If the Cosbys were the first upper middle-class African American family to hit prime time, the LeVays might be the first upperclass African American family onstage—and unlike the Cosbys, all their issues can't be resolved in 30 minutes.
Lydia Diamond's 2006 play Stick Fly, about the old-money LeVay family as they assemble in their Martha's Vineyard home, was in part a reaction to her tiring of always seeing African Americans play downtrodden characters: slaves, drug dealers, and other unfortunates. As she said on NPR's Morning Edition, "I started out as an actress and I remember thinking, 'I wish I could be in a play where I got to wear pretty clothes and didn't have to be in gunnysack.'" (The full audio interview is below.)
But for all their status, Stick Fly shows the LeVays as they deal with race, family life and the world around them from an angle not often explored, whether it's being followed around Pottery Barn by a salesgirl or bringing home a white girlfriend. "This isn't unlike the conversations that I've had with my own family," Diamond said. "Privilege doesn't necessarily shelter them from the prejudice that's woven into the fabric of our society."
Houston's Ensemble Theatre will perform Stick Fly, directed by Eileen J. Morris, from April 3-May 9.
Listen to a great interview with playwright Lydia Diamond:
At this point in movie history, there are precious few ways to make a war film feel original. Every major American war, including the most recent ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been covered, and the “war is hell” idea has been featured in too many films to count. So for a film like the new Warfare to stand out, it needs to do something that other war films have not.
To say that it accomplishes that goal is an understatement. Set in Iraq in 2006, it follows a platoon of soldiers tasked with helping to gain control of the city of Ramadi, a hotbed of activity in the war at that time. But this is not a story of good triumphing over evil, nor one that tries to examine exactly what the U.S. military was trying to accomplish in the war. Instead, it’s just a story of a group of young men trying to do the job they’re asked to do, and what happens to them during that mission.
It presents as fact, with no judgment either way, that one squad of the platoon overtakes the home of two Iraqi families as part of the mission. An ensuing firefight pins the soldiers down with almost no way to escape, and subsequent rescue attempts by other squads result in multiple casualties. The bulk of the film focuses on how the shell-shocked and injured soldiers react to the situation in which they find themselves.
Written and directed by Alex Garland (Civil War) and Ray Mendoza, the film is based on the memories of Mendoza and his fellow soldiers of this exact situation they experienced. As such, the film does not attempt to add extra drama or even emphasize one character over another. In fact, the first 30-40 minutes of the film are relatively boring, as the squad relays information about their position to other, unseen people.
The men in the platoon are not exactly interchangeable with each other, but the way the film is structured, they’re essentially equals. It’s easy to tell who the leaders are, but those giving orders are not treated as more important to the film than those carrying them out. This is especially true when things go to hell, as each person goes from trying to fight to trying to survive, with their training coming into play in different ways.
The situation depicted in the film is somewhat mundane - it’s not some big battle or a turning point in the war - but the intensity with which Garland and Mendoza stage it makes it enormously impactful. They put the audience right in the thick of the carnage, and the horrific injuries inflicted on some of the men, as well as the seemingly never-ending screams of pain emanating from them, can be difficult to take.
The cast features a few actors who are starting to make names for themselves (Will Poulter, Joseph Quinn, Noah Centineo, Charles Melton Michael Gandolfini), others who’ve had smaller impacts (D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai, Cosmo Jarvis, Evan Holtzman), and plenty of others who have yet to get their big breaks. Each of them does their job extremely well, which in this case means that they complement each other’s performances, with none of them overshadowing the others.
Warfare is not an overtly political film, and yet the politics of war are inextricable from the story it tells. Neither anti-war nor pro-war, it simply lays out the facts of one individual mission in a larger conflict, and each viewer will likely take away something different from the experience of watching it.
