Wartime Diversions

Anne Kelly-Saxenmeyer
Mirror contributing writer

   It’s hard to object to such a good-spirited production as “Canteen,” a musical set in a USO canteen in 1942, co-authored by Chris DeCarlo (director) and Matt Wrather (musical director). The show has some admirable talents and plenty of sincere energy behind it. But it isn’t sure if it wants to be drama or “tribute” (for now: an uncritical celebration paying homage to a style, period or group by way of types and with selective acknowledgment of history and context).
   While the production’s indecision happens to look like the now prominent debate over the nature of patriotism, it doesn’t work on the stage for this reason: The conceivers ask us to vacillate between incompatible mind-sets — to delve one moment and glaze over the next.
   The delving in DeCarlo and Wrather’s production happens mainly through the character of Frankie, portrayed with insight and control by Serena Dolinsky. Frankie is a young volunteer at the canteen and a budding writer whose father is away at war. Through a series of letters to him (much of the show’s dialogue is rendered in letters), Frankie reveals her alienation from family and school life, her anger toward her father for leaving, her resentment of wartime sacrifices and her resulting guilt. The portrait extends to include surreal images of her family’s domestic war; the combatants include Frankie’s seemingly insensitive mother (Evelyn Rudie), who actually harbors frustrations similar to her daughter’s, and a screaming little sister (Juliet Berman), whose constant cries for milk signify the fundamental deficit that war has brought into the home. These depictions, which use clever convertible set pieces, striking costumes (Ashley Hayes) and lighting (set and lighting by James Cooper), culminate in a song entitled “The War,” an unflinching impression of Frankie’s experience.
Only Claudia (a convincing Rudie), the canteen manager and returning student involved in an unexpected romance, inspires similar interest. Other characters seem to lack the concrete, original details that might flesh them out, and while charmingly portrayed, they feel like cardboard cutouts beside more fully drawn characters. Such is the case with Peggy (Perrin Iacopino) and Veronica (Jacquey Rosati), the show’s two heartbroken young women.
Of course, World War II left countless such casualties in its wake, which makes portraying them as unique individuals rather than composites of their (also countless) fictional counterparts all the more imperative.
   DeCarlo and Wrather dodge another opportunity in the show’s “postcard moment” convention: the actors are posed as popular media images of the time as a newsreel-style narration endorses Rosie the Riveter or The Boy Scouts of America, among others. The cold, slick images create the expectation of deepening or commentary. But in these two cases the treatment remains flat.
   The song “A Woman’s Place,” which does enumerate the hardships of being a full-time worker and a full-time housewife, ends as a rather hollow feminist anthem, seemingly untempered by the knowledge that women were shoved back into the kitchen after the war. And “Scout’s Honor,” featuring the show’s only male character, Buddy (Gray Silbert), can only be interpreted as an earnest celebration of the Scouts. (Is such a thing possible in the theater community?)
   There will always be a need for pure, simple entertainment—certainly in USO shows and, yes, even in civilian theaters. (I failed to mention that “Canteen” offers plenty of great singing, dancing and good humor.) But some subjects can no longer, probably never really could, be dealt with simply.
   Now more than ever, there is also ample cause to pay tribute to the survivors of World War II. A true tribute, however, must respect the full breadth of that audience’s knowledge and experience.
   “Canteen” presented by the Santa Monica Group Theatre at the Santa Monica Playhouse, 1211 Fourth Street, Santa Monica. Sat. 6:30 and 9 p.m. Sun. 6:30 p.m. Oct. 13-Jan. 27. (310)394-9779.