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.
