When Johnny Comes Marching Home

Sticks and Bones, an intelligent and provocative play by David Rabe, brings up complex issues regarding the Vietnam War and racial stigma through the eyes of the supposedly prototypical American family, centered around the married couple Ozzie and Harriet (Timothy Foley '98 and A. Samantha Thibodeau '96). After seeing the play, however, one realizes that things are not always what they seem.

The play begins when David (Marshall Lewy '99), Ozzie and Harriet's oldest son, returns home from the Vietnam War and is dropped off by a stiff military soldier (Greg David '99). David is now blind: this unexpected circumstance throws a damper on the joy of the family. Each character changes in some way: success-driven yet lonely Ozzie recalls his youth and maliciously derides his own children; Harriet can no longer fix each situation simply by offering snacks to everyone or calling her priest, Father Donald (Rich Amberg '00); and Ricky (Joshua Cohen '97) simply avoids unpleasant situations by leaving the once-happy home.

David has been both physically and mentally scarred by his experience in Vietnam. In addition to his loss of sight, he is lonely because he has left behind his Vietnamese girlfriend, Zung (Winnie Li '00). She haunts his memories and even his life, literally, often floating ethereally across the stage in a traditional Vietnamese garment.

David's virulently racist family cannot reconcile themselves to knowing that he was in love with what they call a "yellow whore." Ozzie, disturbed by his son's serious relationship with Zung, spitefully proclaims at one point: "They got diseases...he touched 'em. That's disgusting," and later says that David just wanted to have "little, bitty, Chinky kids." Harriet says, in a disturbingly soft, coddling tone, of Vietnamese people, "Their poor funny little faces...Human faces weren't meant to look like that.... It is our triumph, our whiteness."

The undercurrents of unhappiness and angst grow stronger as the play continues, and tense interludes break up moments of comedy which recall the original "The Ozzie and Harriet Show." The deft interspersing of the serious with the comic can best be appreciated when the audience responds to the jokes and follows the premise of the play to its gory end. The play's ending reveals the cruel absurdity of the characters' attitudes by taking them to their logical extreme. Eventually, David can no longer coexist with his family: his perspective on life has been so altered by his bittersweet experience in the war that neither he nor his family can relate to each other any longer.

Foley and Thibodeau perform excellently in their opposition to Lewy. From sudden impassioned outbursts to normal family dialogue, they make the characters believable and coherent. Foley had a particularly difficult job in portraying Ozzie so well, because the character borders on an incredible madness. He cannot deal with his wounded son's attitude and the questions it raises about his own youth and his own interaction with war. At times Ozzie appears normal, and at others he oversteps the bounds of rationality.

The effective lighting reflects the scenes and the dialogue clearly. When Foley has a soliloquy describing how his family thinks they know him (but really don't), he steps forward and the back lighting dims and turns a reddish color, drawing attention to him alone and providing a sense of unreality. In another scene, during one of the family gatherings in the living room, Zung performs a Vietnamese dance in silhouette behind the set's back wall, which is bathed in a hot-pink light and becomes transparent.

The Vietnamese strumming which accompanies her dance is beautiful; the same musical theme recurred throughout the play. Certain sound effects, however, are less appropriate, becoming jarring and awkward and forming perhaps the one weak aspect of the play's presentation.

Overall the production was excellent: the acting, in particular, did justice to a difficult and powerful play. Audience members leave feeling disturbed and shaken--clearly Rabe's intention.