Last of the Boys at Seattle Rep

We are still living in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.  So says Steven Dietz in Last of the Boys, now playing at the Seattle Rep.

Actually, so he doesn’t say.  Here’s a quote in a recent Seattle Times article, “I’ve long thought that this play is not ‘about’ Vietnam any more than my play ‘Lonely Planet’ is about HIV/AIDS.” But for me, it really was.  The war determined the path of each of the five characters.

Ben (Reginald André Jackson) is a Vietnam veteran.  He’s the last resident of a trailer park in California’s Central Valley.  With a wall of sand bags forming the front of the stage (see photo) and stacked in a neat line in the back, he is literally barricaded in.  And he is haunted, again literally, by the war.  The ghost (Josh Kenji) of a kind of unknown soldier appears so regularly at night that Ben prepares for him by ironing a clean, white shirt so he can look good for each appearance.  Their regular nighttime visits revolve around the legacy of Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense and architect of the war, shown here as provoking and expanding the war through lies and treachery, to devastating effect on people in both countries.

Jeeter (Kevin Anderson) is Ben’s close friend.  They served in combat together.  Jeeter seems less troubled by the experience but no less deeply entangled.  He’s become a professor, teaches a course on the sixties and has been researching the conduct of the war.

Ben and Jeeter have an easy friendship.  Amid Jeeter's clowning, they share stories and laughs and beers.

Jeeter has also launched into hippy-dippy, woo-woo stuff.  Free-spirited, on his way to Ben’s father’s funeral (Ben didn’t go) he meets Salyer (Emily Chisholm) and her mother Lorraine (Kate Wisniewski).  It’s love at first sight, or something like it, for Jeeter and Salyer and she follows him back to Ben’s place.  Not too long after, Lorraine comes looking for her.

Lorraine and Salyer have their Vietnam connection as well.  Salyer’s father was sent to Vietnam.  His name ends up on the Vietnam Memorial in DC where he is listed as Missing in Action, a sort of neither-here-nor-there thing.  The mother-daughter relationship is as unresolved as his status.

The story builds slowly through Act One.  A couple in front of me left at intermission.  A friend who was there that night said that a couple of people in her section left as well.  She thought perhaps it was this slow development of the story and characters that had them walk out.

I had some doubt at intermission as well: where are they going to go with this, I thought.  But I was so drawn to the reality of the characters.  I have known, more or less closely, a couple of different Vietnam veterans and Ben and Jeeter seemed exactly right.  Lorraine and Salyer had the feel of people I’ve known who have been damaged and pushed to the margins but retain their dignity and drive.

In Act Two everything paid off.  The script and Braden Abraham's direction had me blown away, stunned, in tears or nearly so for most of the act.

There is a grim story told about Ben’s and Jeeter’s days in Vietnam where we are reminded of the toll the war took on the people of Vietnam.  There is a powerful, heartbreaking scene where Salyer reveals what she has been hiding.  Jeeter tells a secret, too about what he has been up to lately. We find out that all of the characters paths have intersected and everyone is burned in one way or another. There is a final, frightening confrontation between Ben and the ghost.  To say much more about how it unfolds would involve too many spoilers.

Maybe, given how riveting the various resolutions are, the play really is about the characters, particularly the friendship between Ben and Jeeter, which stays constant throughout.  But the war in Vietnam, while not ongoing in the same way that our current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are, is still a “forever war” in its own way in that its waves continue to roll ever outward swamping some, washing over others, but leaving no one untouched.  Last of the Boys is the story of five such people.

Photo by me of the stage from my seat in the balcony.  Click to enlarge and see all the sandbags.  

Note, Nov. 20, 2019: If you were directed to this review via a link, please let me know what it was.  This review has been getting a consistent number of views and I am wondering where they are coming from.  So, please share in the comments how you found this.  Thank you!