Desertion is soldiers’ calling
Forgive the gratuitous alarm blasts, strobe light flashes and machine gun patter. Embrace the disorientation you might feel as the scene veers from Kandahar, Afghanistan, to the Cannonball River in North Dakota, to Ireland and Wales, spanning just as many eras, all with barely a breath of transition. And as “The Memory Stick” threads to-
gether contemporary American Indian soldiers in the U.S. Army, Chelsea Manning, Crazy Horse and James Connolly, an Irish Republican of 1916’s Easter Rising, hold tight as the show’s lens continually widens.
This San Jose Stage Company world premiere, in a co-production with Dublin City Arts Office and Irish Theatre Institute, derives from its fluid structure an unusual achievement. It shows that a soldier’s desertion or rebellion can in fact be the highest form of citizenship — the kind of citizenship born of independent and thoughtful individuals whose free thinking and maverick decisions help keep the rest of us honest.
But the show does not romanticize rogue soldiers. In fact, what’s most radical about Donal O’Kelly’s play, seen Wednesday, April 12, is how it upends the way we typically talk about rebellion as the project of a single great man who is simultaneously hero and antihero amidst a sea of conformists. In O’Kelly’s vision, all of us can and must support the questioning, the investigating of our military. It’s a duty that’s crucial to a healthy democracy.
The play’s grand act of rebellion springs from a smaller and simpler demonstration of individuality, as American Indian U.S. Army soldiers Jack (Joseph Valdez) and Seth (John R. Lewis) seek and get permission first to list “Native American” as their religion on their dog tags, then to construct a sweat lodge at their base in Afghanistan. That “cave,” as they like to call it, becomes an oasis, a place to unwind, empty their minds and smoke weed with their friend Bridget (Lyndsy Kail), an Irish janitor on the base.
Cut off from the rest of the base, the cave soon takes on larger significance. It’s where Seth and Jack haggle over what their American Indian heritage might mean. Seth is one-eighth Choctaw, while Jack is Lakota Sioux; for Jack, the spectre of Crazy Horse looms large and real, haunting him as he delays acting on his conscience about what he’s seen on duty. San Jose Stage gets major casting kudos for “The Memory Stick.” In Valdez, the company hired not only a great actor — whose sprung physicality makes every scene wondrously unpredictable — but also an American Indian one.
The cave also becomes a site for storytelling as collective consciousness raising. Under Tony Kelly’s direction, the three actors zip through O’Kelly’s fragmentary, overlapping dialogue, each character helping the others conjure favorite bits of family and cultural lore. It’s as if they’re a troupe of improv actors who’ve been performing together for many years, so gamely and adroitly does each dive into the world of the others’ imaginings and memories, helping to flesh them out.
In that way, “The Memory Stick” offers a sly metatheatrical tribute to performance. It’s through stories told live that we remember who we are, that every person can, as Bridget quotes from James Connolly, do “his duty according to his lights.”
In playwright Donal O’Kelly’s vision, all of us can and must support the questioning, the investigating of our military. It’s a duty that’s crucial to a healthy democracy.