Still Life.

by Emily Mann

Shaped by the author from conversations with the people whose experience she sets forth, the play explores the way that Vietnam has affected three a Marine veteran, his estranged wife and his mistress. Seated at a table, with slides used occasionally to amplify and illustrate their comments, the three tell their various stories. The man confesses that he killed a Vietnamese family in cold blood and, carrying the seeds of violence with him, returned home to brutalize his pregnant wife. The wife, disillusioned and unhappy, wants to ignore the terrors that haunt her husband, believing that in time the awful memories will fade, while the mistress, an angry feminist, blames the man's destructiveness on the forces that conditioned him before he went to Vietnam. In the end, these three become a metaphor for the nation as a whole—still trying to understand, and overcome, the lingering trauma that is the bitter legacy of the Vietnam experience.

Genres: Plays, Theatre

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Lauren · Rating 2 out of 5]

A bare bones meditation on the emotional aftermath of the Vietnam War, Still Life, which premiered in the early 1980s, does away with traditional narrative storytelling in favor of a documentary-style format that robs the play of most emotion. For this 21st-century reader, who is awash in documentary-style stories, Still Life is a quaint relic that doesn’t wear its age well. Not recommended.

[Martin Denton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Emily Mann's 1981 documentary drama Still Life is Set in the late '70s in the upper Midwest. The play tells the story of a marine named Mark who has been back from the Vietnam War for eight years but not fully recovered from it. It's presented vérité-style, as if Mark is being interviewed by some unseen other, and with him are his wife Cheryl and his mistress Nadine--it's not entirely clear if they occupy the same literal space, but they're all together on stage--who are also being "interviewed." The notes in the published script indicate that much of the dialog is taken verbatim from Mann's own talks with the prototypes for these characters.

It's a difficult play: there is virtually no action, just ninety uninterrupted minutes of talk. Non-linearly, the play charts Mark's tour of duty in Vietnam, and his subsequent failures at home, which include a stint in prison, false starts as an artist, and his rocky marriage to Cheryl. Mann makes few judgments here, and none about her characters; but she connects the particularized violence of Vietnam and our collective denial of same with the broken-up lives of Mark and other vets and the people around them.

Though Mark's situation is sadly timeless, Nadine and Cheryl's circumstances often reflect a pre-feminist sensibility that's hard to grasp nowadays. But Still Life nevertheless has real resonance, particularly in Cheryl's observation: "I mean men would not be going on fighting like this for centuries if there wasn't something besides having to do it for their country."

[Chambers Stevens · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is early Emily Mann.
She is a very powerful writer.
But I would start with Execution of Justice.