Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(29)
The play begins with a Vietnam veteran in a bar. People are asking him to describe his experiences. “What was it like? Did you kill anyone?” The veteran loses it, and things spiral out from there. The crowd was hooked from moment one.
John DiFusco came to Chicago to see the show. I stood offstage, watching him on and off throughout the entire performance. The play ends with a powerful percussive scene that turns into a sort of tribal chant, a song with all the actors shouting, singing, dancing a war dance, hollering the same one line, over and over again.
How does it feel to kill somebody?!
How does it feel to kill somebody?!
How does it feel to kill somebody?!
It was the central question our returning Vietnam veterans were asked. The image that sticks in my mind forever is of John during this song. He was sitting in the audience, his head slightly bowed, and when the cast started to chant, his hand raised in a quiet fist.
After each performance, we received a standing ovation. The crowd cheered wildly. The reviews all came back positive. We decided to provide a free performance on Tuesday nights to any veteran who wanted to attend—a tradition that continues to this day, in slightly altered form, at Steppenwolf.
At first, veterans who came to the Tuesday shows were skeptical that we could re-create anything that represented their experiences. But word got out to the veteran community, and our Tuesday night crowds grew bigger and bigger. We performed in the 220-seat, former St. Nicholas Theater on North Halsted Street, and at the end of each show, vets in the audience got up out of their seats and swarmed the stage to shake hands and hug us actors. After each Tuesday-night performance, we hosted Q&A sessions with the veterans, often very emotional, and a lot of the same veterans came back week after week. Their stamp of approval felt life-changing for us, more important than any review we could ever get. That’s when I knew we were on to something good and lasting. A few veterans got together and made us plaques—one for each member of the cast—thanking us for telling their stories. The plaques read:
WE, THE VETERANS OF THE POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER UNIT, BUILDING 135 G, NORTH CHICAGO V.A.M.C., WISH TO EXPRESS OUR HEARTFELT THANKS FOR YOUR KINDNESS, CARING, AND UNDERSTANDING. YOUR UNSELFISH ENDEAVORS TO MAKE THE VIETNAM COMBAT VETERAN FEEL WELCOME IN A SOCIETY THAT HAS REJECTED HIM ARE GREATLY APPRECIATED.
WE APPRECIATE YOUR EFFORTS MORE THAN WORDS CAN EXPRESS.
AGAIN, THANK YOU, OUR FRIENDS.
Today, people often ask me about the highlights of my career. Tracers is one, an incredibly meaningful, absolutely extraordinary experience. As we did this play, I could see that the veterans felt like something was happening—for them. They’d been stuck in the shadows, discredited, abused, or simply ignored, and now they were watching these actors honor them and bring their stories out of the shadows.
I will always be grateful to John DiFusco and the cast of Tracers for the opportunity to work on this life-changing play. For the first time, I felt like I was giving back by honoring our veterans, by not letting them fall through the cracks, by not letting them feel unappreciated or forgotten.
I met many Vietnam veterans who had attended our free performances, and in the early 1990s I was asked to help raise funds to build the Lansing Veterans Memorial in Lansing, Illinois. A Vietnam veteran who had seen Tracers, Tom Luberda, organized the creation of the memorial. It features the names of our fallen heroes on a black granite wall with a giant UH-1 Huey helicopter mounted overhead, while a statue of a soldier carrying a wounded comrade to the awaiting chopper stands as a reminder to never leave anyone behind. I was honored to play some small part in helping Tom and the veterans realize their dream.
And to say thanks for my involvement, they put my brother-in-law’s name on the wall.
LTC BOYD MCCANNA HARRIS.
US ARMY NINTH INF. DIV.
AMERICAL DIVISION, VIETNAM.
CHAPTER 6
Glimpses of Glory
As artistic director of Steppenwolf, it was my job to read plays, and read plays, and read plays. Sam Shepard, the Pulitzer-winning playwright who often delved into the darker side of American family life, became one of my favorites, and in 1981 I sought the rights to Shepard’s True West. I dressed up in a nerdy corduroy jacket, slacks, and paisley tie, looking as official as I knew how, and flew to New York to meet with Sam’s agent, Lois Berman. At twenty-five, I still had crazy hair, and Steppenwolf could barely pay for my plane ticket, let alone a hotel, so I slept on the apartment floor of a friend, Saturday Night Live’s Tim Kazurinsky. My corduroy jacket didn’t impress Lois, who told me she’d never heard of Steppenwolf and wanted the better-established Goodman Theatre in Chicago to do the play. I took off my jacket, pulled off my tie, and flew back to Chicago, out of luck.
The play wouldn’t leave me. I had to direct this play, and I knew it would be great for the company, so every so often I phoned up Lois and asked if the Goodman had given True West any love yet. Now, at the time, I had an unusual office arrangement. Steppenwolf rented an always-cramped space at the Hull House, but I needed something just for me. So I climbed a metal ladder attached to a sidewall of the theater and created my own office space in the lighting booth, high above the theater’s floor. Somehow I lugged a tiny desk up the ladder, and I had a phone put in. That’s where I sat the day I answered the phone to hear Lois finally say, “Well, we haven’t had much luck with the Goodman. I guess you can have the rights.” I scrambled down the ladder, ran into the back office where everybody else shared space, and shouted, “We got the rights to True West!” Everybody cheered.