Veteran's Memorial Theatre Company
Dave Ionno & Dan Tapper in Who by Fire
PurposePost WW II, U. S. foreign policy seems to favor military intervention, or the threat of it, when our national security is deemed to be at stake: Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Bosnia, Iraq (twice). This policy is often supported by a public and by military volunteers, who are unaware of the human costs of war. The VMTC has no position on this foreign policy, but believes that war must be undertaken only when
all costs have been weighed. Our viewpoint, if any, is in seeing war through the eyes of the individual soldier, and the lives he or she touches.
With the exception of Vietnam, where draft policy was the primary issue, and the current war in Iraq, which has brought care for battle wounded veterans into focus, the American public seems unaware of the real human cost of war. There are popular exceptions: Francis Ford Coppola’s movie,
Apocalypse Now, or Tim O’Brien’s
The Things They Carried, and Andrew Carroll’s
War Letters. But generally, we as a populace overlook this issue.
It is the goal of the VMTC to address this lack of attention, and live theatre is the ideal medium through which to do it. Theatre is powerful, immediate, and reaches many. Its literature is full of material: all the Greeks (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Euripides), more than a few Shakespeare's, down to many recent playwrights including R. C. Sheriff, Arthur Miller, Kenneth Brown, Charles Fuller, David Rabe, Charles Mee to name only a few. To our knowledge there is no similarly dedicated group in the country.
Most of the founding members are vets and all have been involved in “veteran’s” theatre productions:
Who by Fire, an original work based on Mark Baker’s book
'Nam plus the Vietnam experiences of the actors (entire cast were vets),
Pvt. Wars, James McLure’s play set in a vets hospital (all-vets cast), and McLure’s
Lone Star/Laundry & Bourbon.