Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue
At its heart Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue is a classical interplay set to war. Tracing three generations of the Ortiz family, American servicemen all, playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes elegantly weaves a shared history in overlapping anecdotes, stringing common threads across three wars and fifty years. In moments ranging from tender to intense, the poetry never falters, and each harrowing episode is rendered with grace and aplomb by director Davis McCallum. Unerringly honest, beautifully acted, and relentlessly affecting, Elliot is a poignant success.
The action begins with the eponymous Elliot Ortiz, an effusive eighteen-year old Lance Corporal in the Marine Corps, preparing for his imminent departure to Iraq. "Let’s do this," he challenges himself, flexing before a mirror. Blustering with gasconade, he attempts to fight down obvious anxiety and the shock of impending combat. In a circular pit on the lower of three tiers of staging, he retrieves fatigues from his hunter-green duffel. Above and to the sides, he is observed by his father, mother, and grandfather, all of whom provide a practical substratum to the impending journey with a rapid-fire litany of military codes. Arriving in brisk shouts, these range from strict clothing regulations to restrictions on permitted personal effects. Stripped bare of possession, Elliot finally resembles the military ideal- a human fighting machine. Played by the surprising James Martinez, he is at the nascent stages of a transformation.
No longer content to remain on the sidelines, Pop Ortiz casts off his thick civilian shirt and takes his bare-chested place in the pit. Suspending his role as concerned father, he returns to his own youth, lamenting the sticky, uncomfortable life of the Vietnam jungles. Softer in tone than his future son, he writes home in good-natured complaint, detailing an upcoming march when his outfit will see their first action. Again, the tension is palpable, and Teddy Cañez ably reflects the sensation in subtle pauses, uncertainty etched on the lines of an expressive visage. His journey will parallel Elliot’s, traversing a spectrum of violence from the guilt of murder to the terror of severe injury.
Watching over them all, struggling against senility, is Grandpop Ortiz. A veteran of Korea, he is a flautist who relates memory to music. When questioned on any aspect of the past, he dismisses with a wave of his hand. "I don’t remember what I was doing," he admits. "Only what I was playing." In wartime, the choice was constant: Bach. Describing the intercourse of the great composer’s major and minor keys, and their heartrending reflection of life near the 38th parallel, the fantastic Mateo Gómez decorates the collective experience with sonorous lyricism.
Upstage, serving as background, a verdant wall covered with lush vegetation is tended by Ginny, Elliot’s mother. The space’s only true extravagance, it adorns and echoes at once. In lighter moments, the heliconia orange and leafy greens predominate, while in the Iraqi desert, new light draws the violet shades from darkness. A coiled garden hose doubles as rainmaker; in the Vietnam scenes, its spray produces an aural rainstorm, the water trickling its way through the eaves. Ginny’s indiscriminate planting was designed to recreate a Puerto Rican sea wall, and it becomes this and more. Thick and transformative, it is a brilliant set device.
Along with beauty, Hudes’ script is laced with wisdom, and Ginny is the frequent purveyor. The matron of growth, she describes her philosophy: "Plant every goddamn seed you can. Each one is a contract with the future." And so the garden thrives with diversity while her son fights halfway across the world.
It is also important to note the ingenious staging. Amid four interlaced lives, the obvious risk is a distracting clutter, contaminating the play’s arc. Luckily, through an amalgamation of unobtrusive lighting and constant space-opening movement, the featured actor is forever in proper focus, and the sum of performance is always greater than its parts. Indeed, Director McCallum’s skill is in making room for the numerous stunning moments. Take, for example, the dual tales of Elliot and Pop’s first kill. While the former sees an AK-47 toting Iraqi fall and perish in a stream of green blood, as tinted through night-vision goggles, the father snipes a Viet Cong regular drinking at the river’s edge. Both approach their victims to discover, buried in pockets above halted hearts, a photograph of distant families. Later, both men suffer leg injuries, and Elliot in particular teeters on unconsciousness, invoking memories to stave off shock. His panicky depiction is a far cry from the boy who idly discussed cereal brands months earlier, and Martinez embodies the humanism with grace and a progressive maturity.
The pained vision he conjures is the first meeting of his parents at a soldier’s hospital in Vietnam. Ginny, a nurse, dresses her future husband’s leg with care, and slowly the two fall in love. In the moonlit moments before the consummation, she stands at a distance. "Walk," she says, imploring him to rise from bed for the first time since his wound. Struggling, he mumbles self-imprecations as he staggers across the floor, eyes on his nurse. After a wrenching distance, they meet, and the realization of the kiss, enacted and placed in the confusion of time, plants the seed for Elliot, the garden, and everything ensuing from the incident’s essential simplicity.
The young Lance Corporal recovers in Iraq, and returns to Philadelphia for a one-week hiatus. He implores his father to share war stories, but no such connection is forthcoming. That particular joy is reserved for the audience. It is yet another notch in Hudes’ belt that she does not concede to a teary embrace and emotive ending. Unsurprisingly, then, she also avoids transforming the family epic into a political fable. Absent of overt liberal ideology, her work will undoubtedly suffer from a certain amount of anonymity. We live, after all, in an era when left-wing backlash creates a caring environment for pontificating productions, and clichéd, facile renditions of societal "issues" garner awards like Best Picture. Yet those who overlook this play will miss a subtle truth; by portraying combat as it occurs, through the candid eyes of Americans, and eschewing the temptation to lecture, Hudes has actually created a powerful anti-war statement.
Ginny, describing her nursing tenure, remembers a never-ending stream of dying men. Inevitably, before the expiration, their last earthly act was a desperate call to a wife, girlfriend, or mother. This loss of human connection, of the promise of love, is the greatest tragedy of death, and kudos to the playwright for understanding that it needs no embellishment. It’s enough for young Elliot to communicate the powerful, restorative sensation of his mother’s treatment, when "the hands of someone you love touch where you hurt the worst." In terms of the gorgeous metaphor, this is the uplifting major chord- all that is preserved, healed, and re-grown. And the minor chord, melancholy and redolent of loss, represents everything taken in war’s sweeping course. It is, in the words of Elliot’s aging grandfather, "the back of the woman you love, walking away."
Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue, written by Quiara Alegría Hudes and directed by Davis McCallum, runs through October 29th at the Teatro Heckscher of the Museo Del Barrio.
