Past Reviews

Regional Reviews: Albuquerque/Santa Fe


Regional Reviews

Love in the DMZ
Sol Acting Academy


Josh Heard and Catharine Pilafas
Sometimes a thoroughly original but only partially successful play is more interesting than a totally successful work that pursues a conventional and well-trod path. Such is the case with Love in the DMZ,which opened last weekend at the Sol Acting Academy in Albuquerque.

The play is a collaboration among four highly skilled professionals. The playwright is Julia Cameron, a New Yorker who moved to Santa Fe four years ago. She is the author of 37 books of fiction and nonfiction. Best known as a guru of the human potential movement, her books on the creative process include "The Artist's Way," which has sold more than 4 million copies worldwide. She has also written eight plays, and her credits include "Miami Vice" and "God's Will."

Daniel Region, a friend of Cameron's for 35 years, came to Albuquerque from New York to direct the play. As well as a director, he is an actor, photographer, and for 17 years was the on-air voice of the Emmy-winning "As the World Turns."

The actors in this two-character play are both teachers at the Sol Acting Academy. Josh Heard is also a resident actor at the Duke City Repertory Theater and appears in films that include WGN's TV series "Manhattan" and AHC's "Gunslingers." Catharine Pilafas acted Off-Broadway in New York, then moved to New Mexico where she has appeared in several Duke City Rep shows. She has done extensive film and TV work, including The Night Shift, Independence Day, Resurgence, Ridiculous Six, Longmire, In Plain Sight and Manhattan.

With this remarkable combination of talents it is not surprising that the result is fascinating. The story transpires during the Vietnam War. A young man is sent to Vietnam as an officer or NCO (it is not clear which and his fatigues carry no insignia). His wife remains at home with their two sons. The couple bridge their agonizing separation by writing letters to each other. These letters, some sent and others not, and the silences when letters remain unwritten, constitute the entire action of the play.

The left side of the stage is a set that suggests a barrack or camp in Vietnam. The right side is a room in the family's house in America. Uniting and dividing the two sets from the prominent position at center stage is a bed.

There is no on-stage action. There are only the two characters, husband and wife, but there is no direct dialogue between them. There are only the letters. This epistolary format puts extraordinary pressure on the written words, the letters that are read out loud by their writers. The letters are intended simultaneously to hide and to reveal the emotions and lives of the couple, for they are both unreliable narrators who tell each other only a bit of the truth-in part because they are afraid to share the full reality, in part because they themselves do not know or understand the full truth. To communicate the lacunae in their communications, the playwright resorts to the awkward and occasionally confusing device of having the couple write letters that are so honest they cannot be sent. Sometimes, one partner, overwhelmed by his or her life, subsides into silence. I wish the director had allowed these very brief silences to persist longer, until they became a weight freighted with almost unbearable pressure.

Although the war establishes the scene of the story, it is more background than foreground. We get only occasional vivid glimpses of fighting and bloodshed, most notably in the husband's description of a mother and child burned to death by napalm while American soldiers laugh at their "dancing." What is constantly in the foreground is the intense, loving but fraught relationship between the husband and wife. The "DMZ" of the title is less in Vietnam than in the hearts and minds of the two protagonists, and the most important stake in the "war" is their love for each other. Each of them feels abandoned, alone, and overwhelmed. Each feels he or she has nobody to rely on but each other. When that bond is imperiled, they both start to fall to pieces.

This play has been performed only once before, in 2004 in Los Angeles, and judging from the Variety review, it was staged quite differently, with the characters remaining mostly passive and immobile while reading each other's letters.

In Albuquerque, the playwright said during a discussion Saturday night that she gave the director his head, and he in turn gave the actors great leeway to improvise. For example, the second act opens with the husband taking a drunken fall, an action that the director said Heard invented on the spot.

The improvisations of the actors, however, are not quite enough to relieve the static quality of all that letter reading, and the letters' prose, while competent and occasionally brilliant, does not sustain the consistently high level that would be necessary to carry the whole play. At the end, I did not really feel that I understood or was deeply, emotionally affected by these two characters; rather, I watched them from a distance while they sank into their morass. When they finally emerge from it, I wasn't sure that the narrow avoidance of tragedy was the most plausible resolution of the plot.

That a play of such ambition and originality has problems is nothing to be embarrassed by. The actors, especially Heard, throw themselves into their roles with enthusiasm, passion, and grit, although I wish that Pilafas would smile a bit less through her pain. Cameron has written a script of love and longing drawn, she said Saturday night, from her own experience when her lover and collaborator suddenly left her to go to Australia. "Vietnam is Australia," she said.

The play continues Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 4:30 p.m. through August 23, 2015, at 5500 San Mateo Blvd. NE., suite 108. For information and tickets call 505-881-0975 or go to solacting.com.

--Wally Gordon