Memories of war make for a torn audience

Author: Grace Duggan

This past weekend marked the end of one of the more ambitious J-term classes available this year, as the cast of "When I Was A Child" gave three performances in the Hepburn Zoo. These performances were inspired by an intriguing concept: the use of presentational theatre to reflect on the experiences and memories of children during wartime, specifically World War II.

Faculty director Ted Perry, who was a child living in the United States during World War II, co-created the work with German-born artist Hans Breder, who also was a child during this time. They drew from their personal experiences and memories. For this production of "When I Was A Child," which has been performed in Texas and Spain in the past, it was the cast that worked with Perry. Starrett Berry '09 explained, "We slowly created a whole new piece out of the raw material that Ted Perry gave us."

"We started off by looking at World War II newsreels and documentary footage to see what we would work with," said Berry. We then chose which portions of the script fit best with which clip. This put us, the students and cast, in the driver's seat. The final product was the result of competition between creative ideas of the cast."

"When I Was A Child" opened with the actors walking out onto a white stage with hopscotch and foursquare boards painted on the ground and suitcases all over the stage. Using flashlights, the actors looked around before sitting down to open suitcases and peer inside. Throughout the performance there was no plot and no specific characters. Actors shared and played multiple non-descript roles. The hour-long performance wandered, sometimes doubling back on itself with the use of repetition or allusions to dialogue previously spoken. Throughout the performance, images played on the walls behind the actors. These images included American and German newsreels, propaganda posters, home movies, and family photographs.

While individual portions of the performance were moving and powerful, they lacked overall cohesion, and were sometimes more confusing than thought-provoking. The actors recited a number of lines in Spanish, French, German, and Hebrew. This was especially poignant when the actors marched and followed Dustin Schwartz '10 as he passed out propaganda posters from different countries involved in World War II.

At other points in the show, such as the gruesome description of the flesh and organs of an autopsied corpse, the use of these languages became superfluous and distracting. In a monologue shared between a number of actors that gradually deteriorated into the repetition of single words, the memory of a mother being raped while her son was forced to watch was more shocking than other parts of the play, and did not seem to fit in with the rest of the performance.

The offstage voices and sound effects that peppered the performance - including an unidentifiable sound that repeatedly scared the performers - along with indistinguishable images projected on the walls were, for the most part, overly vague and often detracted from other, stronger parts of the work.

The actors succeeded, however, in conveying the mannerisms of young children. When Leah Bevis '09 ripped up a letter and walked offstage, the others pieced it together and clustered around Berry to listen to him read it out loud. He stumbled on words, sounded out syllables one-by-one, and looked to the other characters for help on difficult words. When he finished the letter, Laura Harris '07 showed the length of most children's attention spans when she flippantly announced, "I'm bored."

In another part of the performance, Harris threw a temper tantrum about wanting bubble gum while Stephanie Spencer '09 said, "I dreamed my daddy came back from the dead." Berry tried to convince her that it was all a dream and the two tantrums began to overlap and drown each other out, emphasizing the unique dichotomy of children's experiences during war. This division between childhood innocence and dealing with the grotesque and disturbing realities of war was a central message in the performance. Especially powerful was a game of "Concentration," which found the actors naming "things that smelled nice," before turning to more jarring topics like propaganda slogans and types of weapons. They also stacked up suitcases and played war, using their hands as guns before pantomiming an air raid, which resulted in one child cowering in the corner until the others noticed and comforted him.

Perry's director's notes read like a disclaimer when he assured the audience that "when the performance seems repetitious or boring, elliptical or obtuse, the audience member has to trust that the makers are not trying to punish anyone." Yet a rigorous rehearsal schedule and intense collaboration between the cast and Perry was not enough to bring "When I Was A Child" to the level that Perry described in his notes. The performance failed to convey the sense that, "the audience member is a collaborator, a co-creator who is participating in the making of the experience." Rather, strength in the performance was found in individual vignettes within the overall performance and in the efforts of the actors to accurately portray themselves as children.