Theater: 'Jenny Sutter' a Dramatic Triumph

Military.com - Ward Carroll

A good play can demonstrate – among other things – that impact isn’t necessarily about scale.  In the hands of a talented playwright, a few characters on a barren stage can deliver a message with more power than a screenwriter can muster with the requirement for a cast of hundreds assembled on as many expansive sets.  Julie Marie Myatt is such a playwright, and “Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter” is such a play.

Jenny Sutter is just back from the Iraq war where she was wounded, losing her right leg below the knee.  (The audience discovers this early on in the play as Jenny, wearing a defiant expression, wrestles with her prosthetic leg as she changes from desert cammies to mufti at stage front.)  During a rapid-fire exchange of barbs with a bus station attendant it becomes obvious that Jenny is as confused as she is hard-bitten.  And she isn’t sure where she wants to go.

Enter Lou, breezing into the bus terminal with the grace of a fender bender.  She is a frenetic flower child refugee, a bundle of damaged goods addicted to everything.  But in spite of her scars, Lou still has a big heart.  She invites Jenny to join her as she returns to “the Slabs,” a community of transients and misfits in the California desert.  Absent any better ideas, Jenny accepts.

The Slabs is where playwright Myatt’s genius shines.  At a glance this setting is completely tangential to the story of a war veteran’s return home.  But the beauty of misfits is they don’t judge and in not judging they possess a spirituality that allows Jenny’s story to emerge as her healing process begins in a very unorthodox but effective way.  Jenny’s issues are pulled out of her one unconditional question at a time.  She’s seen too much horror.  She thinks her family won’t love her without both legs and therefore she doesn’t want to go home.

The central figure at the Slabs is Lou’s on-again-off-again love interest Buddy.  Buddy is an ersatz preacher whose sermons, by Lou’s assertion, are the camp’s singular “must attend” events.  (Another bit of theatrical flair here is Buddy’s sermons, delivered from behind a pulpit fashioned from a stack of milk carton containers, are directed toward the audience as if they were residents of the Slabs.)  Buddy’s manner is calming and sets the tone for the camp.

Another of the Slab’s denizens, Donald, is the anti-Buddy in that his aura is one of intensity and foreboding.  Donald’s the camp’s loner, and it’s apparent from the negative reactions of the others that he’s made a name for himself in undesirable ways.  He pries for information about Jenny’s war experiences.  Did she shoot anyone?  Did she see anyone get killed?  After dodging his questions, Jenny finally explodes and admits that she was to blame for the death of 15 fellow soldiers because she didn’t check an Iraqi baby for booby traps.  (The baby was rigged with a bomb.)

The admission, followed shortly by the loud pop of a “welcome home” party balloon, triggers a PTSD episode in Jenny.  As she lies passed out on the floor at center stage, at stage front the other characters gather for another of Buddy’s sermons.  During his remarks the preacher asks the gathered (the audience) what can be done for Jenny and whether each of us had done enough.  He lets the question hang in silence, and in that silence lives the play’s message about the impact of the war.  Not the war on a global scale; not the war wrapped in rhetoric, but the war and its effect on individuals like Jenny Sutter – a single mother plucked from lower middle class America, sent to hell for 15 months, and summarily dropped back from where she came with the tacit edict to, as Donald puts it, “get over it.”

Buddy’s question is a fair one.  And bravo to Myatt for creating a work with the courage to pose it without political pretense or the polemic that too often accompanies lesser attempts to capture the real consequences of war on those who go into harm’s way.

So here’s hoping “Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter” finds an audience beyond its short run at Kennedy Center this month.  This play has the power to accurately inform of the sacrifices and heal those who made them.

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Copyright 2012 by Ward Carroll