"Fear Up Harsh" at the Adrienne Arsht Center elicits laughter and tears, but most importantly, asks its audience to interrogate itself

Using the power of Brecht's Alienation-effect, a blackout splits open, cracked by the sounds of war – semi-automatic rifle shots, multiple bombs exploding including a sonic BOOM! so loud that perhaps the elderly members of the audience should have been forewarned, and voices screaming through the mayhem as two silhouettes hold onto one another, crying out in hopeful prayer despite the wounds their rugged military bodies have endured – these volatile sounds – set off further by strobe lights, darkness, and the image of two soldiers, one injured big-boned marine in the arms of a smaller darker woman in beat-up fatigues, who comforts him through the chaos with an alternatingly deep and high-pitched voice that could only come from a frightened yet valiant human being striding immanent fatality, a panicked shrieking pieta – this image marked the opening scene of Carbonell Award-winning playwright Christopher Demos-Brown’s new offering Fear Up Harsh, jarring audience members artfully into the brutal reality of the combat zones that U.S. veterans and their enemies have experienced in their real lives in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past twelve years.

Without giving away the ending: the play tells the story of a permanently disabled marine whose post-war treatment of the female soldier who rescued him in battle by pulling him to safety through the aforementioned war zone, is, to put it mildly, less-than-noble. Yet the play calls the concept of “heroism” into question in a double fashion. It contrasts the wounded and medaled veteran family man Rob Wellman (played sympathetically by Shane Tanner) with his less fortunate subordinate, court-martialed lesbian Army soldier Mary Jean Boudreaux (played in a tour-de-force performance by Karen Stephens). And it further contrasts Wellman’s bravery rescuing his comrades in battle with the inhumane torture techniques his company used under orders during their “tour” in Iraq. Perhaps most interesting, in the scene that graphically depicts this, even the most sympathetic character in the play, Mary Jean Boudreaux, is complicit, as she urges her comrades to intensify their barbaric behavior.

An expression connoting enhanced interrogation techniques used by the U.S. military during the Bush administration to extract information from uncooperative captured prisoners, the inhumane nature of “fear up harsh” can be opposed to “fear up mild,” insofar as the techniques employed during “fear up harsh” attempt to induce the prisoner to a state of intense rather than mild fear through various forms of torture, including sleep-deprivation, water-boarding, and electrocution. “Fear up harsh” can vary from situation to situation, as it is often designed with the individual prisoner’s specific phobias in mind.

Having read the theater’s brief description of the play, I was prepared to witness graphic displays of violence, and perhaps experience that not-so-pleasant feeling that theater goers know well: the feeling of being a “preached-at” member of the choir by the time the curtain falls. However, Demos-Brown’s brilliant play did not provoke that jaded kind of cynicism in me. Instead, the play worked in the best possible way that dramas can: it produced critical thought as well as emotional release, including unexpected laughter. The two scenes mentioned above, totaling perhaps five minutes of stage time, were the only scenes that might have received an “R” rating for violence. Yet despite their relatively tame nature compared to what is available to the numbed-out public in films and even on made-for-television entertainment (let alone the news), the scenes still effectively evoked feelings of shock and trauma, perhaps because of their strategic placement by the playwright.

Karen Stephens, Shane Tanner, and Jessica Brooke Sanford
in Zoetic Stage's "Fear Up Harsh"
photo: Justin Namon

For example, in the scene immediately following the war-torn opening, the audience was treated to an incredibly humorous suburban driving lesson given by the disabled veteran marine to his 17-year-old daughter Shawn (played with finesse by Jessica Brooke Sanford), in which the-father-as-single-parent-of-only-daughter relationship was played up to full comedic effect. Boudreaux’s arrival shortly thereafter only heightened the eruptions of audience laughter that the play inspires, as plain-talking Boudreaux’s blunt retorts contrast hilariously with Wellman’s white-bread propriety and Shawn’s adolescent naivety, especially during a scene in which the AWOL soldier and the teen smoke pot together in Wellman’s basement. But the real scandal that the play exposes unfolds in a series of flashback scenes between Wellman and a motley assortment of his military superiors, all played with physical dexterity and vocal precision by Stephen G. Anthony. These scenes expose the corruption in higher military offices in Washington, as Wellman's betters instruct him to lie about his time in Iraq so he can be awarded the Medal of Honor for his valorous deeds, thus helping to restore the Marines' tarnished public image. With his portrayal of one high-ranking character, Anthony adopts a nearly perfect mimicry of Jack Nicholson, which seemed a bit over-the-top until the playwright’s clever line about the character’s quirky Nicholson-esque personality slyly managed a comedic payoff that actually heightened the feeling of ridiculousness surrounding the officer's duplicity. Interwoven with these scenes are dialogues between Boudreaux and Wellman that depict her desperation and unhonored valor in contrast with his ignominous refusal to protect or help her. These moments highlight the unfair, infuriating, and disgraceful aspects of human experience.

Yet what struck me most about the play was the fragile humanity that it asks its viewers to access and understand. Tanner’s compassionate portrayal of Wellman renders him an antihero that provokes cathartic pity in the audience in the mode of classic tragedy. Yet the Brechtian aspects of the play save it from feeling clichéd. With his literary finger pointed directly at the audience, rather than assigning blame to the soldiers who were tangled up directly in the fearful inhumanity of combat, the playwright asks the audience to question its own complicity through Boudreaux’s impassioned lines to her superior: “Are you going to let me die, or are you going to take care of me? Are you going to stand up for me, or betray me?”* 

In our present era in which the U.S. public is overwhelmed by incessant political posturing over healthcare and other social justice issues including women’s freedom and marriage equality, for me, these lines ring particularly relevant when spoken passionately by an African-American lesbian veteran who has been betrayed by her white male “superiors.” Although the Zoetic Theater’s production, including director Stuart Meltzer’s strong direction, was nearly uniformly commendable (the raised platform at center stage, set atop a contrived pile of concrete rubble and lit with an out-of-place chandelier, felt like a clunky design choice at times, perhaps mostly due to the fact that we could see Wellman’s wheelchair being lifted there by the stagehands between scenes, as well as the able-bodied actor climbing into it), it was Karen Stephen’s heartfelt, tough, full-throated performance that most viscerally brought forth the playwright’s social message. A veteran South Florida stage performer, Karen Stephens without doubt left it all on the stage, as they say. Her generous theatrical gift of provoking not only critical thought but compassion surrounding the issues that plague our day is refreshing indeed, especially when compared to the unwelcome media flotsam deposited by the real-life Floridian cast-of-characters whom much of the U.S. public unfortunately associates with the “Gunshine State.” My deepest thanks to the Adrienne Arsht Center, to Demos-Brown, to Meltzer, to the cast, and to Stephens especially for allowing us to see the world through Zoetic’s humanistic eyes rather than Zimmerman’s psychotic ones for a change. In my not-so-humble opinion, Demos-Brown’s voice is a much-needed palliative to the media meta-narrative that too often soils our sunshine.

* paraphrased