A Production “In Conflict”

The off Broadway play In Conflict is a production in conflict. Its shortcoming lies in the director’s (Douglas C. Wager) inability to transform Yvonne Latty’s text (In Conflict: Iraq War Veterans Speak Out on Duty, Loss, and the Fight to Stay Alive) into anything more than an embellished audio book.
The performance consists chiefly of verbatim recitation of Latty’s interviews with Iraq war veterans. The young members of the Temple University Theatre group attempt to deliver their monologues with as much poignancy as possible, at times overacting. Even so, quite a few of the debutants are actually rather talented. Particularly when Damon Williams (Jamel Daniels) takes the stage, arms akimbo, and tell us of his irrevocable nightmares, paranoia, and self-loathing does the audience get a sense for the play’s redeeming qualities. After the fifteenth sequential monologue, however, the stories become somewhat repetitive and insipid.
Similarly, the interim scenes of the play, which are most likely meant to unify, end up making it even more disjointed. In between each character’s soliloquy is a montage of various echt war scenes, such as marching or standing single file. This takes away from the seriousness of the dialog and over dramatizes the whole production. At the same time, set designer Andrew Laine has the actors incessantly spinning large slab-like panels that partition the stage, which is as distracting as it sounds. Meanwhile, Yvonne Latty sporadically appears two television screens flanking the stage and speaks about her experiences interviewing the veterans. With Latty on the television, the actors on the stage, and the revolving partitions spinning furiously, one cannot help but be overwhelmed by this production. In certain instances, the affecting echoes of war veterans shine through, but overall In Conflict’s disorganization ends up stifling its ambitions.