Alaska News

'Women' weeps, but war goes on forever

One can easily dismiss "The Women of ..." as anti-war propaganda. A series of loosely associated, monochromatic scenes, sketches, pantomimes, big monologues and choral recitations, it addresses women's lot in wars from Vietnam to Iraq and into the future. The collaborative script by director David Edgecombe, Mildred Harrison, Alex Pollack and the cast -- some drawn from existing letters, news reports and raw data -- has little dialogue, no plot, no protagonists and no moral except that war makes everyone a victim.

But that format is intentional, modeled after classical Greek dramas, particularly "The Trojan Women" by Euripides. The ghost of Hecuba (Elizabeth Ware), deposed Queen of Troy, the main persona in Euripides' play, returns from antiquity to guide us through the various levels of Inferno -- bombings, displacement, internment, death -- presented here.

Like the Greek thespians of yore, the cast of the "Women" in question, now playing at UAA's vaguely Grecian Mainstage Theatre, must deliver long poetic speeches in unison without the help of verbal or visual cues. It's an astonishing feat of timing, memorization and putting performance egos on hold. They do it all very well. I could understand the words of most of the ensemble deliveries, which is more than I can say for some solo actors I've heard in some other productions of late.

The seven women, a choir of angry angels, wear long cloaks with hoods that they remove to shift into individual characters. The three men, warriors, wear military fatigues touch questions -- Why do we fight Can we avoid it -- that have been explored since way before Hecuba watched her sons and husband kill and die. But the play doesn't offer clear answers any more than Euripides did. Perhaps because neither reason nor art can accomplish that.

Certain scenes rescue "Women" from becoming mere highly-stylized rant. Katie Strock, as a USO entertainer, sings Janis Joplin's bluesy "Get it While You Can" to an audience of women detainees; Strock has a great voice and wields it with utter sincerity.

Van Le Crockett's tale of her family's suffering in and escape from Vietnam is another high point. Perhaps that's because she is telling her own real story; an ID photo of her as a little girl supplies a direct connection to the memory of war with the present. But it also has something to do with her admission that her father flourished, to some extent, in the aftermath of his ordeal.

Both scenes shift the relentless emotional focus for a moment and put the brute bitterness into poignant perspective. But such flashes of light are few and brief.

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From time to time a character says, "The war can't go on forever." Yet in segments featuring the very young and very confident Gabriel LoRusso, warriors take sons from mothers to become new warriors who will take the next generation of sons away from the next generation of mothers to make yet another generation of warriors.

War, "Women" concludes, will indeed go on forever.

Find Mike Dunham online at adn.com/contact/mdunham or call 257-4332.

By MIKE DUNHAM

mdunham@adn.com

Mike Dunham

Mike Dunham has been a reporter and editor at the ADN since 1994, mainly writing about culture, arts and Alaska history. He worked in radio for 20 years before switching to print.

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