These three young men absorb us, they earn our sympathy, and they disgust us-it’s heart wrenching. Magnetism is an operative word here: the play toys constantly with repulsion and attraction, and the pain of enduring diametric pulls simultaneously. The play’s success, its magnetism, is in no small part due to the nuanced charisma of its three actors, Wyatt Joseph Fenner, Sea McHale and Gabriel Sloyer. The War Boys did eventually swallow me, however, into its tense, shape-shifting psychological quicksand. It took me a good 15 minutes (indeed, past the patriotic self-gratification bit) to calibrate to its rhythm and actually believe I might be anywhere other than a small, downtown black box theater. It kicks off with some rapid-fire, tit-for-tat locker room talk, and at first the pacing feels abrupt and a little jarring. It takes a little time to settle into the world of this play. I wouldn’t be the first to observe that the Muslim ban and border wall nonsense are only the latest vicious permutations of a long-held tradition (the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 being one place to start tracing our racist immigration lineage). James Will McBride’s director’s note submits that “the striking relevance of this play is proof that Naomi felt the tremors of phobia long before they jolted the bedrock of mainstream America.” I would disagree to the extent that xenophobia, that ever-indelible stain on American culture, has been giving us the jolts for hundreds of years. It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that The Artists Crossing is mounting the NY premiere of this play, written way back in 1993, right now, in the thick of the hellfire that is Trump’s presidency.
(It dawns on me that the whole jerking-off-to-the-Pledge-of-Allegiance thing is a pretty apt metaphor for what this trio is up to). He’s part of a three-man brigade that hangs out for kicks every night on the US/Mexico border, passing the time cracking beers, showing off and turning in “beaners” attempting to cross over to the Feds for $10 a head.
Not more than 10 minutes into Naomi Wallace’s War Boys we see a frustrated young man jerking off to the Pledge of Allegiance. L to R: Sea McHale, Wyatt Joseph Fenner, Gabriel Sloyer.
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