For me, one of the best parts of working on a play is all the things it makes me think about, all the connections I make to things I’ve already studied, and all the new ideas I stumble across while researching the play’s material. Making new connections and widening the artistic scope is one of the fundamental elements of any artistic endeavor. I think in some ways it helps to simplify and ground a play’s central ideas, as well as gives those ideas dexterity.
As I was considering the major themes of Somewhere in Between, the one theme that remains the most prominent is brotherhood. The definition of brotherhood is flexible in itself. Circumstance and experience can bond people in a way that goes beyond familial relationships. Sometimes connections derived from experience can be the most powerful. In Somewhere in Between, we find two brothers connected very deeply through experience, making their bond unwavering. This kind of fraternity is also found among soldiers, which made me think of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. For those of you who haven’t read the book, here is a short summary courtesy of BarnesandNoble.com:
The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and of course, the character Tim O’Brien who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. They battle the enemy (or maybe more the idea of the enemy), and occasionally each other. In their relationships we see their isolation and loneliness, their rage and fear. They miss their families, their girlfriends and buddies; they miss the lives they left back home. Yet they find sympathy and kindness for strangers (the old man who leads them unscathed through the mine field, the girl who grieves while she dances), and love for each other, because in Vietnam they are the only family they have. We hear the voices of the men and build images upon their dialogue. The way they tell stories about others, we hear them telling stories about themselves.
O’Brien doesn’t spend a lot of time in the book talking specifically about the idea of brotherhood, partially it seems because he wishes to avoid romanticizing the idea of war or the idea of being a soldier, but he makes it clear that these soldiers only have each other in their experience and because of that they are connected forever. Here are these men, boys really, just thrown together. They find themselves in what feels like a different world, with guns in their hands and the weight of war quite literally on their shoulders. Every time I talk about it, it almost sounds like science fiction to me; a world I can never seem to really understand, with a completely different set of rules for survival, thrust into circumstances that seem completely inhumane, and all occurring in what seems like a galaxy far, far away from the life I live. It is that very idea that unites soldiers. Having this experience together, dealing with the physical, emotional, and mental demands of war, they have no other choice but to be connected. Their bond is permanent. Linked by traumatic experience, the soldiers feel little comfort except for that fact that they are in it together. I don’t even mean that as silly and sentimental as it sounds, because it isn’t that way. It’s the simple fact that they are all trying to survive and they have to take care of each other in order to that.
Not such a foreign concept to Somewhere in Between. In the play, the brothers are bonded closely by traumatic experience, trying to support each other to hopefully survive their circumstances. Not always an easy task.
Well that’s all I got!
‘Til we meet again,
Simmon
Collaborative Stages 