by Geoff Hoff~

Wilfred Owen was a young soldier in World War One (the first war to end all wars), sent to the Craiglockhart War Hospital for the Mentally Disabled because he suffered from shell shock, which his commanding officer called “Cowardice”. There he met poet and decorated war hero Siegfried Sassoon who befriended him and helped him become what was later thought by many critics to be the leading British poet of the First World War. Mr. Sassoon was in the institution because he had started writing anti-war poems. He was also thought to have tossed his war medal away in disgust (although that seems to have been refuted when it was found in an attic in 2007.) These two events caused the military and governmental powers to believe that confinement in a mental institution would at the very least shut him up.

The play Not About Heroes, by Stephen McDonald, chronicles their brief but intense friendship, which lasted only 18 months before Mr. Owen was killed on the battlefield just before the war ended. The play (as are many of the poems of both men) is about the horrors of war. Both are also about friendship. The play also has an undercurrent of seemingly repressed homosexuality, although history suggests that, although the men probably didn’t have that kind of intimate relationship, Mr. Sassoon was absolutely gay and Mr. Owen, at the very least, actively socialized with the leading homosexuals of the day and incorporated aspects of homoeroticism into his poetry.

One of the main themes of the play is the nature of what it means to be a man. Mr. Sassoon was a war hero, decorated and revered by the young and old of the day. Mr. Owen was institutionalized for perceived cowardice. He greatly admired his older mentor for having thrown away his medals, left the battlefield, and spoken explicitly against warfare, but thought it was admirable only because he’d first proved himself to be a man, proved himself not a coward, been a hero. Any attempt to discredit war without those requirements he sees as inappropriate, as cowardice, or, at the very least, and perhaps most importantly, as perceived cowardice. Without those requirements, he thinks, nothing he could say would have any weight.

Once he is declared fit again, he reenters the war with relish so that he can have the foundation upon which to turn his back on warring. The irony, of course, is that the war killed him. He did get a medal before that happened and his poems are decidedly anti-war, so in some small way, his desire was fulfilled. The play Not About Heroes is about heroes, at least two of them, and the fallacy of what heroism is thought to require.

I was a little concerned at the beginning of the production of Not About Heroes at the Lounge 2 Theatre. Although the set seemed simple but attractive, the director, William Hemmer, used the “turn off all electronic noisemakers” speech to give the audience a brief history of World War One, including statistics on how many men died in two separate battles, in order to give us some context within which to view the play. My thought then, and still, is: Don’t. If the play stands up, anything you have to tell us is moot. If the play doesn’t stand up, nothing you say will matter. If you think you must educate us, do it in the program where we can go to it afterwards to deepen our experience of what we’ve seen. (He does do it in the program, also, so it seems, rightly or wrongly, that he either doesn’t trust his production or doubts his audience.)

Another thing that worried me was the diagram of the set for both Act I and Act II in the program with circles depicting the stage areas, complete with descriptions and a numbering system to tell us when and where the various scenes take place. Rather than make anything clearer, it just made it confusing. (Especially so since the Act II diagram had no number “2″ location. Was that a symbol or an oversight?) A simple list of locations would have served the play much better.

These things are too bad, because the play does stand up, and this production of it mostly does. Mr. McDonald’s script is poetic and literary and it is easy to know when and where we are at all times and what is going on in the world around the two friends which informs their decisions and movements. The development of the friendship between them, told through the poems, actual letters and imagined conversations, is clear and moving. The set, designed by director Hemmer, was simple, elegant and effective, each location suggested with small pieces of appropriate period furniture and rugs, and was enhanced by the lighting, by Matt Richter, which isolated areas and supported varying moods very effectively. They used two screens with projected black and white still images to further enhance the feeling of location, and this was mostly effective, although occasionally pulled attention and distracted from the play. The costumes, by Garrison Burrell, who also did props and was the “set advisor”, were simple and accurate for the period.

Robert Hardin was poet Owen and is a very good actor. His Mr. Owen is young and eager, intelligent, troubled and convincingly admiring of his older mentor. I never quite believed, though, that he was haunted by, or, indeed, had ever experienced the horrors of war. This is probably not his fault. No amount of makeup can create a haunted face and internalizing that kind of horror is probably next to impossible. The war is still very present in the poetry and, therefore, in the audience’s minds.

Josh Mann played poet Sassoon. Mr. Mann is obviously trained in stage craft, had a booming voice and manipulated his face, body and emotions with all the fire and surprise of a well written symphony. However, every move, every thought, every outburst was choreographed, pre-planned and self-conscious and often seemed to have little or nothing to do with what was actually going on around him. I often felt I was watching an impersonation of Oscar Wilde. Also, his cut-glass British accent occasionally slipped.

The effect of the play was more intellectual than emotional, but there was enough intellectual impact to have kept it in my mind since I left the theatre. I also wanted to know more about the poetry of these two men, none of which I had read before seeing the play. I suspect Los Angeles could use more productions with a powerful intellectual impact.

Not About Heroes is performed Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 pm and Sundays at 7:00 pm through August 22^nd, 2010.

The Lounge 2 Theatre is located at 6201 Santa Monica Blvd. in Hollywood, 90038, just east of Vine.

Ticket prices: $30.00

Reservations online at www.Plays411.com/heroes or by phone at (323) 960-7744.