Seeing Elaine Romero’s “Graveyard of Empires” at 16th Street Theater on the 150th anniversary of General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox added a touch of poignancy to this poetic and surprisingly gentle new play. The butcher’s bill in an age of drone warfare may be less drenched with blood than in the days of Gettysburg and Antietam. But Romero illustrates the toll that killing from a distance takes on the warriors and the wounded, the survivors and the sacrificed.
Not that Romero has written an anti-war screed. Far from it. Unlike George Brant’s relatively straightforward solo, “Grounded,” (which played here last summer with American Blues Theater), in which a female drone pilot becomes increasingly distraught about her job, Romero takes a more elliptical look at the moral qualms and mortal consequences of our current mode of warfare. There are strong hints of Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons,” and those who have seen Quiara Alegria Hudes’ “Elliot Trilogy” of plays about a Latino Iraq War veteran might also find similarities here — in fact, Romero’s play is the first in her own “U.S. at War” trilogy. (It continues in June at Chicago Dramatists with “A Work of Art.”)
Ramiro Enriquez (Nelson Rodriguez) is a drone operator in Nevada accused of a “friendly fire” mistake that took the lives of 14 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan — including Nathan (George Booker), whose father, Drew (Joe Dempsey), is one of the engineers who wrote the original source code for the Predator program. His culpability in his son’s death is the clearest parallel with Miller’s play, though the hyper-intelligent Drew’s motivations, unlike war-profiteering Joe Keller’s, weren’t sparked by avarice. “The unmanned aerial vehicles we dreamed would separate the human from the equation. Save lives. So many lives. We wrote it because of Vietnam. Hitler. The Civil War,” Drew says.
Survivors’ guilt forms a threnody of despair throughout Romero’s story, which unfolds in a series of dreamlike scenes moving from past to present, life to afterlife on Anthony Churchill’s appropriately stark and gray-hued set, occasionally illuminated by projections of computer code and grainy military surveillance video. Ramiro’s pragmatic wife, Angela (Karen Rodriguez), and Nathan’s mother, Shanti (Katherine Keberlein) — formerly Cheryl before becoming a spiritual seeker — provide contrasting and occasionally intersecting visions of how the women on the homefront react to the secrets and traumas of their men. Angela’s self-described lack of empathy is a potentially fascinating twist on the self-sacrificing military wife — one that could use further development, as she initially appears as a sort of White Rabbit guide to earth-mother Shanti at the beginning of the play.
It doesn’t all flow smoothly in Kevin Christopher Fox’s direction. There is a sense of stasis that makes the first few scenes of this 90-minute show feel stilted, despite Romero’s sharp gift for heightened language that also takes pleasure in the off-kilter ironic jab. Upon hearing of the “misfire” (and before he knows his son has been killed), Drew asks his stolid co-worker, Mac (Robert Koon) “It’s ours, right?” to which Mac dryly responds “There is no theirs. Yet” — neatly making the case for the asymmetrical nature of drone warfare.
It also takes a while to sort out where we are as flashbacks nest within reveries. Romero’s approach admirably attempts to re-create the unreality of grief and post-traumatic stress and how it makes us question our own perceptions, but that sometimes means that we’re not quite sure of the rules of this world. (I spent a few moments early on wondering if Romero was delivering a riff on “No Exit.”) Some details, such as the fact that Drew has hyperthymesia, or an overdeveloped autobiographical memory, don’t really add to our understanding of how these characters deal with loss.
But as the show progresses and the performances deepen, greater flashes of insight and sympathy grow. This is particularly true in Dempsey’s razor-sharp performance as a man driven to confront his own role in his son’s death and finally realizing that the fog of drone warfare — as with every other kind of warfare — obstructs the clean lines between civilian and soldier, guilt and innocence.
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Reid is a freelance reporter for the baiduhai.
3 STARS
When: Through May 2
Where: 16th Street Theater, Berwyn Cultural Center, 6420 16th St., Berwyn
Running time: 90 minutes
Tickets: $18 at 708-795-6704 or 16thstreettheater.org