ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, April 21, 1997 TAG: 9704210084
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAN CASEY THE ROANOKE TIMES
MEMO: ***CORRECTION***
Published correction ran on April 23, 1997.
A story Monday about a play written and performed by Community School
students misnamed eighth-grader Rachel Mikulas.
Outdoors, crowds paraded, danced and sang. Inside, offered a somber reflection on the war that won't die.
A drum banged sharply as ghostly figures mounted the blackened stage, shadows from dimmed flashlights flickering over their faces.
A torrent of Vietnam War facts spewed forth, like headlines delivered by a dozen newscasters on speed: 12 million Vietnamese killed; 58,000 Americans dead; four students shot down during a Kent State protest; American bombs raining down on Cambodia.
The guitar-warped chords of Jimi Hendrix's "Star Spangled Banner" filled the air at Mill Mountain Theatre's Theatre B on Church Avenue.
As the sun shone brightly on the outdoor festival Local Colors, a small band of sixth-, seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders from the Community School carried forth on a war that ended more than a decade before they were born, one that many Americans are still trying to forget.
Their powerful 50-minute production, "If People Really Knew," played twice Sunday at Local Colors. The final performance, which is open to the public, will be Wednesday at 7 p.m. at Hollins College's Talmadge Hall.
"We wanted students to learn about the war in Vietnam. The question became, 'How do we teach them about such a complex subject?''' said Jinny Wooddall-Gainey, a language arts teacher at the Community School who oversaw the script. The show is directed by Mary Best Bova.
The answer came through months of research, interviews, writing and rehearsal. The resulting psychodrama is a series of flashbacks to the 1960s and 1970s, delivering the war through the eyes and words of those who lived it: U.S. soldiers; Viet Cong guerrillas; American protesters; and the Vietnamese civilians, who were caught in the middle.
The show is told partly through oral histories gathered by the students, partly through dreamlike episodes symbolic of conflict in Vietnam and the United States.
Shell-shocked American survivors "talk" to dead buddies they left behind; villagers recall the devastation of their families and homes; a draft dodger recounts how he hacked off his own index finger to avoid induction; an ROTC student explains what led him to protest the war.
Underlying the conflict (and explained in one early scene) are the cultural differences between the two countries that led to gross misunderstandings by people on both sides. One example among more than a dozen: Freedom of silence is as important to the Vietnamese as freedom of speech is to Americans.
The audience was stunned.
"What these kids have come up with is incredible," said Joe Duehl, a counselor who treats former soldiers at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Salem. "The confusion - I think it shows everything about that period in history."
Drama, Wooddall-Gainey said, is a good way of teaching recent history, and the Community School has used it before.
"We try to integrate the subjects, not teach them in isolation," she said. It seems to have worked.
Until January, when the students tackled the subject, they knew little about the war in Vietnam.
"I didn't know anything about it, really, other than what I'd seen in `Forrest Gump,''' said Rachel Williams, 13, an eighth-grader from Catawba.
Now, however, she is conversant with Vietnamese culture: the Buddhist belief in reincarnation that made Viet Cong willing to die in battle; the bombs of jellied gasoline that were dropped on villages; the continuing anguish of soldiers who survived.
"What really surprised me the most was how brutal we were to them," said Max Bursey, 12, of Vinton. "The chemicals - Agent Orange and things like that - that were authorized to be used on these people.
"Especially when they hadn't done anything to us."
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ERIC BRADY/THE ROANOKE TIMES. The Community Schoolby CNBplayers take their final practice run Sunday at Mill Mountain
Theatre.