THEATER : War finds battles’ humor, irony
Posted on Sunday, April 27, 2008
FAYETTEVILLE — Amy Herzberg grew up listening to her father’s stories about his World War II service. She doesn’t remember a time he didn’t tell them.
She later learned that many veterans didn’t talk about that time of their lives. But, her dad, Art Herzberg, did — and many of the stories were funny.
“My dad always felt that that was a mistake, not to talk about it,” she says.
“Because people need to hear the dark side,” Bob Ford, her husband, adds.
“Though, he didn’t talk about the dark side all that much,” Herzberg says. “My dad has these stories that are like really funny, funny stories — like a Jerry Lewis movie.” Ford has written a play, My Father’s War, which incorporates 25 of the stories Art Herzberg, now 82, told over the years. And Amy Herzberg, an actress and drama professor at the University of Arkansas, plays the role of her dad. The world premiere of the play opens Friday at Nadine Baum Studios.
Art Herzberg enlisted in the Army in December 1943. He turned 19 four days before he landed on Utah Beach, June 6, 1944, during the D-Day invasion of Normandy. He soon advanced to first scout, the person who went out to spy on the enemy. That person was usually injured or killed within two weeks; he lasted three and a half months. And he joked about it.
“It’s like, my dad, somehow everything is hysterical,” Amy Herzberg says. “These suicide missions — hysterical.” Her dad, who received a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star, has a scar on his left wrist from shrapnel.
“As a kid, if you pressed that scar ‘button,’ he’d turn into a monster and chase you around the house,” she says.
To preserve the stories, Herzberg’s nephew videotaped her interviewing her dad. That two-and-a-half-hour recording holds about 80 stories. Many of those true tales are shared in the play, which, Ford cautions, uses “in-the-trenches language,” with wartime situations.
Ford is an actor, playwright and author of the novel The Student Conductor. His play The Fall of the House will premiere next year at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival.
When Ford met Herzberg and started hearing about the stories, “I immediately recognized them as great movie, novel, play potential,” because they involved irony.
“You don’t read something about the everyday. You want to read something about how the everyday suddenly gets flipped upside down,” Ford says.
In Art Herzberg’s case, it was “this extraordinary luck that he seemed to have,” Ford says. “He had one like ridiculously near miss after another.” In one instance, Herzberg ran into another kid, named Bobby, from Chicago. They were in a foxhole together under German artillery, when Herzberg ran to get his lunch. When he returned, Bobby was dead.
Ford was also interested in the irony of a Jewish kid from Chicago fighting Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, even with anti-Semitism in his own unit.
“Then, there’s an irony on top of that,” Ford says. “Art himself doesn’t bear any resentment about that at all.” At one point, Art worried the play was going in that direction, so Ford tempered the tone.
Herzberg tells many of his stories “like they’re jokes,” Ford says. “For a playwright, or anyone on stage or film, it’s just gold when somebody comes along and can make something that is obviously catastrophic and tragic, and can tell you something funny about it.” “If we can just get the audience laughing, then the meaning will really sink in later when we want to get to the more profound stuff.” ABOUT MEMORY Four months before Ford and Herzberg married in 2000, they traveled to Normandy where her father had been. While they were there, her dad wanted them to find the gravesite of the soldier from Chicago who’d been killed. They learned that his body had been shipped back home for burial, which her dad had never known. “He wanted to know where [Bobby ] was,” she says. Herzberg called her dad, asking him questions about what she was seeing. She talked to him while it was nighttime at his home in Phoenix and midday in France. When Ford saw her standing in a phone booth, he knew he was going to write a play and that Herzberg would portray her father. “The spine of the play is Amy discovering and recovering these memories for herself, as her father’s daughter,” he says.
Ford’s original idea was a one-woman show about her telling the stories and then becoming her dad. He realized if there was one other actor — then two, and three — that other characters could be brought in for dialogue and more complete scenes.
Four actors join Herzberg, portraying more than 40 characters. Many scenes portray Art with three other soldiers or Art with the commander and two other soldiers.
The play, which blends memory and fiction, is “very much about remembering and how far you can take memory and remembering,” Ford says.
Ford has stretched and altered some of the stories through poetic license, and he has talked to his father-in-law to get his approval.
One part of the play details a relationship between Herzberg and a Texan, which starts out as antagonistic but changes — as can happen on the front lines of battle.
“Those kinds of differences get completely crushed when you’re facing life and death day after day,” Ford says.
In one of the stories, Herzberg recounts an incident where a young German soldier came into their camp. As a “result of Art’s actions, the kid got killed,” Ford says.
Art Herzberg used to say that he thought about that German soldier every day. At important junctures in his life — marriage, the births of his daughters, daughters getting married — he’d think about those things that soldier would also be experiencing had he lived.
“I found that to be kind of extraordinary,” Ford says. “And it’s become one of the central sort of themes of the play.” Director Alice Jankell wanted to be involved with this project since she lived in Fayetteville a few years ago. She lives in New York now, but she has returned to direct this play. My Father’s War is in the last slot of the season of TheatreSquared, the professional regional theater company where Ford and Amy Herzberg are two of the founders.
Jankell and Ford have collaborated by e-mail and long phone conversations. She also worked with the costume designer and the lighting and set designer in New York, having regular production meetings the last few months.
Jankell says Ford “really successfully creates a world,” in this character-driven ensemble piece, “which means it’s very meaty for the actors.” Ford also plays with storytelling conventions, like changing the sex and ages of the characters, and creates “an imaginative reality that only enhances ours.” With the script, Ford wanted to “somehow convey some portion of what it means to send boys — even now I’m living very close to this — into these situations,” he says, catching his breath through tears.
It’s one thing to say war is a life-and-death situation.
“The only people who really know what that means are the guys coming back from Iraq, the guys who were in Vietnam, the guys in World War II. And none of the rest of us really knows what that means,” Ford says.
Though the story is timely, Jankell says she doesn’t view this as a “war play.” It’s about fathers and daughters, best friends, unlikely best friends and the actions of strangers under duress.
“The crazy thing is that, in 60 years, human nature hasn’t changed one iota,” she says. “It’s relevant, and it’s not just relevant because of the [Iraq ] war. It’s relevant because of how humans interact with each other.” My Father’s War by Bob Ford Showtimes: 8 p.m. Friday, May 3, 8-10, 15-17; 2 p.m. May 4, 11, 18 TheatreSquared at Walton Arts Center’s Nadine Baum Studios, 505 W. Spring St., Fayetteville Tickets: $ 22 for adults; $ 18 for senior citizens; $ 15 for veterans (Sundays and Thursdays only ); free for World War II veterans (seats reserved in advance ). The $ 50 opening-night ticket price includes a post-performance wine and dessert party. (479 ) 445-6333
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