Like Joe Bonham, Johnny Got his Gun refuses to die. First a 1938 novel by Dalton Trumbo (later one of the Hollywood Ten), then a movie and now a play, Johnny Got his Gun has a life that will not quit. Good thing too, because its anti-war message remains relevant and important. The latest version is an adaptation by British playwright Bradley Rand Smith which was first done in England a few years ago as a one-man play. Now Tim Robbins, artistic director of Actors’ Gang, has added an eight-person chorus to enhance and expand Smith’s text. It’s a brilliant creative decision. The hero—and beating heart—of the piece is still Joe Bonham (the amazing Nathan Woodworth), the grievously injured soldier back from WW I to tell his tragic tale. A bomb blast destroyed his arms and legs, speech and sight. The world might think of him as just a torso, but as Joe reminds us in his blisteringly powerful (and poetic) monologue, his heart and spirit remain intact, his humanity, as well. At Actors’ Gang, the play takes place on a bare stage, with a lone chair representing Joe’s hospital bed. The audience is asked to imagine everything: not just the ward but the battleground where Joe fought and fell, also his memories of childhood, parents, friends, enemies, lovers. Here is where the chorus contributes meaningfully to the story. Sometimes quietly singing the songs that Joe remembers, sometimes chanting bits of dialogue or weaving in tightly choreographed fashion around him, the chorus becomes Joe’s world, a collective witness to his fate. A chorus member also takes on the persona of a nurse who, having recognized that Joe is more than just a vegetable, devises a way for him to communicate by tapping out words with a pencil in his teeth. But mostly it’s just Joe talking directly to the audience, recalling his youth, his reactions to being drafted and sent off, with very little training, to fight in a foreign war. Joe denounces the politicians who voted to go to war for bogus patriotic reasons—and rips into the generals who treated soldiers like him as cannon fodder. As he points out, it’s a rare general who ever dies in battle. Joe also indicts the doctors who, after saving his life, wanted to put him display as proof of how effective modern medicine was. If it were up to him, he’d be put on display to show just how horrible and wrong war is. Above all, Joe wants us to know that he still believes in humanity, still has hope. “I want to live,” are his last heartbreakingly passionate and unforgettable words. “I want to live!”
