'Body of an American' at the Wilma

Photographers are our eyes for looking at what we don’t want to see. Photos by Paul Watson, the subject of Body of an American, are on display in the Wilma’s lobby. Watson, the subject of the new play by Dan O’Brien, is haunted by the voice of a dead American soldier, Staff Sgt. William David Cleveland, whose picture he took in Mogadishu in 1993. A voice that says, “If you do this, I will own you forever.”

I want to look at the pictures in the lobby, but instead I read the descriptions and avert my eyes from the images of death and destruction. How can people do that to each other, I wonder. How can people live with that? How can a photographer look at all that horror and not come back wounded?

Two haunted men

Body of an American is a play about hauntings. The two characters — Paul Watson, played masterfully by Ian Merrill Peakes, a photographer suffering from PTSD, and the brash young playwright Dan O’Brien, played by Harry Smith — talk about their personal hauntings as if they were equivalent.

Watson is haunted by that voice, the voice of an American captured and dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, and by all the other horrific images he’s seen. Once driven by the urge to succeed, he now hates that he is still fueled by the adrenaline of witnessing and documenting desecration.

O’Brien is haunted by his family, the secrets and tragedies of his childhood. And he is obsessed with the older man’s haunting because he sees them as the same.

But are they really equivalent? Does personal trauma equal collective destruction?

The televised war

Once war was dinnertime fare — tray tables, TV dinners, and images of the dead in body bags returning from Vietnam. At least we knew soldiers were dying. We saw the results. In today’s media savvy world, war has been whitewashed, images edited, removed from view. A volunteer army keeps us from having to make hard decisions. We no longer put ourselves on the front lines; we ask others to do that for us. I see more dead bodies in fictional narratives — where I know the actor playing dead will get up and walk away when the scene is over — than I do in actual tragedies, in war.

It occurs to me suddenly that we are at war right now, have been at war for most of my life, and yet it doesn’t touch me. We are not haunted by our wars because they are invisible to us. We get to look away. No wonder the photographer who looks through the lens, who cannot look away, is traumatized. He takes on our pain. Our views are shaped by what we see of what he has seen. And sometimes even history is changed.

There is the suggestion that Watson’s photograph of an American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu led to 9/11, the first time modern Americans really experienced a war that came into our homes, our streets. Not just over there but actually over here. Because of the photo, Watson says in the play, Clinton pulled back troops from Mogadishu and didn’t intervene in Rwanda. That’s a lot of guilt to carry. Not just the haunting of a dead soldier, but of thousands of Americans dead and still dying in a war with a foe that saw our weakness through the lens of a camera and took advantage of it.

Over there

The play begins with a cacophony of news reports, a blur of sound and images of the war that is over there, never here. The set is minimal, two chairs and a wooden platform, while the atmosphere is supplied by the images projected on the screens behind that fill in the story — when they say it snows, we see snow; when they ride on a sled, huskies race toward us.

It starts where O’Brien’s story began, with Terry Gross’s 2007 Fresh Air interview with Watson, about his book, Where War Lives, in which Watson tells the story of taking the picture. Watson and O’Brien sit in the chairs, walk around, speaking yet really communicating through email. Other voices are supplied by the two actors as well — sometimes they both speak for the same character, which is a bit disconcerting.

Searching for an ending

When they finally meet in a hotel room (two beds, a closet) during a blizzard at the Arctic Circle, the space becomes claustrophobic. They are trapped together with nothing to do but talk; there wasn’t even enough alcohol to keep them distracted. The play stalls at this point. Watson is overwhelmed by trauma, and O’Brien admits he is searching for an end to the play.

The conclusion circles back to Watson’s story, to his attempt to reduce the haunting. It is at last a satisfying dramatic moment, not a poetic imagining of pain and suffering.

The piece is powerful and thought-provoking. It tackles a grand subject, but hits us with deep thoughts without letting us go deeper. It talks about hauntings, it talks about love, it talks about lies and the need for adrenaline, it talks about cosmic retribution. O’Brien is very much a poet. His characters make war and dying poetic, and therefore we are once again distanced from what it means to die in war. Watson tries to make sense of it all. He quotes Camus that war “lives in each of us.” But even if we solve that conflict within ourselves, can we really rid the world of war?