Review: Pain, guilt, patriotism probed in Vietnam saga onstage

It’s been nearly 41 years since the last American helicopter lifted off from Saigon, yet the Vietnam War refuses to slink away gently into the pages of history.

Which begs an obvious question: How long must that rumble in the Southeast Asian jungle torment us? Steven Dietz’s play “Last of the Boys,” a production of which premiered Friday night at Spokane’s Modern Theater, attempts to offer an answer.

Actually, Dietz, the author of some 30 plays, examines a number of issues in his Vietnam saga. Among them: ruptured father-child relationships; that escapist trap we tend to define as love; the dichotomy between a sense of duty and the subsequent feelings of guilt that duty often creates; and, perhaps most important, the all-encompassing need we humans have to fill the hollowness inside us with notions of patriotism or honor or rage or … well, all of that and more.

Above everything, though, it is Vietnam and that conflict’s enduring aftermath that both fuels and connects the characters Dietz puts on the stage and the narrative he forces them to forge through.

“Last of the Boys,” set 30 years after the war, involves five characters, the central two – Ben (Todd Beadle) and Jeeter (George Green) – being the main “boys” of the title. Joining them are Salyer (Chasity Kohlman) and Salyer’s mother Lorraine (Teri Grubbs), along with an apparition identified in the program as The Young Soldier (Nathan Patrick Nelson).

The setting is somewhere in central California, specifically in a rundown trailer park that boasts a single surviving resident, Ben. He is joined by Jeeter, his longtime buddy and fellow Vietnam veteran.

On the surface, the two pals couldn’t be more different. Ben works as a handyman (though he insists on being called a “carpenter”), while Jeeter is a college professor who teaches a course on the ’60s. Ben, it seems, is the more stolid of the two, preferring to stay put in his sandbagged personal compound.

Jeeter, in contrast, embodies the full range of the emotional spectrum, offering more gag lines than a standup comic. He’s continually on the move, especially when engaged in his quest to deliver a specific message to his favorite rock band (the production uses ’60s-era music of the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, both to good effect).

A further plot point both separates the two friends and underscores the play’s essential plotline: Jeeter can’t understand why Ben refused to attend his own father’s recent funeral.

Meanwhile, Salyer is the much younger woman whom Jeeter, though having met her only some 17 days before, is infatuated with. Full of secrets and dressed in multiple layers of clothing for reasons that only gradually become clear, Salyer is searching for a connection to the father she never knew. And Lorraine, who is haunted by her own past, has come in search of the daughter whose sense of loss she shares – even if she isn’t willing to admit it.

What’s clear is that each of Dietz’s main characters is haunted, all of them metaphorically and at least two of them literally. That haunting comes in the form of The Young Soldier, who represents both the focus of Salyer’s need and Ben’s complicated feelings regarding not just duty and honor but also the need for a “plan” as defined, specifically, by former Secretary of Defense Robert F. McNamara.

If there is a weakness to “Last of the Boys,” it involves this ghostly conceit. Dietz’s blending of reality-based drama with the techniques of magical realism feels, at times, too much like a plot convenience and, at others, mostly confusing.

That caveat aside, this production is energized by its powerful performances, particularly by Beadle and Green. The two perfectly embody those real men of the ’60s who, damaged by war, struggled over the next several decades to find a way not so much to live as to merely endure. And aided by stage directions (the play was directed by Diana Trotter) that may have come from Dietz, the periodic explosive confrontations of all the characters are followed by lingering periods of silence that only emphasize the shattering effect.

In the end, “Last of the Boys” doesn’t offer any answers to its essential questions as much as it simply explores the pain that plagues both its characters and, in a larger sense, the country in which they – and the rest of us – live. Vietnam bears its own tragic legacy, just as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq do for today’s veterans.

As Dylan sang, “The times they are a-changin’.” They just don’t always change for the best. Not for all of us.