Traumatized veteran's spouse debates her future in DeVita play

MADISON - Learning that her husband has survived a roadside bombing in Iraq with apparently minimal, shrapnel-induced damage, stateside wife Elise Sabato can be forgiven for counting her chickens before they’ve hatched.

“I find myself watching random homecoming videos on YouTube,” Elise tells us in “Learning to Stay,” a world premiere from Forward Theater that opened over the weekend under Jennifer Uphoff Gray’s direction.

Adapted by James DeVita from the novel by Madison-based writer Erin Celello, “Learning to Stay” is set in 2010 Madison.  It chronicles what happens after the celebratory homecoming video ends and real life begins again.

In the case of Elise (Kat Wodtke) and Brad (Jeb Burris), real life doesn’t mean the old life, back when Elise saw Brad as “the kindest, smartest man I’ve ever met, equal parts patient and handsome” as well as a surefire winner as a future Dad.

That description comes from the novel.

Although DeVita follows Celello’s lead, giving us a memory play told from Elise’s point of view, his adaptation doesn’t convey much sense of the Brad who was. That makes it harder to grasp why Elise might stay with the Brad who is: a “ghost” wounded in body and mind who drinks too much and is prone to frightening violence.

Burris accurately channels the rage consuming the new Brad; late in the play, he’ll provide us with back story of an all-too familiar sort, confirming anew that war is indeed hell.  But this isn’t really his story.

“Learning to Stay” belongs instead to Elise, with Wodtke toggling between narration of the scenes she describes and reliving them in real time.

Those narrative passages are insufficiently dramatized, in the script or on stage; ditto many moments belonging to a four-person chorus, playing multiple, singly dimensioned characters and saddled with too many earnest and sometimes chalky expository passages.

There’s also an unfortunate subplot involving the law firm where Elise works; its stereotyped characters and environment don’t track the way people behave in an actual law firm, particularly in a city like Madison.

More important, that subplot pulls focus from the story that counts, here: Whether Elise should stick it out with Brad or start over.  Watching Wodtke actually interact with Burris plays to Wodtke’s strength as an actor: an ability to capture the tension between ostensible calm and underlying despair that’s all the better and more poignant because it’s not overplayed.

Dramatizing that story, amplified by further attention to the stories of two other women – one who lost her husband in Iraq (Malkia Stampley) and another leaving the damaged man who returned (Karen Moeller) – would give DeVita’s script more focus.  In its current iteration, its commendable attention to the details of Celello’s novel is stifling its emergence as a play.

“Learning to Stay” continues through April 9 at the Overture Center, 201 State St., Madison.  For tickets, visit forwardtheater.com/.  To read more about this production, go to TapMilwaukee.com.

Program notes

Filed Away and Forgotten:  The huge towers of upstage filing cabinets in Mike Lawler’s scenic design conjure many images. The law firm where Elise works. The perimeter of an embattled Iraqi safe zone. The nightmarish bureaucracy couples like Elise and Brad must navigate in seeking medical help. The “cabinet full” of medications that Brad must now take. The way we reductively pigeonhole veterans and categorize the mentally ill. And the way soldiers like Brad are trapped within their minds, reliving experiences they don’t know how to share.

A Foundation Made of Sand: Lawler has rimmed Forward’s thrust stage with sand. That suggests Iraq, always surrounding and lying beneath the seemingly stable American world to which Brad returns. Those desert sands also suggest the shifting and unreliable foundation on which Elise and Brad must now try to build a new life.   

A Greek Chorus: When they’re not each busy playing multiple characters, the four ensemble members surrounding this play’s central couple serve as a Greek chorus, particularly effective in moments in which they underscore and further dramatize Elise’s ruminations – as they do, for example, immediately after Elise’s opening monologue. They also often remain onstage between scenes in which they’re appearing as characters; as Uphoff Gray pointed out in a talkback following Sunday afternoon’s performance, doing so allows them to bear witness to a story that affects all of us. As Uphoff Gray additionally noted, keeping the ensemble onstage also facilitates transitions, in a script with many – too many – truncated scenes. In addition to Moeller and Stampley, this production’s ensemble members are Di’Monte Henning and Michael Herold.

An Iliad: DeVita’s play follows his unforgettable performances in two productions of “An Iliad,” in which he plays the Poet, struggling to make sense of war while cataloging what it’s done to who we are and the world in which we live. Interviewing him before the first of those productions at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater in 2014, it was clear that this reliably thoughtful artist had already given considerable attention to the phenomenon of war and its tremendous collateral damage.  He and Uphoff Gray deserve kudos for deciding three years ago to write and stage a play like this one; they did so long before the “theater of war” became a hot-button topic in the theater world (it’s featured on the cover and in several articles in the current issue of American Theatre, which has profiled DeVita’s play).  

A Performance for Veterans: Consistent with the commitment that gave birth to this play, Forward has scheduled a private performance of “Learning to Stay” that’s intended exclusively for veterans, their families and service providers.  It will be followed by an in-depth discussion with Uphoff Gray, her cast, and Veterans Administration personnel.  It’s free; details and registration for those eligible to attend are available here: www.wisvetsmuseum.com/events/?ID=191.