On Stage in New York and New Jersey

John M. Meyer, an airborne-Ranger Army veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, has turned himself into a playwright-actor-director-producer of great talent and productivity. While a student at Texas, Meyer wrote and acted in a play titled American Volunteers and had another play he authored, Cryptomnesia, performed by Lawrence University in Wisconsin. Since moving to New Jersey with his wife Karen Alvarado, who just graduated from the Rutgers MFA acting program, Meyer has remained busy in theater while working on a PhD dissertation on British World War II legend Orde Wingate. I go to many Rutgers theatrical productions, and Meyer and Alvarado live across town from me, but I first met Meyer when he emailed me out of the blue to discuss a play he was writing. Called Westhusing in the House of Atreus, it was based on the life and mysterious death in Iraq of Colonel Ted Westhusing, an infantry officer and philosophy professor at West Point whom I knew well. The play—as yet unproduced—combines Meyer’s interest in contemporary war with Greek and Shakespearean theater, as the play riffs on themes from classic mythology and large swaths of it are written in blank verse. Later I watched Meyer act in two plays in New York City, Philoctetes and Our Trojan War, and Alvarado perform leading roles in two Rutgers plays, one an all-female production of Julius Caesar (she played Marc Antony) and the other Federico Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding. Last summer, my wife and I hosted a parlor play in our apartment titled The Priceless Slave, written by Meyer and starring Alvarado.

I was recently drawn even further into the Meyer-Alvarado orbit when they asked me to join a writing group they had organized under the auspices of Aquila Theater’s Warrior Chorus. For several years now, Aquila Theater has robustly sponsored plays that combine interest in contemporary war and Greek classics (including the aforementioned Philoctetes and Our Trojan War). This cross-pollination speaks to the background of Aquila Theater executive director Peter Meineck, a Brit who served in his own nation’s army before obtaining a PhD in the Classics and a teaching position at NYU. Meyer’s bent is much the same as Meineck’s, and under his leadership nine of us gathered on Friday nights for two months to brainstorm ideas for a crazy-quilt adaption of Midsummer Night’s Dream and two Greek classics, Aristophanes’ Frogs and Euripides’ Hippolytus we called Autumn Ever After. The end-result, which we performed in two staged readings, did not feature a particularly martial theme, but all the participants were either veterans or family members of veterans. Our Warrior Chorus writing group was one of four, each led by a vet-theater veteran (Jenny Pacanowski, Neath Williams, and Dan Murphy, by name) and featuring vets in writing and performing roles, so many thanks to Aquila Theater for its generous support of the cause and for facilitating my stage debut, late in my late-late-late middle-age.

A second recent Meyer-Alvarado production, even more central to the subject of contemporary war theater, is Bride of the Gulf, a play about Iraqi civilian and British soldier interaction over ten years in Basra, Iraq. Written by Meyer and directed by and starring Alvarado, Bride of the Gulf recently completed short runs in New York City and New Brunswick, NJ, in preparation for a run at the prestigious Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland later this summer. A publicity blurb describes the plot economically: “Amid the violence that engulfed southern Iraq in 2007, a sharp-witted Iraqi woman searches for her missing husband at the behest of her mother-in-law.” The blurb doesn’t do justice to the complexity of the characterization, which includes British soldiers and news crews and sectarian militiamen, in addition to Iraqi non-combatants whose lives are ruined by war. The acting, featuring Alvarado as the bereaved bride (“Bride of the Gulf” is also a nickname for Basra) and a cast of American and American-Iraqi actors, was intelligent and vibrant. Even better was the staging:  a mesmerizing swirl of movement, speech, sound, music, light, and image. Overall, it was intriguing to watch a play about the Iraq war written and performed by (mostly) Americans that doesn’t make the physical suffering and moral anguish of American soldiers its subject and isn’t beholden to strict straightforward linear narration and representations of reality. From my short acquaintance with Meyer and Alvarado, I’ve learned that their sense of what a play can do and be is expansive. Never staid, too-talky, or one-dimensional, a Meyer-Alvarado production makes use of a wide range of stagecraft possibilities to generate immediate effect and lasting resonance.

Many thanks to my Autumn Ever After castmates, from left to right in the picture above:  Andrea Bellamore, Melina Schmidt, James P. Stanton, Frank Dolce, Lou Bullock, and Nelly Savinon.