DANIEL BERRIGAN'S 'THE TRIAL OF THE CATONSVILLE NINE' - HARDCORE RADICAL RELIGIOUS IDEALISM

"David Huynh, Eunice Wong, Mia Katigbak

HENRY EDWARDS - New York - February 23, 2019

Welcome to the MAGA moment in American history.

In response to the widespread protests that greeted the first two years of Donald Trump’s presidency, 31 Republican-controlled state legislatures introduced more than 50 anti-protest bills. The legislators never said it out loud, but their longing to criminalize protest could not have been more clear.

Transport Group’s revival of Jesuit priest, poet, and sociopolitical activist Daniel Berrigan’s 1971 docudrama, “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine,” chronicles a protest that occurred in 1968, serving as a potent reminder that a half-century later, years of hard-fought civil liberty protections are currently under extraordinary threat.

In 1968, in their determination to bring a halt to the Vietnam War, the “Catonsville Nine” - Father Daniel Berrigan, his brother, Josephite priest Philip Berrigan (eventually to become the first priest in this country ever to be prosecuted for civil disobedience), and seven other Catholic activists - engaged in a radical action with deeply surprising consequences.

Their principles and tactics inspired more than 250 similar actions, eventually leading to the end of the draft five years later in 1973, and continuing to influence activists to this day.

The Nine selected a small Selective Service office in a Knights of Columbus Hall in the small Maryland community of Catonsville as the site of an act of outright resistance to the draft.  

Until then, the antiwar activists were identified as students and easily dismissed as naïve, or viewed disapprovingly as long haired, casual drug using, promiscuous "hippies."

The Nine knew the image they were about to send out to the world would be a powerful one. Members of the clergy simply did not stage political acts of vandalism and no one would ever expect protesters to be or had been priests and nuns.

On May 17, 1968, after nine weeks of planning and with the press on alert, the Nine entered the draft office and threw hundreds of draft records into wire bins.

They incinerated the documents in the parking lot, successfully destroying 378 that had been classified 1-A , thus eliminating from the system the names of candidates who had been declared available for military service without delay.

According to their press statement, they used napalm to accomplish the deed “because napalm has burned people to death in Vietnam."

U.S. forces were infamous for using the highly flammable sticky jelly to incinerate villages and accidentally people. (Napalm stuck to human flesh.)

The Nine concocted their homemade batch out of Ivory soap flakes and gasoline, using a recipe adapted from the US Special Forces Handbook.

While they waited for the police, they held hands, recited the Lord's Prayer, prayed for peace and explained their reasoning for the protest.

The tableau of the Berrigan brothers dressed in clerical attire at the scene proved so striking the siblings would forever be painted as the leaders of a protest that actually had none.

Five police officers eventually arrived and arrested the nine radical Catholic peaceniks who were charged with four felonies by the U.S. government

Over five days from October 5–9, 1968, they were tried in federal court.

The lead defense attorney was counterculture legal icon William Kunstler.

Even though the judge, Roszel C. Thomsen, and the prosecutor, Stephen H. Sachs, realized the historic proportions of the event, they allowed little leeway to the defendants' arguments.

 The policy of the government was to compel defendants to stick to "nothing but the facts” and the jury simply had to decide whether or not the Nine destroyed government files.

"In a sense, it was a choice between life and death. It was a choice between saving one's soul and losing it,"said defendant, Thomas Lewis.

The Nine knew they had committed a “crime” and in full view of the world no less, but they contended they had performed an act of conscience and were following a higher law — God's moral law—citing such precedents as the Nuremberg war crimes trials after World War II. 

They also called up their experiences all over the world with the poor who were often the victims of United States foreign policy and tried to put that policy, and especially the Vietnam War, on trial.

After three hours of deliberation, the jury found the Nine guilty of destruction of U.S. property, destruction of Selective Service files, and interference with the Selective Service Act of 1967.

Each was sentenced to two to three and a half years in prison, and a fine of $22,000.

Eunice Wong, Mia Katigbak Three years later, in 1971, Father Daniel Berrigan wrote a play in free verse based on a partial transcript of the trial. The scrapbook of testimonies was designed to prod the conscience of theatergoers.

Playwright Saul Levitt worked on the script to give it more fluency. The resulting “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine” was first presented in Los Angeles, subsequently opened off-Broadway to great acclaim in 1971, and finally moved to Broadway for a brief 29-performance run. The 16-member cast included Sam Waterston and (believe this) James Woods.

Later that year, Gregory Peck produced a film version at a cost of $300,000. It took eight days to shoot and had almost no distribution.

Transport Group’s artistic director, Jack Cummings III, is the adapter and director of the “radical imagining” at Abrons Arts Center, presented by Transport Group in partnership with National Asian American Theatre Company (NAATCO).

Cummings’ revisions include welcome updates on the ultimate fates of the participants.

Father Daniel Berrigan lived from 1975 on the Upper West Side at the West Side Jesuit Community and died in 2016 at the age of 94; Philip Berrigan, while still a priest, married former nun Elizabeth McAlister in 1969 by "mutual consent." In 1973, they legalized their marriage and were subsequently excommunicated by the Catholic Church. By the time of his death in 2002 at the age of 79, Berrigan had spent about 11 years in jails and prisons for civil disobedience.

“The Trial” was – and remains – a polemic that offers a rational and civilized argument in which emotion and passion are seen as intellectually moral processes.

Father Daniel Berrigan’s unabashed and unconcealed argument is meant to persuade audiences to consider what our nation is doing in our name, leading them to admit that higher law is being broken daily. Questions sprang from the text and continue to remain unresolved:

How does one deal with the conflict between the urge to act out of conscience and the imperative to follow the law? What should be the punishment for acts of civil disobedience, regardless of their inherent morality? And if one commits such deeds, should one expect to pay a price or be exonerated for following a higher purpose?

In common with all polemics, “The Trial” certainly does have its boring moments, and the material repeats itself and occasionally seems mawkish andself‐righteous. But how often do you encounter human beings in real life or in the drama with the pure and orthodox morality of the uncompromising defendants in "The Trial"?

The one thing this straightforward documentation of what went on in a Baltimore Federal Court for five days in October 1969 does not need is the use of theatrical devices of any kind.  

Cummings did not listen.

Designer Peiyi Wong transforms the Abrons Center stage into a playing area and utilizes a curtain to separate the stage from the empty auditorium.

The playing area is reached by a side passageway, allowing an audience of 75 to make their way to a series of wooden pew benches that surround a large battered metal desk, complete with goose-neck lamps with horizontal shades.

The clustered tabletop houses a collage consisting of hundreds of Vietnam War-related photographs, period memorabilia - LP albums, magazine covers, ads, articles and pages from old Life magazines.

Audience members are invited to inspect the display, and it is artful, but also nostalgic enough to soften the horror of an agonizing time in American history.

R. Lee Kennedy’s blazing lighting cue and Fan Zhang’s pounding sound of rain and copter, followed by an actor playing a vinyl recording of the 1964 protest song, "Eve of Destruction," launches the production.

It’s a corny and awful choice that spells trouble from the get-go.

In place of 16 actors, Cummings has elected to have three Asian American performers, Mia Katigbak (the powerful and flinty Bessie Berger from NAATCO’s revival of Clifford Odets’ “Awake and Sing”), David Huynh, and Eunice Wong, portray the many male and female characters.

They enter in coats and hats, stumble onto the exhibit, and begin to check it out. Watching Asian Americans looking over artifacts of a war the U.S. fought in Asia holds real fascination. (David Huynh’s parents were refugees from the Vietnam War.)

Coming across the trial transcript, one begins to read from it. Soon, the others join in, not reading but reenacting the text as they sit by the table or move around it with some sequences delivered simultaneously for choral effect.

Confusion reigns as audience members make a mighty attempt to sort out one character from another.

What makes it even harder is the profusion of overbearing lighting and sound effects. Kennedy’s lights are either too blindingly white or too blood red; Zhang’s endless, melodramatic underscoring doesn’t let up for a second; and together they achieve peak madness attempting mercilessly to submerge the audience in the sensory effects of war.

The testimony unleashes numerous horror stories of the U.S. government routinely murdering Guatemalans deemed, accurately or not, to be Communists; American planes bombing the Congo and "mistakenly"hitting  two unprotected villages;  and how a U.S. group in Latin America was in fact a CIA front.

The defendants recount visits to young men who have set themselves afire or recall having been prodded forward by reading Camus.

In a particularly harrowing  account, Daniel Berrigan recalls how historian Howard Zinn and he were invited to Hanoi by the North Vietnamese government, where they were shown the remains of citizens killed by the US Army, either by pellet bombs that ripped their brains apart by by bit or were burned alive by napalm.

To add to the oveall disbelief, the judge conscientiously instructs the jury that it “may not judge this case on the basis of conscience.”

He later mused, “This is the first case in which the issue of conscience has been brought up in my courtroom.”

How does one try to stop a war when all of the “proper channels” have been exhausted? What if a President has broken the law?

“If a President should break the law,” the judge ruefully but firmly concludes, “very little can be done about it.”

And that was 1968!

Moving On

At the very end, there is a burst of light, the stage fills with fog, the curtain lifts, allowing the empty auditorium to be seen for tje first time, and David Huynh plays Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It Is Worth,” which begins:

"There’s something happening here / What it is ain’t exactly clear."

With that the actors depart the stage and exit through the haze-filled auditorium and, one assumes, into the ether.

Is not exactly clear, it looks great and it’s wrong.

“The  Trial” was meant to be a teaching lesson and sadly, after almost 50 years, it deserved to be retaught and was not.

The Catonsville Nine

ETHAN HAWKE AND PAUL DANO AS SAM SHEPARD'S ETERNALLY WARRING BROTHERS

Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano

 HENRY EDWARDS - New York - February 5, 2019

Check out the Book of Genesis for the first story of sibling rivalry, Cain’s murder of his brother Abel.

The Biblical narrative dates to 1450 BC-1400 BC. Needless to say, since then, there have innumerable depictions of siblings and their rivalry, including Sam Shepard’s seething 1980 play, “True West,” an ongoing favorite of college theatres and small theater companies.

Shepard’s older sibling rival, Lee (Ethan Hawke), is an impulsive, wild-eyed drifter and small-time thief. Lee takes after the brothers’ alcoholic, perpetually broke desert-rat father, claiming that he, too, lives on the Mohave where he makes dubious ends meet; his younger brother Austin is the polar opposite, a responsible and accommodating Ivy League-educated screenwriter with a wife and children and a devotion to his craft.

The bros have been at each other's throats since childhood. “True West” dramatizes their tumultuous encounter, after not having seen each other in five years. 

They compete and collaborate, love and hate, drink and work, reminisce and prevaricate, argue ceaselessly over their incompatible present, past, and future lives, ending up in figurative and literal chaos punctuated by a beer-drenched Cain and Abel re-enactment.

The roles call for actors who enjoy placing their (often toxic) masculinity on devastating display, cutting loose with absolutely no inhibitions, and giving audiences a relentless pounding. 

The 1982 pairing of Gary Sinise and John Malkovich has deservedly achieved legendary status. Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, Randy and Dennis Quaid, Tommy Lee Jones, Peter Boyle, and Bruce Willis have also assumed the challenge.

“It's the kind of play actors love to handle,'' Shepard once told an interviewer. “At its heart is this conflict between the intellect and the emotions, the physical wild man part and the reasonable intellectual side. You know, what it really means to be a man . . . there's not a whole lot of men who know what a man is, and I always thought it was weird that American men haven't resolved this; the American male is in conflict  . . . and I think they're getting farther and farther apart; there's a bigger gap between the macho man and the other one.''

Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano portray the warring duo on a Broadway stage for the first time in 19 years in Roundabout Theatre Company’s deeply committed but flawed revival at American Airlines Theatre, directed by Britain’s James MacDonald.

Hawke, an old Shepard hand, appeared in a 1995 Steppenwolf production of the writer-actor’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Buried Child” and directed a 2010 Off-Broadway revival of Shepard’s “A Lie of the Mind”; MacDonald directed Shepard (in a return to the stage after a 30-year absence) in Caryl Churchill’s “A Number” at New York Theatre Workshop in 2005.

Shepard died on July 27, 2017 at the age of 73, leaving a legacy of 44 discomforting but often darkly humorous plays, including his greatest achievement, the so-called family (nightmare) trilogy, “Curse of the Starving Class,” “Buried Child” and “True West.”

Each play in its individual stylistic way pulverizes the American Dream and its vision of the ideal American family and ideal American existence.

With reference to “True West,” Shepard once commented the play provides a taste of “double nature. I think we’re split in a much more devastating way than psychology can reveal.”

The split takes the form of a deep, contradictory craving in the American character for both freedom and the security of roots. There also exists a gnawing fissure between one's nostalgic memories of the past and the bleakness of a garish and desolate suburban present and pockmarked by cookie cutter lookalike homes, freeways, smog, and Safeway supermarkets.

“True West” takes place in just such a present, a linoleum and wood-paneled Carter-administration kitchen and adjacent dining room in the brothers’ childhood tract home about 40 miles east of Los Angeles on the periphery of the L.A. suburban sprawl.

Set designer Mimi Lien and lighting designer Jane Cox install their design inside a frame lined by bright fluorescent light strips. "True West" is written in nine scenes spread over two acts. Between each scene, the frame delivers a blinding blast of harsh white light.

And what a mistake that is!

By nature, a Broadway theatre is too big to wrap itself around a cramped and claustrophobic play that is meant to spill menacingly into the laps of audience; thus encasing it in a frame – artsy though it may be - does it the signifant disservice of creating a significant additional dose of unwanted distance between actors and audience, rendering it impossible to experience Shepard's desire to give theatergoers a kick in the guts.

Casting is another problem. While the first half belongs to Lee and the second half to Austin, Leo, by far, is clearly the showier part and Austin’s the harder one, making it a real challenge to create combatants of equal stature.

Hawke thrills as dangerous, combustible Lee.  One look at him is all it takes to know he is major trouble, and that he lacks the slightest bit of concern for civilization’s legal or moral constraints.

The actor also subtly reveals the “Austin” part of his nature that dwells inside him. Lee may be untutored, damaged, and dangerous, but it turns out he's also a genuine romantic.

Paul Dano returns to theatre after an eight-year absence during which he delivered compelling, individualistic screen performances in “There Will Be Blood,” “12 Years a Slave” and “Love & Mercy,” among others. He’s a wonderful actor. But his passive characterization of Austin in the first half deflates the play.

Not that there’s an easy way to balance Hawke’s monumental aggressiveness, especially when portraying a character who has been overly civilized.

In the second half, Dano comes into his own as he sheds his good-boy behavior and lets it rip.

We first encounter the brothers in their mother’s home. Austin is housesitting while his mother is on vacation in Alaska and is hard at work attempting to finish the first draft of a script for Hollywood producer Saul Klimmer (Gary Wilmes). Klimmer is scheduled to visit the following day so that Austin and he can finalize the deal and sign contracts. 

But Lee has turned up unexpectedly, and dripping with sarcasm, he starts plying Austin with nonsense questions.

Lee’s reference to the “forefathers” reveals his connection with the myth of the frontier American West.

Remembered mainly from the movies, if remembered at all, Lee’s old-fashioned romantic notion of a “true west” is characterized by unbound individualism and disdain for regulation. It's a male scenario existing in Lee's imagination and nowhere else.  

Austin does not initially know what his brother is talking about. His “true west” is the “new” west of twentieth-century Southern California, replete with family ties, sophistication, comfort, suburban bungalows and freeways. Austin has absolutely idea that such a life can be empty and sterile.

Does either vision represent what it means to be a “real man”? Or does it take the consolidation of both points of view to produce a real “real man?"

The questions hang in the air.

The next day, while Austin meets Klimmer, Lee returns with the day’s haul, a stolen television set. Saul and Lee discuss golf and make plans to play the next day, excluding Austin because he doesn't play.

 Lee also proposes a script idea for a "true-to-life" western and Saul reacts positively – if Austin writes an outline.

That night Austin grudgingly takes dictation from his illiterate brother.

Lee’s bizarre “true” western envisions two men who “take off after each other straight into an endless black prairie.” Since they don’t know where they are going, their improbable chase through the Texas Panhandle’s "Tornado Country" never ends.

While they work, the brothers admit harboring a deep-seated jealousy for the other’s life: Lee yearns for Austin’s status, education and familial stability; Austin pines for Lee’s outlaw life.

Hawke and Dano

Saul likes the outline because it has a mythical quality to it and suggests a primal experience. The producer offers to let Austin write both he and his brother's scripts, but Austin insists on doing his own work and loathes the inauthenticity of his brother's concept. This causes Saul to drop Austin's script and find another writer for Lee's story.

After Austin refuses to help Lee transform the outline into a screenplay, Lee takes on Austin’s identity, sitting at his brother’s typewriter, hunched and anxious, poking angrily at the keys and shouting at his despondent brother who is taking on the role of a semi-drunk Austin, to keep it down so he can concentrate.

Screenwriting can't be that hard, Lee tells Austin, adding that his own life of petty crime is much more difficult to navigate. He bets Austin that he couldn't even steal a toaster.

The next morning finds Austin polishing more than 30 toasters he has stolen from neighborhood houses.

Lee’s frustration grows as he recognizes that he cannot re-create his vision of the mythic American West or achieve his goal of successful screenwriter without the help of his brother. Finally, his violent disposition, heightened and accelerated with his growing awareness of the futility of his position, Lee explodes, smashes the typewriter with one of Saul’s golf clubs and burns pages of his script.

Likewise, Austin has descended into a drunken, unrestrained, aggressive state.

The resulting switch in roles has led them to conclude nothing is authentic and they have nothing to believe in.

Reduced to the untamed status of two wild animals in the mythologized West, they smash, spill, throw and pulverized everything they can get their hands on: demolishing a dozen cans of beer; at least two bottles of liquor; a full bag of golf clubs; the typewriter; a strung-out typewriter ribbon; an entire loaf of toasted white bread, which Dano stacks into a tower on a plate only to have Hawke knock it out of his hands and send the toast flying across the stage; the contents of almost every kitchen drawer and  the drawers themselves; candy and knitting tins, yellow legal pads and assorted wadded-up sheets of yellow legal paper; ashtrays and cigarettes; a rotary phone which has been yanked off the wall; and a set of curtains, all also yanked off the wall.

Slumped against the kitchen cabinet, Austin, a mix of exhaustion, rage, and grim sadness, slugs down whiskey and crokes out the pathetic story of the last time he visited their old, drunken and near-destitute father in Juarez. They went on a bender, and the father ended up leaving his brand-new false teeth and some leftover chop suey in a brown paper bag in some dive bar and was too drunk to remember which one it was.

Looking at his mother’s destroyed kitchen, Austin has an epiphany about his unsatisfactory life. Making up his mind to drop out of society and give up his family (whom he has so far ignored, he begs Lee to take him to the desert. Lee agrees on the condition that Austin finishes the screenplay for him.

Dano, Hawke and Marylouise Burke

The next day, their mother (a benumbed Marylouise Burke) returns from her vacation to discover her sons have demolished her home. To which Austin tells her that they are going to the desert. But the brothers have reverted to their previously held identities, and Lee declares that Austin is not cut out for desert life.

He starts to leave on his own, but Austin erupts in rage, grabs the phone from the floor, lunges at him and quite literally, he is at his brother’s throat, wrapping the cord around Lee’s neck. They stumble about the kitchen as Austin strangles Lee. When Lee, seemingly unconscious, falls to the ground, Austin releases him and starts moving towards the door, but Lee jumps to his feet and stops Austin from escaping.

After a very long and unnecessary shift, the scene shifts to the desert and we catch a glimpse of the brothers crouching and watchful for each other’s next step. There is no resolution. Their conflict is not resolved and, like others like it, can never be resolved.

Shepard’s antic and potentially tragic mix swings wildly between physical comedy and explosive violence. The surprising transformations of its two main characters and the conflicts that live within each of them -- intellect versus machismo, dream versus actual experience, obedience to the code of civilization versus impulse to rebel -- live within the culture as well as in the individual.

Even though the characters are written as equals, I could not help wondering if a cultured, literate Austin type stands a chance in a MAGA world where Lee and his regressive cohorts have seized control.

If he does not, although it’s emphatically sad to say, “True West” is a dated play.