The Vietnamization of New Jersey
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Christopher Durang’s dark farce The Vietnamization of New Jersey, written in 1976 on commission from Yale Repertory Theatre, was conceived as a satiric bicentennial response to late-60s angst. Alternately mocking and morbid, this portrait of an American family wrestling with the Vietnam war and its aftermath is packed with period references, from the Doublemint jingle to the Watergate scandal. Yet, as Chemically Imbalanced Comedy’s engagingly scruffy mounting of the rarely done work shows, the unresolved questions of the past have serious implications for the present. Did antiwar activists unwittingly prolong the war rather than ending it? Was it wrong for the government to set a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal? Was America’s postwar malaise the result of losing in Vietnam or of being there in the first place? Substitute “Iraq” for “Vietnam” and you’ll see that the issues Durang was dealing with are alive and kicking. And the play’s larger themes–American jingoism, racial injustice, moral chaos, and the failure of popular culture to provide useful models–ring loud and clear today.
The Vietnamization of New Jersey addresses these matters with an abrasive irony that’s proved more durable and thought provoking than the self-righteous seriousness that characterized the antiwar agitprop of the Vietnam era. Durang’s play started life as a satire of one prominent example of the genre: David Rabe’s Sticks and Bones, winner of the 1972 Tony for best play and part of his series of war indictments, which also included The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Streamers. Rabe populated Sticks and Bones with a materialistic family named Ozzie, Harriet, and David in homage to the paradigmatic sitcom The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet.
Playing the script’s absurd exaggerations straight, the performers inhabit their characters rather than commenting on them. These aren’t caricatures but real people–albeit ridiculous two-dimensional ones. The tragedy is that they’re unable to comprehend that their silly, sentimental sitcom worldview is completely useless. Ozzie Ann’s idealistic belief in a resilient America is all too familiar: “If we didn’t win the war, or if we fought on the wrong side, or whatnot–well, I say, that’s behind us, let’s get on with the business at hand.” If only it were that easy.
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