News & Reviews

Nuclear fallout
FLC Students tackle Hiroshima
October 17, 2006
By Patricia Miller Arts & Entertainment Editor

"Folding Paper Cranes: An Atomic Memoir" a play adapted from the work of Durango-area poet Leonard "Red" Bird was staged by Fort Lewis College students from the United States and Japan during three performances on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

I wonder how college drama teachers deal with military and political violence in the plays they choose. Are they concerned purely with the drama the conflicts provide or do they care about educating their students about social issues? How does that fit in with the play's aesthetics? Is the answer to root conflict firmly in the past?

At Fort Lewis College last season, the student actors mounted Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," attacking the anticommunist demagoguery of the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the rise of Reaganism.

This year, the college's Theatre Department chose the work of a local author, adapting Leonard "Red" Bird's Folding Paper Cranes: An Atomic Memoir.

The production expresses outrage over even earlier issues: Bird decries America's dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, that killed more than 100,000 people, according to the play. He also exposes this country's making soldiers stand within yards of a nuclear bomb test. Bird was one of those soldiers.

The college also has chosen Bird's book as their first Common Reading Experience in which they encourage all students, faculty and staff members to read the same book.

The stage adaptation is by Kathryn Moller who also directs the play simply, using hieratic movement to heighten the impact of the horrific events. For the capable actors, this is a collaborative production in which the characters aren't given names although Geoff Johnson appears as Bird.

Roughly half the actors are Japanese and speak some of their lines in that language. It was a happy surprise to hear from an FLC alum that the college has an established tradition of attracting Japanese students.

In another innovative piece of staging, two women, Allison Wiest and Tiffany Simonton, appear as male soldiers without makeup or any attempt to disguise their gender. The experiment works.

The action takes place against a handsome, dramatic and moving set of digital projections by Kurt Lancaster. The sound, designed by Lancaster and Moller, is appropriately spare, often relying on a plaintive single flute or a single voice. The lighting by Nathan Lee and Stephen Juhl is simple and appropriate. Julia Schneider's costume crew came up with neutral kimonos and Army khakis, all worn barefoot.

The action opens with the bombing of Hiroshima; oddly Nagasaki, which was also bombed, isn't mentioned. The bombing was sold to U.S. citizens as necessary to shorten World War II.

A Japanese mother sings to her baby, and a teacher mourns her pupils. The mood is aching and somber. The actors speak in chorus. At one time they intone words like "Vietnam, Bosnia, Belsen, Tiananmen Square."

The action shifts to Yucca Flats, Nev., in 1957, when soldiers were told they were in no danger though 200 yards from the nuclear bomb being tested.

"Stand up and face ground zero. In two hours you will assault ground zero so we can study the effects on you," a sergeant barked.

The scenes are tied together when Bird returns to Hiroshima, first as a young Marine then as an older man seeking hope. A Japanese woman who has lost her husband and daughter tells him, "I believe in education. I have hope." The sermon gets a little direct there.

The ending of the play is a surprising reversal, from protest to pastoral. A new figure emerges (Miles Batchelder), presumably the older Bird, who speaks poetically of the beauties of nature as consolation. I wish his character had been less resigned.

Nature is consoling, but in a month when the U.S. Congress has passed a bill permitting the torture of prisoners and when more people have died in Iraq than in Hiroshima, there's still much to protest.

Poetry or protest? It's a quandary.