|
LAST OF THE BOYS
Pick up a Time Magazine from the late Sixties and read the debate between stay the course or cut and run. That debate still rages. Set in 1999, this moving, sometimes funny, and always incendiary play about the life-long friendship of two Vietnam vets who share beer, whiskey and a secret neither wants to discuss takes us back to the heart of that time.
It's a play about friendship, about how a girl honors her missing father, about how a man deals with the loss of his own father, about a hidden conversation that won't go away. Ben and Jeeter meet every summer at the beat up mobile home where Ben lives in the middle of a toxic dump in (where else?) California. Jeeter, still using memories of meeting Bob Dylan to pick up chicks, now teaches a college course on the 60's. Ben, whose father was once an aide to Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the buildup in Vietnam, is now a carpenter, still trying to rebuild his own life.
The notion of the 60's, or perhaps the myth, has become like Woodstock - everyone was there. Now we romanticize that time, but the issues central to that decade still flare up. Last of the Boys is one such story - there are thousands still out there, buried deep that will never come to light.
"The most important, must see play of the season, Last of the Boys may well prove to be a major new American play." NJ Magazine
|