In Conflict

In a play, there are actors on stage, pretending to be people made up by playwrights and directors, sometimes based off a real person from the past or the present, yet a character nonetheless.  In Conflict had actors pretending to be living, breathing, existing human beings with deep and sometimes dark stories to tell.  People that had served in Iraq and decided to tell all that would listen their stories of hope and betrayal and utter depression.  The actors up on the stage had no choice but to be on top of their game, because the person they were portraying could be out in the audience, or even more stressful, their spouse could be.  And all the actors were on top of their game.  There were some that were better then others, some stories that were more interesting or heartbreaking, and still each person pretending to be a different person was practically who they were pretending to be.
Unfortunately, there were a few things that took away from these actors great triumph in portrayal.  The set was an unwieldy mess that worked for a few scenes but it’s main purpose seemed to be for the rather cheesy transitions, which, besides a surprisingly moving one portraying the American soldiers as terrorists, all seemed like badly choreographed performance art that you go out and make fun of with your friends later on.  The basic lighting worked, but again, the dramatic stuff made it seem as though they were trying to make the play an avant-garde movie rather then a soul-clenching work of art.
There was a beautiful purpose to that play, a motivating one and if those in charge had let the stories of those veterans stand on their own, stripped the corny transitions to the bare minimum and let the stories of loyalty, politics and the horrors of war do what they would to the audience, the play would have felt cleaner and more whole.  It would be a true testament to those soldiers, because there’s never any swing sets or bright blue lighting in Iraq.  What they do have is what has left them with the stories that were told on stage.  Brilliantly told stories, from which you realize that we are all elemental to our country’s present and that we’re all going down in history.