TT: A very pretty war

I’m back in New York and feeling grumpy: today’s Wall Street Journal drama column contains thumbs-down reviews of Black Watch and Romantic Poetry. Here’s an excerpt.
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What is war like? Those who, like me, have never seen combat in person often look to art to tell us what we missed, while pacifist playwrights seek to portray war in order to persuade us that it is ever and always a bad thing. Yet both groups ignore the warning of Walt Whitman, who worked in the army hospitals of Washington, D.C., during the Civil War, a harrowing experience which persuaded him that “the real war will never get in the books.” Nor has the National Theatre of Scotland succeeded in putting it on stage in a believable fashion in “Black Watch,” a theatrical spectacle about the Iraq war whose return engagement at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse has just been extended through Dec. 21….
“Black Watch”‘s portrayal of modern war is aestheticized and prettified almost beyond recognition. Much of the show consists of a series of tableau-like montages whose elaborate choreography is meant to juxtapose the regiment’s ceremonial duties with the bloody realities of war. Yet those realities are carefully kept at arm’s length, just as the composite personalities of the soldiers seen in “Black Watch” are never allowed to emerge save in flashes.
Of course there are many ways to show war on stage, and some of them, like Shakespeare’s battle scenes or the dream-like vignettes of violent death woven into “Company B,” Paul Taylor’s World War II ballet, are highly aestheticized. But these great works of art never pretend to be anything other than works of art. They do not offer themselves as documentary slices of life, and so we feel no need to trust their makers to tell the truth. Nor do Shakespeare or Taylor ever indulge in the tear-jerking sentimentality to which “Black Watch” not infrequently stoops…
John Patrick Shanley is a gifted but uneven writer in whose authorial personality tough-minded realism and dopey whimsy exist side by side. When the former is in command, we get “Doubt” and “Defiance”; when the latter takes charge, we get “Joe Versus the Volcano” and “Romantic Poetry,” the dreadful new Off-Broadway musical to which Mr. Shanley has contributed the book and lyrics. It’s about a cellphone salesman from Newark who longs to be a poet, which tells you just about all you need to know about the plot, in which–are you sitting down?–love conquers all….
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Read the whole thing here.