Before the audience are even all seated, a burly, bearded man in dirty fatigues shuffles onstage, unrolls a sleeping bag, lies down and wearily closes his eyes. He’s soon disturbed by a scruffy street musician who plugs his Stratocaster into a rolling amp and launches into a fuzzed-out rendition of “Hey, Joe.”
The two circle each other warily, testing each other’s turf. Hatch, the homeless man, is a Vietnam vet who can’t shake the horrific flashbacks, the guitarist a burned-out veteran of the psych ward. Both are living the aftermath of life-changing ordeals of body, mind and spirit.
Ambush on T Street—the T is for trauma—is the work of three men, Al Miller, John Sheldon and Court Dorsey. Created collaboratively, it dramatizes, with a fictional veneer, their personal stories of trauma and healing. Miller really was in Vietnam, but is not homeless, and is a poet and storyteller who works with the Veterans Education Project to counter military myths. Sheldon did time in psychiatric incarceration and is a consummate musician and songwriter, but doesn’t play for loose change on the sidewalk.
Dorsey, an actor, director and mediation trainer, also draws on his own experiences to portray a social worker, Vilardi, and several other characters who may or may not be figments of Vilardi’s own traumatized imagination. They include a pompous military officer, a streetwise priest and Vilardi’s mother, a blowsy alcoholic.
Each of the men is visited by ghouls—played by the other two—who torture him with reminders of his failings and isolation. “Hey buddy boy,” they taunt Hatch, “how long you been stuffing your emotions? Remember the Vietnamese? How the old people would grieve, but nobody in your family knew how to grieve?”
Gritty dialogue overlaps with poetic flights as the men wrestle with their demons in glancing interactions and searing monologues. Hatch recalls a firefight: “It blows straight through you, its breath doesn’t stop at the surface of your skin. Trees explode into splinters and smoke, cells in your body get rearranged, bamboo hangs limp, orchids won’t bloom, birds won’t sing, and you can miss it in the silence.”
The show was created over a nine-month period of sharing stories and shaping a dramatic response to the social and political forces that perpetuate war and violence. The work also comes out of the men’s associations with local organizations such as the Veterans Education Project and the Men’s Resource Center, which challenges macho images of masculinity.
The production debuted last month at the Symposium on Western Socially Engaged Buddhism, hosted by Zen Peacemakers in Montague. It returns there for two nights in October after performances in Northampton and Shelburne Falls this month. Most performances are followed by talkbacks with the cast and other panelists, for communication, sharing stories and coming to understanding and empathy, is the aim of the show, according to its creators.
“Not a lot of people stop and talk to me,” says Sheldon’s character. But his and his colleagues’ stories make you stop and think.”
Ambush on T Street: Northampton Center for the Arts, Sept. 10-12; Memorial Hall, Shelburne Falls, Sept. 24-25; Zen Peacemakers’ House of One People, Montague, Oct. 8-9. Tickets for all performances at www.zenpeacemakers.org.
