Legacy of Pen, Sword

In a sense, a play such as “War Letters” is the essence of theater for an actor. If theater means convincing an audience that you’re someone you’re not and never could have been, then “War Letters” may present the ultimate challenge.

The nascent play, opening today at the Canon Theatre in Beverly Hills, is conceived, directed and performed by a group of people who’ve never set foot on a battlefield. Yet they’re so intense about the production that they’ve been approaching it almost as though it were a mission, particularly since Sept. 11.

“I want this project to make war real, to make it human, to bring it to life, so that for other people it’s not abstract,” Andrew Carroll says. Carroll, 32, is sitting in a small conference room next door to the theater, talking about the “project”--the Legacy Project, his campaign to save and disseminate America’s war letters, an often-poignant cache of memories about what it was like to live through wartime, from the Civil War to the present day.

The Legacy Project began with a simple letter to Dear Abby and has unearthed 60,000 more. He solicited the letters in a Nov. 11, 1998, Abby column, triggering a chain of multimedia dominoes, including an acclaimed PBS documentary that aired last December.

“When you’ve lost something that was very valuable and you hear people were intentionally discarding it, that’s very troubling,” he says. “So I got this idea to start this organization called the Legacy Project, which was only meant to encourage people to save their letters.”

The first outgrowth of the Legacy Project surfaced last May, when Scribner published “War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence From American Wars.” The book, which later made the New York Times bestseller list, contained 200 letters edited by Carroll about combat, God, love and death from the Civil War through the Gulf War. Since then, Carroll has been helping director Philip Himberg, artistic director of the Sundance Theatre Program, and playwright Paul Selig with the difficult task of molding a coherent, compelling play from the dense clay of a 472-page book.

Himberg’s other collaborators include the actors themselves--two celebrities who will be replaced every few weeks, starting with Treat Williams and Mario Van Peebles, and three permanent cast members: Tony Abatemarco, Nichole Pelerine and Sybyl Walker.

Himberg, Williams and Van Peebles all remember the Vietnam War but never served. For most of Carroll’s life, America has been at peace. Yet all of them say the letters have connected them to the experience of war in a way they’d never imagined.

“No matter how much your family tells you about someone, no matter how much they talk about your grandfather or uncle, when someone puts pen to paper and expresses themselves, that person’s personality just comes through in a way it hadn’t before,” says Williams, whose uncle died in World War II at age 19. “It’s probably the greatest legacy anyone can leave.”

How did a group of people, several of whom opposed the Vietnam War, come to be immersed in a project bent on communicating the experience of war? How did their understanding of war make the leap from an abstract concept to something so heartfelt they were compelled to express it through art?

For Carroll, the journey began in 1990, when he was an English major at Columbia University. He remembers a life-changing call from his father, saying the family home in Washington, D.C., had gone up in flames. Carroll came home to an empty shell.

“I went up to where my closet had been, and the thing that struck me was that all the letters were gone,” he says. “I thought it would be an inconvenience to re-create my whole library of books and CDs, but the letters couldn’t be replaced. I had a friend who’d been in Tiananmen Square the June the massacre took place. He was writing these riveting letters about what it was like to be there. And then just letters from girlfriends, letters from buddies, letters from my parents that I’d kept and really took for granted until they were gone. And that’s what got me interested in letters.”

His first venture was compiling and editing “Letters of a Nation: A Collection of Extraordinary American Letters” (1997), which illuminated 350 years of American history through the missives of unknowns as well as the celebrated and the notorious. In researching the chapter on war, Carroll was particularly struck by the words of veterans.

“There were Navajo code-talkers,” he says. “They used the Navajo language as our military code in the South Pacific because it’s not mathematical and you couldn’t figure it out. So I was talking to these veterans, and I said, ‘I’d love to see your letters. We’d love to get some unpublished material in the book.’ They said, ‘We just threw them away.’”

In his letter to Abby, Carroll urged Americans to preserve their letters and send him copies. As the missives poured in, some the work of unsung poets who died soon after the letters were written, he realized he had the makings of another book. He also discovered that approaching the material as an outsider posed a distinct advantage.

“How to go through 50,000 letters and pick 200? I started out thinking I was the last person who should do this project. But then you say, ‘OK, I’m not a war buff. I’m not a military person. Does this hold my interest? Is there something gripping about this letter, something insightful? If I get bored after a couple of lines, then the reader is going to get bored.’”

He consulted with some of the families who’d contributed letters that made the cut and decided to donate any book proceeds to veterans’ organizations. (Carroll makes his living as executive director of the American Poetry & Literacy Project in Washington, which promotes literacy by distributing free books of poetry, including 100,000 slim volumes at the Salt Lake City Olympics. He founded the organization in 1993 with the late Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky.)

“It seemed unfair to profit from what was incredibly sacred material,” Carroll says. “So that was the genesis of the whole thing. There was no intention of doing a book, a PBS documentary, certainly not a play.”

The idea to adapt “War Letters” for the stage was hatched by Himberg, who heard Carroll discussing the project on National Public Radio a year and a half ago. The broadcast was pegged to an exhibition of letters at the Smithsonian Institution, which was commemorated with readings by such Beltway notables as John McCain and Cokie Roberts.

“At the end, the announcer said that they were all ‘last letters,’ and none of the men had come back,” Himberg says. “It took my breath away. I drove to my office and called NPR, which turned me on to Andrew Carroll.”

Carroll sent him galleys of the book, and Himberg suggested skimming the cream for a reading in Los Angeles so he could see whether the letters had theatrical potential. To adapt the letters for the stage, he recruited the New York-based Selig, who’d worked with the Sundance Theatre Lab three years earlier to develop “Mystery School,” a one-character play later produced in New York with Tyne Daly as the star. “Letters are like monologues, and the ‘Mystery School’ piece was a series of monologues,” Himberg says. “How do you get a single person onstage to tell a story in a way that’s interesting?”

Selig quickly produced a first script using 35 letters that he edited with Carroll’s blessing. A free reading at the Canon was pegged to the book’s launch shortly before Memorial Day. The staging was incredibly simple. Twelve actors--some unknowns and some celebrities, such as David Hyde Pierce, Tom Skerritt, Gerald McRaney and Esai Morales--sat in chairs onstage and stood to read their letters. A narrator at a lectern quoted from the book to put the letters in context, and Maureen McGovern and Charlayne Woodard punctuated the reading with songs.

The audience members were enthusiastic, some applauding individual letters and staying behind to talk about them.

“It became apparent that the letters were in fact adaptable for the stage,” Himberg says. “They didn’t all work, but the stories were compelling and the voices were interesting, and altogether they did tell a story about the country. The letters were moving because they were written by young people in extraordinary circumstances, searching their souls to express a myriad of emotions. People had compassion for these people in a way they didn’t expect. Including me.

“I don’t think I had given a whole lot of thought to these voices before. Even though my father was in World War II, he was in a generation that never spoke about it. Then Vietnam came around, and we were so polarized that there wasn’t the ability to look beyond the political into the human. So there was enough excitement about it to move forward.”

Even though the Sundance Theatre lent its imprimatur to the project, Himberg developed the play on his own. The theater program, which predates Sundance’s film arm by a year, helps playwrights develop their work in its Theatre Laboratory, mounts classic American musicals for its Utah neighbors, and commissions and produces plays for young audiences. What it hasn’t done is produce its own plays--although Himberg would like to change that.

“The lab isn’t a place for me to work,” he says. “It’s a place for me to provide space for someone else to work. There is something ironic in the fact that I have one of the most prolific theaters in the country and ‘War Letters’ wasn’t developed there.”

That was also a function of timing. For a few months after the reading, the project found a niche on the back burner. Then Sept. 11 happened.

“The letters that were resonant already became even more so,” he says. “I was sitting around like a lot of theater people saying, ‘Is my life important?’ When it came to choosing a musical for next summer, I thought, ‘I’m not doing “No, No, Nanette.” I can’t do that with my life anymore.’”

Less than two weeks later, Himberg brought up the hibernating “War Letters” project during a lunch with Canon producer Susan Dietz.

“That’s when it got on the fast track. She said, ‘I have a theater, and “Vagina Monologues” is closing, so let’s think about it.’ The lab is in the summer, so we decided to do the development process on our own. We started writing and rewriting and reshaping. It was crazy. It was fast. It’s been development and production happening together.”

Himberg watched the PBS documentary based on the book but decided to start fresh. He also concluded that the show should borrow only a couple of elements from other recent plays based on letters and monologues--A.R. Gurney’s “Love Letters” and Eve Ensler’s “Vagina Monologues.” He incorporated a rotating guest cast of celebrities to entice audiences and offer busy Hollywood stalwarts a chance to do theater. But he wanted his show to be more theatrical. He didn’t want to imitate those plays, which chained actors to seats onstage where they read from a script.

“I just thought that was too static,” he says. “By the nature of having two [celebrity] guests, you can’t get them blocked into the play in a day or two. But I don’t want people sitting at desks. It isn’t theatrical. I thought creating stage pictures and some tableaux and some movement makes the experience more than a reading, particularly with the [permanent] ensemble. They use the letters as a prop, but they know them by heart. Some are read. It’s a challenge. We’re reading letters, but we’re trying to interpret them and give them physicality.”

Himberg and Selig consulted with Carroll and replaced nearly half the letters from the May reading with more compelling alternatives. They also dropped the narrator, which slowed things down, and arranged the letters chronologically to provide context. To further enhance the sense of time and place, Himberg enlisted projection, lighting and sound designers.

The monologues are interspersed with music and illustrated with diverse backdrop projections of battlefields, medals and the letters themselves. Perhaps the most arresting example is a missive written on Adolf Hitler’s letterhead with the Fuhrer’s name crossed out and the liberating American soldier’s penned in.

Still, the biggest challenge has been the script. “These are real letters, not love letters by Pete Gurney,” Himberg says. “And the challenge is how to make the material theatrical. How do you make a letter work as a story? Some worked better than others. You can drop words, but you can’t invent words. That’s how the letters were written.”

Some of the writers are famous, among them Clara Barton and Colin Powell, who tells a curious first-grade class that yes, he has been scared, he eats snacks and he watches a lot of television. Some offer an unsettling perspective on war rarely heard. In one, a black soldier during World War II writes about watching German prisoners of war enjoy themselves at a restaurant in the American South while the soldier is forced to eat in the kitchen. A mother who has lost her son in the Vietnam War, praying he hasn’t died in vain, asks “If a war is worth fighting, isn’t it worth fighting to win?”

But it isn’t all darkness. Humor springs up like grass amid broken concrete. One World War II soldier writes a letter trying to seduce a woman he hasn’t met by using an unusual come-on: “I have a nicely formed nose. It’s visible from a distance of 14 miles.”

The first preview was two weeks ago, and Carroll raced from the airport to see it. He was delighted to find that hearing the letters read aloud by professional actors created a whole new dimension, even for him.

“I could not be more happy with how they’re interpreting them,” Carroll says. “I happen to know some of the people [who wrote the letters] in real life, and I know their personalities are different, but it’s still a great reading of that letter. You look at it on the page, and it’s all black text on white, and here you see different people and different voices with different accents, and you think, wow, it’s come to life.”

The show is still being polished, and each performance is slightly different from the one the day before, perhaps incorporating a new ending, letter, music or projection.

“The biggest difficulty,” Williams says, “and I must say with all due respect to Philip our director, is finding a connecting thread to the letters, so the evening doesn’t sound disjointed. I think at the moment some of the letters may not work. It’s very difficult. It’s neither fish nor fowl.”

The “War Letters” team also wants to keep the play fresh and topical by adding new missives related to the Afghanistan conflict and perhaps Los Angeles as well. Still, they aren’t fazed by their complex task. The show may be a work in progress, but then so is the world.

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“War Letters,” Canon Theatre, 205 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills. Opens today at 7:30 p.m. Regular schedule: Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays; 5 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 and 7 p.m. $25-$50. (310) 859-2830 or (213) 365-3500.

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Irene Lacher is a frequent contributor to Calendar.