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Balancing act
All’s fair in Another American
BY LIZA WEISSTUCH
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If a gay soldier is in your unit and he doesn’t make a sound about his sexuality, does it matter? That’s the touchy question Marc Wolf dives into headlong in Another American: Asking and Telling, the one-man, 18-character play that won him an Obie Award when it opened Off Broadway in 1999. Since then, he’s performed it around the US. Now he’s been recruited (so to speak) by Boston Theatre Works to launch the company’s season, which focuses on politically charged plays. Politically charged Another American is, but Wolf, a charismatic performer who changes personae with the precision of a motorcycle making hairpin turns, never issues an outright charge of right or wrong. Spun around the Clinton administration’s 1993 "don’t ask, don’t tell" policy that upheld the ban on gays in the military but took no action to identify and remove them, Another American is crafted from more than 140 hours of taped interviews with some 200 persons with whom Wolf spoke over three years. In a performance influenced by the character morphing of Anna Deavere Smith in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 and other works, as well as by Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, Wolf, armed with only a table, chair, mike, beer bottle, and tape recorder, presents two hours of impersonations, using the interviews verbatim. The soldiers range from those who served in World War II through Gulf War vets; some are gay and some aren’t, some have been discharged because of their sexuality and some haven’t. Also on deck are policy pundits and parents of people in uniform. Each opinion is informed by personal experience; some are also grounded in fact, like that of the anonymous serviceman who’s indignant that funds are being allocated to ferreting out gays at the same time that military forces are being sent out with insufficient supplies. What the speakers have in common is the firmness of their opinions. Some are understandably paranoid; they interrupt themselves with suspicious remarks or demand assurance that Wolf isn’t with the government or the CIA. Others refuse to provide their names. The broad perspective puts the complexity of the issue under a microscope; whatever your position, you’re apt to find yourself re-evaluating it. For his part, Wolf accords each individual the same physical idiosyncrasies and telling hesitations, whether it’s the activist Jewish lesbian Midwesterner who was the first person reinstated in the military by court order or the soldier with a thick Bronx accent whose prejudices stem from having grown up in a neighborhood where he was always on guard against pedophilic men. The actor has no problem switching from a humorous look at the flamboyant Vietnam vet known to fellow soldiers as "Mary Alice" — he whines about the jungle climate and tells how he "played house" by tidying up the bunker — to a poignant depiction of the mother of Allen Schindler, the sailor who was beaten to death by shipmates in 1992. Sitting solemnly in a pose reminiscent of James Whistler’s portrait of his mother, Wolf’s woman bares her grief as she tells how Allen’s mutilated body was identifiable only by his tattoos. These portrayals reveal Wolf to be an impressive performer. But in giving a voice to the silenced, he’s also making his mark as a human-rights activist.
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