On Stage: J.A. Moad II’s Outside Paducah

USAF veteran J.A. Moad II’s one-man play Outside Paducah: The Wars at Home, about the multi-generational angst of southern Illinois men for whom military service is both a rite-of-passage and a curse, begins a 21-show run at New York City’s Wild Project theater this coming Tuesday. Having read the print version of Outside Paducah and having watched Moad perform a scene from it at last winter’s AWP conference makes me excited to see a complete performance. The giant emotions engendered by veterans’ issues play well on the stage, and Outside Paducah targets two big ones: the often-fatal allure of war on young men and its crippling effects on those who survive. Set in 2007 in the small towns across the Ohio River from Paducah, KY, Moad’s play stitches together ruminations on the Civil War, World War II, Vietnam, and Iraq with scenes that dramatize the disintegration of Middle American families and communities concurrent with the nation’s increasingly dismal military history. Moad’s eloquence, on display since his days chronicling the war writing scene for the War, Literature, and the Arts journal blogsite, are testified to in blurbs by two war-writing greats, Robert Olen Butler and Brian Turner:

It is a tribute to J.A. Moad’s mastery of narrative voice that Outside Paducah not only plays brilliantly as a theater piece, but reads just as brilliantly as literature. This is a richly resonant work of art that profoundly illuminates the complex entwining of war and the families of warriors.  (Butler)

Outside Paducah offers profound glimpses into the lives of an overlooked and war-torn America. J.A. Moad has crafted a poignant world with these character studies, and uses a deft and mature hand in doing so.  (Turner)

Outside Paducah is sponsored by Poetic Theater Productions, an off-off-off-Broadway company that has frequently staged mil-and-vet-themed plays at Wild Project. I watched Maurice Decaul’s Dijla Wal Furat: Between the Tigris and the Euphrates there, and have myself read at a Poetic Theater veterans’ event called Kicking Down Doors: Veterans and Their Families in America. Each performance of Outside Paducah will be opened by a reading or performance by members of New York’s active veterans’ art-and-writing scene, and the official Opening Night, Friday, September 29, will feature an extended kick-off program sponsored by War, Literature, and the Arts; Warrior Writers; the Veteran Artist Program; and Consequence magazine that includes vet writers Jerri Bell, Drew Pham, Tony Schwalm, and Jenny Pacanowski. I won’t be able to make that performance, but I already have tickets for another, and I encourage you to go, too. The ever-vexed questions of how to help veterans return from war and how America should or might remember its war heroes aren’t going away any time soon. Comprehensive and practical answers are in short supply, unfortunately, so ever-more trenchant portraits of the problems, such as Outside Paducah vividly provides, are most definitely welcome.

A review of an Outside Paducah performance in Minnesota last year can be found here.

J.A. Moad II. Outside Paducah: The Wars at Home.  War-Torn Books, 2016.