never recovered from the infamy of the murders and the racist lie Smith used to escape blame.

Seeking a solution for the county’s dire troubles, community leaders turned to a cultural project they’d seen work in Miller County, Georgia, nine years earlier: they engaged the Chicago-based Community Performance Inc. (now called Community Performance International) to help them develop a play based on the county’s history, culture, and, most importantly, its stories—some of them not told for centuries.

The project, entitled Turn the Washpot Down, involved the whole community—black and white, young and old, rich and poor—and the finished play was performed in the summer of 2002.  Said Jules Carriere, one of the CPI cowriters of the script, of the county residents, “They didn’t want to settle for sweetness.  They wanted to tell the hard stuff . . . .”

In the end, Burnham characterized Washpot as “an intimate theatre of place.  Its potent impact is derived from its truth, the resonance of shared ordeals and delights, its portrait of a place like no other.”  The editor of the local paper in Macon, Georgia, wrote of that county’s similar effort, that it was “a performance that is not only healing but also compelling, authoritative, confident theatre.”

Union County’s Washpot not only healed individual people—the participants, their fellow Union County citizens, spectators at the performances whether local or visitor—but it returned a community that was disintegrating back to harmony: the very definition of a healing ceremony.

As a conclusion to her report, Burnham wrote a perfect characterization of healing theater:

Once in a while in my travels, I see graffiti scrawled on a wall somewhere: “Art Saves Lives.”  I feel in my bones it is true.  Even if Turn the Washpot Down doesn’t save Union’s life, it has already saved its soul.

[The work of Community Performance Inc./Community Performance International as described by Linda Frye Burnham in her AT article (“A More Perfect Union,” December 2002) is truly interesting.  Her account of the development of Turn the Washpot Down is also fascinating.  I highly recommend looking into both.  (Unfortunately, the AT online archive doesn’t go back as far as 2002, so the issue isn’t available on the Internet.  A slightly different version of the article, however, is accessible at https://wedgeblade.net/files/archives_assets/21889.pdf; many libraries will have back issues of AT as well.)]

'Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret'

 
“RETIRED GREEN BERET SCOTT MANN
ON ‘LAST OUT: ELEGY OF A GREEN BERET’”
interview by Jim Sciutto 

[I was watching the news on CNN Friday afternoon, 7 July, and Jim Sciutto of CNN News Central did an interview with a retired Special Forces lieutenant colonel named Scott Mann.  I’d never heard of him, although he’d been the subject of considerable news coverage for the past several years.

[Mann served in Afghanistan (among other posts), and he had trouble adjusting when he left.  He found that many other returning vets did, too, so he compiled a play based on his and his fellow vets' stories, Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret, which toured the country and was filmed.  (I'm leaving out several steps along the way.)

[Below is the transcript from CNN News Central of that 7 July segment (from ca. 1:50 to ca. 2 p.m.).  Mann talks about the play, and I’ve added to the interview text an article about the retired Green Beret from Stars and Stripes, followed by a review of one of the performances of Last Out while it was on tour.]

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN HOST: It is hard to believe it is nearly two years since the Taliban took over Afghanistan. U.S. troops withdrew.

For many American troops, it feels like time has stood still in terms of the trauma and horrors of the nearly two decade-long war and all the pain from that withdrawal.

My next guest knows it extremely well himself. He’s a combat veteran who also wrote and now stars in the play “Last Out, Elegy of A Green Beret,” which helps veterans and their families not just deal with the fallout of the war but to try to leave it behind.

And they also know him for setting up Task Force Pineapple. It’s a volunteer group of U.S. veterans who helped evacuate so many Americans and Afghan allies in the chaotic days after the U.S. withdrawal.

He is joining me now, Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann.

Always good to have you on, Scott.

LT. COL. SCOTT MANN, AUTHOR: Hey, Jim. Thanks for having me. And I just want to say our condolences to Nasrat’s family and his wife. All of us in the Special Operations community are busted up over this.

[Nasrat Ahmad Yar, a native Afghan who was a Lyft driver in Washington, D.C., shot and killed in his vehicle Monday, 3 July.  His death was the subject of the previous segment of this CNN News Central.]

SCIUTTO: Understood. I wonder how – you’re busted up, the loss of life and, particularly, the special heartache, right, of having escaped the danger there to only to find more danger here.

MANN: Yes, it really is something that is plaguing our Afghan brothers and sisters. And it is one of the reasons we’re doing the play, Jim. It’s not just to honor the service of our veterans and our military families, but also our Afghan partners.

SCIUTTO: Tell me how it stands in your view, the effort to get those Afghan partners out. You know as well as I how many thousands are still waiting the chance to leave Afghanistan despite their service and despite being under genuine threat from the Taliban.

MANN: Yes, it’s slowed to a trickle, Jim. There’s still some effort to get folks out, and some are meeting success. For the most part, there is a huge backlog.

SCIUTTO: Let’s talk about the play here. I watched some of the scenes from it. It’s a powerful message here, which I know you take to heart for soldiers suffering. And it seems you’re encouraging them to leave it behind if they can.

MANN: Yes, this story is about letting go of the pain. You know, there’s so many of us, whether we served or not, are holding onto the pain.

My service, the things with it, Jim, it nearly took me out, I nearly took my own life. And it was storytelling that saved my life.

And six years ago, I decided to use storytelling as a way to help Americans understand the impact of war while simultaneously validating the service of those who lived it.

So I wrote this play, “Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret.” It’s an all-veteran military member cast. And we’ve traveled to something like 28 cities now performing it.

And it is a very, very healing program of storytelling and shared experience.

SCIUTTO: You’ve done a good job in telling your own experience and letting so many people you know who have suffered with mental health following their service. You’ve done such a good job of speaking openly about it and without stigma, right, to get folks to seek the help they need.

How important is that?

MANN: Oh, it’s so important. That’s why my wife and I founded the Hero’s Journey, where we focus on helping warriors and their families find their voice and tell their story.

Because Jim, we had 80,000-plus calls to the V.A. hotline in March alone.

SCIUTTO: Wow.

MANN: I mean, we’re sitting on a tsunami. Mental health is this moral injury as the Afghanistan, post-9/11 war comes to a conclusion.

And you know what we found? A lot of these veterans, they don’t need therapy. What they need are connections with their neighbors, to have their stories heard without judgment, and then walk the path of healing with their neighbors.

That’s what this play does, what storytelling does at a community level. It’s a way, frankly, for civilians to get beyond “thank you for your service” and really get involved with bringing our wounded home.

SCIUTTO: There’s a threat here that goes back to the wake of Vietnam as well and the play, “Tracers.” Of course, Gary Sinise sponsored your play. He had involvement with it then.

[Tracers was a 1980 play produced by the Vietnam Veterans Ensemble Theater Company.  It was presented Off-Broadway at New York City’s Joseph Papp Public Theater in January through July 1985 for 186 performances, winning 1985 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Sound Design for sound designer and director John DiFusco and a Theatre World Award for cast member and co-writer Richard Chaves.

[The play was conceived by DiFusco and co-written by Chaves, DiFusco, Vincent Caristi, Eric E. Emerson, Rick Gallavan, Sheldon Lettich, Merlin Marston, and Harry Stephens, who also initially appeared in its Los Angeles première.  The writers and the cast were all Vietnam veterans and the script is about their individual stories.]

And the shared experience, right, to those decades ago, soldiers who came home after a difficult war to uncertain receptions here and a whole host of issues. What is the importance of that tie?

MANN: It’s hauntingly similar, Jim. You know, Gary Sinise, I can’t say enough about him and his foundation [The Gary Sinise Foundation. a charity and veterans service organization, founded by the actor in 2011]. He watched the film version of our play on Amazon Prime [streamed in 2021] after the Afghanistan collapse, and he was so moved by it that he called me out of the blue, and we spoke.

He said, “You know, this is what we did with ‘Tracers’ in post-Vietnam.” I said, “Yes, this is the modern-day evolution to ‘Tracers.’“ He agreed and he helped us put this thing on tour. He sponsored it. And we are taking it on tour across the country in October with him.

And we are going to keep going. We’re going to keep pushing this show into every community that will have us.

SCIUTTO: More power to you. I’m going to do my best to help you spread the word. And I know it’s a great service to veterans like yourself and others.

Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann, thanks so much for joining us.

MANN: Thank you, Jim. And thank you for standing up for our veterans. It means a lot.

SCIUTTO: Happy to help.

[Scott Mann is a retired lieutenant colonel in the United States Army Special Forces (Green Berets) with over 22 years of army and special operations experience around the world.  He’s deployed to Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Iraq, and Afghanistan and is the CEO of Rooftop Leadership, a professional training and coaching program he launched, and the founder of The Heroes Journey, a nonprofit organization committed to helping veterans tell their stories in transition.

[Scott regularly speaks to and trains corporate leaders, law enforcement, and special operations forces on best practices for going local and making better human connections.  Scott’s frequent appearances on Fox News, CNN, and other national platforms as a thought leader on countering violent extremism, building organizational relationships, and restoring trust in our communities.]

*  *  *  *
“RETIRED GREEN BERET SCOTT MANN EXAMINES 
‘HOLISTIC HORROR OF WAR’ IN ‘LAST OUT’”
by Brian McElhiney 

[The following article about the development of Last Out appeared in Stars and Stripes on 2 July 2023.  Stars and Stripes is a daily U.S. government-published newspaper reporting on matters concerning the members of the United States Armed Forces and their communities, as well as national and international events, directed at service personnel serving outside the U. S.  It operates as a function of the Department of Defense, but is editorially independent from it.]

Storytelling helped Army Lt. Col. Scott Mann deal with post-traumatic stress after serving in the Afghanistan War and retiring in 2012. A decade later, it’s helping him — and others — deal with the fallout of that war all over again.

In August 2021, as the Taliban took over Afghanistan and the U.S. scrambled to evacuate its allies and citizens, former Green Beret Mann was busy launching the film version of his play, “Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret,” on Amazon. The play, written by and starring Mann, tells the story of a Green Beret who is trapped between his family obligations and his mission in Afghanistan as he struggles to ascend to the mythical warrior afterlife of Valhalla after getting hit with a roadside bomb.

But Mann soon switched gears, founding Task Force Pineapple with other veterans to help more than 1,000 Afghan refugees escape Kabul.

“It was all-consuming until my wife had my best friends stage an intervention somewhere around October after the collapse, and I stepped away from it and got myself healthy again,” Mann said recently from his home in Tampa, Fla. “I was not in a good place . . . coming out of the Pineapple experience, and even writing the book (“Operation Pineapple Express,” published in 2022 [Simon & Schuster]) because interviewing all of those folks that made it, those folks that didn’t, the veterans. I have interviewed just hundreds of veterans — iconic special operators — and watching them weep in front of me and telling me that they’re never gonna let their son join the Army, and just the moral injury that I felt and so many of my peers who fought this war for 20 years felt and the families. So there was a lot of just heaviness coming out of that.”

Around this time, Mann got a call from actor, musician and veterans advocate Gary Sinise. Sinise had seen the film version of “Last Out” through mutual friend and songwriter John Ondrasik, better known as soft-rock piano balladeer Five for Fighting.

“He was struggling, Scott, with . . . what did we do and why did we do it, and he was losing friends who were committing suicide, and terrible different things were happening,” Sinise told Stars and Stripes in May. “Much like the guys back in Vietnam — the veterans that I met back in the ’80s who wrote a play called ‘Tracers’ because they were struggling with their own service and coming home from that war to a divided nation and a nation really that had abandoned them. The healing play that they’d made was very, very positive for them, and Scott did the exact same thing.”

The partnership with the Gary Sinise Foundation has led to a summer tour for “Last Out” that kicked off with performances in San Diego and Phoenix, and continues through October with stops in Sioux Falls, S.D.; Franklin, Tenn.; Milwaukee and Topeka, Kan. Along with a preview show at Sinise’s Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago — where Sinise presented the Vietnam-era play “Tracers” in the early ’80s — these are the first performances of the play since COVID, and more significantly, since the end of the war in Afghanistan. [Sinise directed a production of Tracers that ran at Steppenwolf from 24 January to 7 April 1984.]

“When Gary called me and said, ‘You know, Scott, this reminds me a lot of Vietnam,’ I was walking in the driveway . . . and I just kind of fell apart on him,” Mann said. “And I’m like, ‘Gary, it is a lot like that. And if we don’t do something, we’re on the front end of a mental-health tsunami.’ I mean, I told Congress this when I testified to the House Foreign Affairs Committee about Pineapple. I was like, you guys don’t understand; I mean, you’re talking about 73% of the Afghan War population feels betrayed. This is really bad, and on top of all, the suicide rate. So coming back to the play, when Gary brought that up, we both agreed that this was a preexisting asset that could be put into play right now to help veterans make meaning out of their lived experience while simultaneously showing politicians and civilians the impact.”

Mann wrote the play over several years and premiered it in Tampa in November 2018. At the time, Mann and his team of actors and crew — all veterans and military family members with little to no theater experience — “thought it was a one-time thing,” according to the play’s website. But audience reaction led Mann to mount a 16-city, 28,000-mile tour out of a U-Haul van in 2019 through his nonprofit, The Heroes Journey.

“Last Out” was originally developed as a one-man show with Mann starring as career Green Beret, Master Sgt. Danny Patton. But as the story progressed, Mann knew he had to involve other characters — namely, Patton’s best friend and fellow Green Beret Kenny Suggins (portrayed by Lenny Bruce, also a former Green Beret who served in Afghanistan with Mann), wife Lynn (Heather Corrigan) and son Kaiden (Cooper Mann, Mann’s son).

While not directly autobiographical, much of the play is based on Mann’s own experiences. Suggins is based on Clifford Patterson, one of Mann’s closest friends who was killed on 9/11 at the Pentagon. And Lynn Patton takes inspiration from Mann’s wife, Monty Mann, and her experiences at home while Mann was in Afghanistan.

“I started asking my wife questions about what happened when I was gone, what happened when I was deployed, and at first she was resistant — almost agitated about it,” Mann said. “At this point I’d been retired for seven years, and she’s like, ‘Why are you bringing this stuff up? I don’t want to talk about this.’ And there were times when we would kind of go at it. And then finally she told me, ‘Babe, I had to keep all this from you to keep you alive; I really don’t want to do this.’ And I said, ‘Well I think if we can put this out there, it’s going to validate what you and a lot of other family members did.’”

That seems to be exactly what has happened. Audiences, often made up of veterans and family members not just from the recent Middle East wars, but stretching back to Vietnam, Korea and World War II, participate in “talkbacks” at the end of the show, sharing their own experiences with Mann and each other.

“We had the sister of a Green Beret sergeant major, she stood up and she said, ‘You guys told me in two hours what my baby brother has been trying to tell me for five years,’” Mann said. “And so you see these families sitting together looking at the war from each other’s perspective, because the way the play works is the protagonist, Danny the Green Beret, he’s stuck between his living room and his fire base after being severely wounded, and so he can’t ascend. And so you see both, and the audience is affected by that in a very profound way because a lot of the home front stuff, no one really understands or knows.”

But the play also was written for civilians to help them understand “the holistic horror of war,” as Mann describes it.

“I’m a father of three boys. My oldest son a few years ago told me he was gonna join the Army and he wanted to be a Special Forces guy, and that just hit me right between the running lights,” Mann said. “Because at that point we were over there, we were in this war that — most people didn’t even know that we were there. . . . I can’t tell you how many times people would say to me in airports, ‘We’re still in Afghanistan?’ And now my son’s gonna go fight a war that I didn’t finish. That for me became something that I felt like that had to be fixed, that had to be adjusted.

“. . . My vision was that I could tell a story kind of like ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ with body armor, in a way that the audience could really go for the ride and feel what it’s like to say goodbye to your wife at the airfield, to feel what it’s like to hold your buddy in your arms in his final moments because he did what you asked him to do,” he continued. “The things that go with combat that most people don’t know. To see a military spouse watch a news report with no dialogue in a scene, and just fall to her knees and scream — I mean, it rocks the civilians to the core.”

That mission seems even more important now with veterans struggling with how the Afghanistan War ended. Mann hopes to continue touring the show in partnership with the Gary Sinise Foundation, and plans to film the show in a live setting, a la the filmed version of “Hamilton.” [The 2020 Disney release of the filmed version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s stage musical Hamilton was a live stage recording edited from three performances at Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theatre.]

“The irony in all of this is that we’ve been telling stories — warrior storytelling — since we’ve been fighting wars,” Mann said. “I mean, if you look at most of Shakespeare’s plays, that’s what they do. And civil society has used storytelling as the primary way to bring veterans home from war, in every civil society on the planet, and we’ve lost that.”

[Brian McElhiney is a digital editor, podcast editor and occasional reporter for Stars and Stripes.  He’s worked as a music reporter and editor for publications in New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, and Oregon.  One of his earliest journalistic inspirations came from reading Stars and Stripes as a kid growing up in Okinawa, Japan.]

*  *  *  *
“IN THE MOMENT: ‘LAST OUT’ BY THE HEROES JOURNEY”
by David Siegel 

[Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret went on an extensive tour of the United States, subsidized by the Gary Sinise Foundation. (Sinise, now a nationally-known film and television performer, was a longtime member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago, which hosted a special presentation of the play, two performances only on 20 and 21 January 2023 in the troupe’s Downstairs Theater.)

[Below is a review of one of the performances on the road.  From the website DC Theater Arts of 28 May 2019, “In the Moment” covers the show which ran at the Richard J. Ernst Community Cultural Center in Annandale, Virginia, from 24 to 25 May.]

Last Out is a raw emotional journey with no illusions as its core value.

It is an intense confessional about military service and the effects on family, told from multiple perspectives. It is no sanitized, pretty TED Talk with nifty projections from practiced narrators. Last Out, a short-run, touring production, begins with trigger warnings about its content; the least of which is its strong earthy language. Last Out is a unique wartime tale not about those first in to where few tread, but those last out, with a military spouse front and center to the unraveling story about sacrifice.

Last Out is also centered upon a newer generation of military service members who are largely yet to be depicted on stage with the long war in Afghanistan a central focus. After all, Gulf War-era veterans now account for the largest share of all U.S. veterans, surpassing Vietnam-era veterans. Last Out also has a stated goal to cross the military-civilian gap. A recent Pew Research study indicated that a smaller share of Americans currently serve in the U.S. Armed Forces than at any time since the peacetime era between World Wars I and II.

Last Out (full title is Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret) is not [. . .] the usual testosterone-fueled derring-do tale of brave men taking on an external enemy. It is a production full of heartbreak. Preshow music such as Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” gives hints of what may be in store for audiences. You remember that line, “Hello darkness, my old friend/I’ve come to talk with you again.”

Last Out is about a modern-day warrior caught up fighting battles “that range from Afghanistan to his own living room” as the corrosive gears of war “affect his family, his integrity, and his very soul” as the production’s program states. “He discovers that combat can be fueled by vengeance or by love . . . it just depends which price you are willing to pay.”

Over the course of the one-act play, scenes dissolve somewhere in the here-and-now and the afterlife framed by the endless war that is Afghanistan. In a back-and-forth time frame covering over 25 years of time (1989-2015) it resembles an ancient Greek tale about warriors and heroes’ journeys–but in this case an American warrior, a Green Beret.

Last Out has intense, gut-wrenching direction from Ame Livingston. The production is ably and sympathetically performed by a diverse cast of four, with three actors playing multiple characters. Three of the actors are retired military veterans who saw combat and upon leaving military service became trained professional actors. The fourth is from a military family.

The actors and their main roles include Scott Mann as Danny Patton, a Green Beret killed in action in Afghanistan and now caught between life and the afterlife. Patton is no simple “gung-ho” trigger-happy man with an M4 Carbine. Rather he is a complex, sensitive man with a heart and soul. Ame Livingston portrays Lynn Patton, Danny’s long-suffering wife. (There is a scene in which she hugs her stage husband that puts the final hug in the movie “An Officer and a Gentleman” [Lorimar Film Entertainment and Paramount Pictures, 1982] to shame).

Bryan Bachman is Danny’s senior sergeant and friend who also portrays a Special Forces Officer at terrible odds with Danny. Danny has a nuanced view of the Afghan population while his commanding officer sees things in black-and-white terms. Len Bruce is Kenny Suggins, a close friend of Danny’s killed in the Pentagon on 9/11. He also plays an Afghan Pashtun Elder.

The set design (Mark Hartley), Lights (William Glenn), Audio (“Big Bob” Ballas and Mark Prator), and Film (Kevin Lang) bring [the] emotions to the audience. The design includes boxes and objects that turn into more than props, including a silent spinning red light that alerts the cast and the audience when the chaos of battle is near.

Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret is a production way beyond war as combat or magnificent speeches such as Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day call to arms. It is about war’s effects that few know firsthand–its effects on home life and family, or the one with the initials PTSD. While the Last Out performance presumes some knowledge and relationship with military service, none is necessary. It is uncompromising, intense and intimate, and for those open to see a different side of those who serve.

War is a horror. Based upon true stories, Last Out more than suggests, there is never a “last one” out from the burden of war. The legacies, of whatever dimension, continue through generations. Last Out aims and succeeds at showing that to those open to it.

Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret, presented by The Heroes Journey, played three performances on May 24-25, 2019 at the Richard J Ernst Community Cultural Center – 8333 Little River Turnpike, Annandale, VA. Running Time: About 90 minutes, with no intermission.

[Some other critical remarks about Last Out include:

• “This is the most emotionally compelling play  I’ve ever seen – and is well ahead of most war movies and books.  Hemingway came to mind as I drove away” (David Phillips, Adjunct Researcher at RAND Corporation; “Last Out: A Brief Review of Scott Mann’s Amazing Stage Play,” LinkedIn, 26 May 2019).

• “With unnerving sound and visual effects — gunfire, explosions, and a disorienting swirl of conditions and events — it’s as if the struggles being encountered by the war-weary soldiers are our own” (Ben Miles, “Theater Review: ‘Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret,’” The Beachcomber [Long Beach, CA] 3 June 2021).

• “Last Out packs into a U-Haul and has been rolling around the country on tour to reach as many veterans as possible. It builds into a tight, practical set with sound and lights that shake the theater with the intensity of a combat zone” (Maggie Yates, “Review: ‘Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret,’” Santa Barbara [CA] Independent 29 January 2020). 

• “Last Out delivers on its promise to give the audience a powerful and moving experience that you won’t find anywhere else” (Amy Forsythe, “LAST OUT: Elegy of a Green Beret Delivers on Authenticity and Hits Home for Many Veterans,” Medium [website] 10 June 2023).

[In addition to the film adaptation of Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret, there’s also a back-stage documentary, Last Out: A Voice Never Heard, that recounts the birth of the play.]