A man is beaten to death by his fellow sailors. A woman is threatened in the middle of the night. Another man spends nine months in military prison. Another woman is called the antichrist.
They’re all Americans, all military personnel, all victims of 10 years of the United States armed forces’ policy known as “don’t ask, don’t tell.” And the stories of these gay and lesbian service members resonate through Another American: Asking and Telling, a one-man documentary drama in which actor David Lee brings the harsh effects of the controversial policy into the light.
In creating Another American, actor Marc Wolf spent three years interviewing more than 150 current and former members of the U.S. armed forces, along with family members, officials, politicians and academics. Wolf modeled his play on the one-woman stage docudramas of Anna Deavere Smith, who explored the unrest that followed Rodney King’s beating in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 and the Crown Heights riots in Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities. Adopting the same techniques, he taped interviews with his subjects, edited them down and played all the characters in his drama. That production, which began in New York in late 1999 and then toured the country, brought Wolf an Obie Award and considerable praise.
In Orlando, Lee and director Michael Wanzie have taken a similar tack, putting Lee on a simple stage at the Parliament House’s Footlights Theater and letting him bring Wolf’s characters to life simply by shifting his body language or altering his voice.
One man, an ex-colonel, tells how he was arrested for appearing in drag at a charity benefit: One of the bits of so-called evidence the military police collected from his house was the sheet music for La Cage aux Folles.
The mother of a sailor who was murdered by his fellow sailors tells of having to identify a body so badly beaten that family members knew him only by his tattoos.
A Vietnam veteran talks of getting through the fighting in a bunker full of guys who called him Mary Alice. A woman complains of old military policies that rejected women who were married or pregnant: No wonder, she says, there were so many lesbians in the Army.
A few of Wolf’s characters bemoan the presence of gays in the military. But it’s hard to look at Another American as anything but a testimonial to the idiocy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” — especially when some of the gay soldiers onstage seem like the most patriotic people you’ve ever met.
Lee, who looks as all-American as Tom Hanks in his khaki pants and gray, military-style T-shirt, is at his most moving with the most dramatic of those characters — the mother of the murdered sailor, the military man disturbed by the loss of the freedom to speak out, “the simple ability to talk about what life is.”
“What ever happened to the Constitution?” he asks. “We’re not talking about misconduct or bad behavior. We’re talking about speech.”
Although Lee moves from lectern to dinette table to bar across the stage, there are one or two instances when it’s hard to tell who he’s supposed to be, especially when he’s playing both characters in a two-way conversation. And there are times when Another American, which lasts about an hour and 45 minutes, seems a little long — especially when it feels as if the play is preaching to the choir.
But there’s no denying the weight of this rhetoric — not when you hear from the men and the women who love the service, love their country and just want to be left alone to do their jobs.
It’s ironic that most of the people who might be persuaded by Another American: Asking and Telling are those who are least likely to see it, not least of all because it’s being performed in a gay bar. Take this show to an American Legion hall or to a senior center or to the Orlando Country Club, and you’d really see the power of speech.
