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John Murrell's Waiting for the Parade, running now at the Acrosstown Repertory Theatre, is a play about war. Having read Ernest Hemingway's Men without Women is scant preparation for Women without Men. This play shows how war really hits home.
We've got more wars going on now than we can count. There's Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Global War on Terror. We are also serving notice on Iran, and the Ruskies better watch their step too.
The parade that five women are waiting for in the play is the one to celebrate the end of the war to end all wars. That would be World War Two, which would cost seventy–two million lives. Forty–seven million civilians were murdered. And it didn't end all wars.
The play takes place not on the battlefields of Europe, but in Canada. Our civilized neighbors to the north found themselves sufficiently yoked to Great Britain to be yanked into the conflict years before we were.
The plays that Jerry Rose has directed at the ART, Gainesville's most adventuresome non–Equity house, from Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author to Greetings, are sharp, spirited, and serious–minded. Here Jerry Rose is fascinated by the way geopolitics traffic in what Proust labeled the Intermittences of the Heart. While men at war fight and die, women love and suffer. Endlessly.
Rose explains the choice this way. "Like all great plays and I consider Waiting for the Parade a great one, there is a treatment of themes in the human condition that are both timeless and universal as well as specific to a time and situation."
Here, Rose finds in five women in Canada during World War Two human behavior in war.
Fidelity in relationships between men and women tested in warfare. "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else But Me."
"We incarcerate 'enemy combatant' suspects today," Rose says, connecting the play's themes to the present. "And we have ever harbored fears, often obsessive ones, of the ’Äòenemy within.'"
In the play, watch for the subtle differences in responses of the other four women to the German–American woman in their midst.
For Jerry Rose, ultimately, "There is the issue of justice in the rewards and costs of prosecuting wars that still perturbs the world today. We hear complaints that the U.S. war and then occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan were undertaken for the benefit of a few corporations while National Guardsmen find themselves separated from their families by unexpected multiple deployments. A soldier in Iraq writes on his helmet 'One weekend a month my ass.'"
Waiting for the Parade reveals a Canadian version of the World War II homefront that is very different. These are people who make sacrifices in personal freedom and consumption for the benefit of the war effort. "There's a war on" is the all–purpose justification for gas and food rationing and price controls. Imagine.
Rose sees the irony in this, and points out, "After 9–11 our military went to war, but our President told us that the best thing most Americans could do would be to 'go shopping.'"
While the geopolitics of opposing Hitler and later Japan resonated with some Canadian national interests, the women in Waiting for the Parade are somewhat skeptical about any real threat to Canada from the Axis powers.
Again, Rose notes the parallel. "Nowadays, Canadian public opinion is not an exactly a thrilled or willing part of the 'coalition of the willing' engaged in the Afghan occupation, and the country threatens constantly to pull its troops out but always winds up remaining under the thumb of the economic power of the USA."
In the play five Calgary women respond very differently to civilian life during WW II, providing a portrait of Canadian society in the 40s:
Cindy Lasley, fresh from a brilliant performance in On Gold Pond in High Springs, plays Catherine, who 'copes' by working in the canteen.
Irene Johnson, another veteran of the local boards, is Margaret, who has one son overseas and one who has joined the Communist Party, and she believes that both are lost to her.
Amanda Fraser, a Santa Fe College student, plays the martinet Janet, burdened with her own brand of suffering and guilt about her draft–dodger husband.
The excellent Liddy Freeman, Satellite correspondent, world–traveler, and UF Theatre major, plays the beleaguered German–Canadian woman, Marta.
Karuna Kaufman, another SFCC student, plays the vulnerable young schoolteacher Eve, who is freaked out that the movie star Lesley Howard is actually in the war.
"Frankly," Rose says, "how I envision Gainesville responding to this play and its concerns goes back to justice, in terms of exactly who gains and who pays the costs of war. I think a 'then and now' contrast between the 'good' WW II with its 'shared sacrifice' will touch a nerve of public dislike for the 'bad' wars of Iraqi, Afghanistan and the threatened ones against Iran and even Pakistan."
Waiting for the Parade runs through September 14 at the Acrosstown Repertory Theater.