Review: American Volunteers by Johnny Meyers
by Michael Meigs

The hero's aura that trails after the 27-year-old John Meyer looks to be authentic.  The man was an Army ranger -- no small accomplishment.  Only the toughest and most apt--men only--finish the 60-day training course at Ft. Benning, in the Georgia mountains and in the Florida swamps.   They are in constant physical training and in simulated combat operations, often functioning 20 hours a day.  The lore is that the stresses age these men prematurely.  Candidates commonly lose weight -- between 20 and 40 pounds from already fit bodies.  Leadership at the platoon level is a foremost criterion of selection  -- and evalulation is both by the trainers and by peers in the squad.

 

Meyer has been there.  He's done that.  He served as a ranger in Afghanistan, an experience that provided him with the material for an unpublished novel.  He was called back for service under the terms of his Army reserve status, in 2006 while studying at UT for his undergraduate degree.  His concept of the novel changed.  He says that he had an agent for a brief period -- until he told the agent that he was recasting about half of the text in verse.  Meyer attended Shakespeare in Winedale, a formative experience, and last week after the staged reading of American Volunteers  for the UT English Department he spoke earnestly about the immediacy of theatre.  "You can close a novel and put it down.  You can't do that with theatre."

 

American Volunteers has the feeling of authenticity in the details -- the guy talk, the stress, the confusion of war, and the yearning for home.   I just wish it were a better play. 

 

Conflict abounds and that macho talk pushes it into high relief.  These three platoons of the mythical "Arapaho" company are in the Afghan mountains on extended operations.  The mission is opaque.  The Army sends a female private up there to serve as the contact with Afghan women, angering the squad leaders, who are sunk deep in their male world.  Ania Upstill as the stoic Pvt. Martin takes it like a man -- all the contempt, the lecturing and the correction.  They won't inform her of the mission, because she doesn't have the requisite security clearance. . . or perhaps, and more likely, because they themselves don't have any idea of what the command elements are up to.  We experience, if only vicariously, the intensity, fear and fumbling of a house-to-house search, the breakdown of one squad leader, the delirious dreaming of another.  American Volunteers does not lack for plot, including a murder mystery and relevation that would fit into Agatha Christie, if only Dame Agatha had situated her novel in the Tora Bora cave complex of the Safed Koh.   All that's entertaining and frequently gripping.  Meyer's denouement takes it too far over the top and into unknown territory for my taste, but that's acceptable for a yarn of these proportions.

 

The language of his text is largely unsurprising, with little audible differentiation between the prose and the verse.  His use of a single-member chorus -- speaking in tandem with Meyer himself -- is a device without a clear motivation or heightened speech.

 

 

Most of concern to me was the astonishing lack of leadership shown by these tested warriors.  The lack of cohesion of those squads is nearly as surprising.  That must be Meyer's concern and his message: in the stress and confusion of uncertain combat, even the brave are quickly worn down.  Of the four sergeants running these operations, one ceases to function (Daniel Rigney), another becomes a criminal (Daniel Friedman), and a third becomes delusional (Jack Fogarty).  David Boss, playing Sergeant First Class Weisman, the toughest guy with the most on the ball, is curiously absent during most of the action.  Competence is of little interest.  All these soldiers are non-coms and their only other adult supervision is from unseen officers somewhere on a radio net, evidently not interested at all in their welfare.

 

In crisis toward the end, soldiers are telling each other that orders have arrived that imply summary execution of a captured Afghan suspected of sniping.  That man, we learn, was not responsible for the death and probably never used the telescoped rifle found in his dwelling.  During the talk-back that afternoon, Meyer acknowledged that no such order would have come down the chain of command -- and made the point that these men in desperation and under pressure could well have believed such an order was delivered.

 

War is not a clean business, and men carrying out missions without understanding are dangerous to themselves and to others.   Combat is unpredictable -- covered in what Clausewitz called "the fog of war."  But by and large, American soldiers are men, not children, especially if they have survived ranger school. The wash of admiration in Austin for Meyer's writing and for his play is fed at least in part by our desire to share the experience of those who risk themselves in foreign adversity.  They may often do so with little enlightened understanding of the policy aims shaping those conflicts. The tacit anti-war incomprehension suggested by Meyer resonated to some extent with an audience uneasy with our central Asian wars -- although the focus of much of the post-show dialogue was not on politics, but on the crude misogyny of solider-talk.

 

Meyers' American Volunteers nominated for the Dylan Thomas prize, University of Wales, honoring playwrights under 30 years of age, July 22

 

About the January 2010 staging of American Volunteers at the FronteraFest Long Fest:

  Review by Dan Solomon at Austinist.com, February 1

 Jeanne Claire van Ryzin's review of American volunteers at the Statesman Austin360 "Seeing Things" arts blog, January 22

 Statesman's video interview of Johnny Meyer, January 17

Jeanne Claire van Ryzin's feature on Johnny Meyer in the Statesman, January 16

 

Click to view program of staged reading of American Volunteers by John Meyer

 

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American Volunteers
by Johnny Meyer
Johnny Meyers

May 24, 2010
University of Texas (other)
between Guadalupe and Red River
between 29th and Martin Luther King Blvd
Austin, TX, 78712