October 2, 2002

extreme measures

by j.h. tompkin

Combat zone

I WONDER IF British playwright Tom Stoppard, who in 1978's Night and Day asks that we consider the ambiguities and complications of belief, had considered the possibility that an American president might someday declare war from the seat of a golf cart. American Conservatory Theater dramaturge Paul Walsh probably has. In a recent conversation about Night and Day, which opens at the Geary Theater this week, he referred to "American antihistorical and anti-intellectual culture."

"One of the reasons I love working on Stoppard plays," he told me, "is their complexity. At ACT we're committed to an aesthetic of complexity. Sometimes asking the question is more important than finding the answer. It's great to do this play at a time when we have a president who campaigns on a platform that he's intellectually mediocre."

Night and Day is chiefly concerned with the motives and interactions of foreign journalists working in a dangerous, crumbling African nation, not the political leaders who create the mess the trio explore. Today's context, however, gives ACT's production a muscular spin: the Enron fallout is uncontainable, a malignancy snaking through the nation's social and economic fabric; the president is hawking war in Iraq like Cal Worthington working a Long Beach car lot; the vice president asks soldiers to put their lives on the line while denying access to potentially incriminating Enron-related documents. The idea of risking one's life in service of the free press seems an extravagant gesture, all things considered.

Perhaps extravagance is what covering a war – going wherever soldiers go but carrying a camera or a notebook instead of a weapon – is all about. Stoppard, as well as Walsh and ACT artistic director Carey Perloff, who is directing the upcoming production, was influenced by Dispatches, Michael Herr's riveting account of covering the Vietnam War. Herr has few illusions about what he did.

"The glamour" of being a war correspondent, he writes, "was possibly empty and lunatic, but there were times when it was all you had, a benign infection that ravaged all but your worst fears and deepest depressions." Herr's book is irresistible, attracting, among others, directors Francis Ford Coppola and Stanley Kubrick, who used him to add authenticity to, respectively, Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. The majesty of Dispatches lies in how he limns the disconnect between policy makers and those carrying out policy half a world away. He writes about a conversation with a young marine who told him, "'Boy, you sure got offered some shitty choices.' And I couldn't help but feel like what he really meant was he didn't get offered any at all."

Reporting from the trenches is the business of a correspondent; unfortunately, good reporting doesn't guarantee much. "It seems to me," Perloff told me, "that the questions raised by this play are germane. I wanted to know who these [correspondents] are, so I began to follow bylines. We are getting a story, but whose story are we getting? Is it just the editor's version? And who decides if a story runs and what kind of play it gets?"

For Prime Time Inc., uncovering facts to deliver truth is often low on the agenda. Given the corporate checks and balances, it is – how can I say this strongly enough? – most unlikely that a major news outlet will play a leading role in breaking news unpopular with the powers that be.

While this means that Dan Rather will never again be, well, Dan Rather (which leaves aside the question of who he was in the first place), the tradition of the war correspondent is still with us. The telex machine in the living room of a British industrialist's African mansion brought Stoppard's three journalists together in Night and Day. Now the key link is a modem. A generation of reporters raised on laptops and the X Games are providing more war-related news than the world has ever had – often as it's happening. You could spend an entire workweek on Yahoo!'s war links alone. Or go to www.globalsecurity.org, the site of a military watchdog group, to find satellite photos showing August's military buildup at an air base in Qatar.

The e-mail era makes many of the practical complications facing Stoppard's '70s journalists beside the point; but other, more important issues don't go away. "The correspondents in Night and Day," Walsh said, "believe they'll make all the difference in the world, and so do we in the theater – all evidence to the contrary in both cases."

And buyer beware: "I think," said Perloff – whose work has been reviewed countless times – "that we all have ambivalent feelings about journalists. Like with lawyers, you only need one bad experience. For those of us who work in fields like this and who are exposed to the media, our skin is so thin, we are constantly defensive. But that's how it works – everyone is always using everyone. You can say journalists are reprehensible, but people are bad because of how they use journalists."