Joseph Heller’s We Bombed in New Haven is a suitably absurd counterpart to his landmark 1961 novel Catch-22. Like Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, We Bombed in New Haven, and its more famous predecessor, evoke a particular blend of nihilism and humanist compassion as a response to armed conflict.
Third Eye Theatre’s take on Heller’s 1967 piece is an enjoyable and timely production that will speak to the average Portland liberal’s feelings about the Iraq War and give shape and substance to the their fears, frustrations and lack of faith in elected officials.
The play follows a group of servicemen who have been tasked with bombing Constantinople. The nonexistent target is the first sign of the absurdity that Heller traffics and a scathing indictment of the seeming pointlessness of the conflict the characters are involved in.
Simeon Denk plays the cowardly Captain Starkey who initially questions the wisdom of bombing Constantinople. When the major (Chandler Adams) explains that the attack is “in the script,” Starkey shelves his questions and resumes his place in the chain of command. Soon, it’s revealed that the script involves a number of character deaths.
With this revelation comes the first hint of ambiguity—are the characters really dying, or are they just playing their assigned parts in the play they’re performing? (Or, is the play about actors who think that they might die in real life instead of just onstage?)
We Bombed In New Haven quickly establishes that it’s a play within a play. Its actors have been assigned parts to play and play them readily until the soldier destined to die in the first raid asks for a better role. When Henderson (Jeff Gardner) discovers that he is the next to die, he becomes obsessed with finding out the truth about the fate of the man who died before him.
Much of the play’s humor comes from the characters’ single-mindedness—for much of the first act, no one actively questions the script, and it’s not until the second act that Henderson starts to break “the rules.”
Fortunately, We Bombed in New Haven departs from its otherwise Kafkaesque sense of humor by including the Red Cross Girl, who doubles as Starkey’s girlfriend. Jamie Mallory is charming in this role and draws attention to the script’s willingness to squander not just talent, but human life. She provides a perfect counterpart to Starkey and helps to reveal his shallowness, cowardice and absence of compassion.
Denk, for his part, begins as a rather likeable character but quickly devolves into a simpering robot. Starkey’s weakness of character and inability to feel are, of course, in the script, but Denk’s performance would have been more moving had he conveyed a deeper mourning for the shallowness of the role he is doomed to play.
Fortunately, the devolution of Starkey’s character is paralleled by a deep development of Henderson’s. Gardner is effective and likeable as he transitions from a brash, trash-talking young man into one who is terrified for his life and the only character brave enough to try to escape the prison that the actors have created for themselves.
We Bombed in New Haven is a smart play that invites us to think on our complicity with the status quo. It’s a subtle critique of attitude and culture that reminds us that the things we find abhorrent would not be possible if everyone agreed to stop playing the game and walked away together.
It’s refreshing to see a play without a scapegoat—after all, in a bureaucracy, there are no villains, and everyone is just playing their part. And, rarely is a critical play so life-affirming. The moral of We Bombed in New Haven, condemnation of groupthink aside, is that people should not choose to be limited or defined by their assigned role in life and a powerful reminder that everyone has the freedom to write his or her own script.