Living Our Internal War on Stage

Essay by Gaven Trinidad

Walls is an ambitious play from 1989 by Filipina American playwright Jeannie Barroga. The play centers the then 21-year-old Maya Lin and the controversy and discourse around her identity as a Chinese American woman and her design of the Vietnam War Memorial. Surrounding the televised political battle, Barroga introduces us to visitors of “The Wall,” specifically highlighting Asian American and Black military veterans, who are attempting to reckon with the memories of the war, their positionality to it, its aftermath, and the country that forced them to fight in their name. Throughout the play stands a white soldier holding an American flag in grief and meditation, disputably an unwavering image of an America that is so dissonant from the internal war of the characters on stage.

I first read the play in my first year of graduate school at the University of Massachusetts Amherst during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. What enraptured me as a Filipino American dramaturgy student and as a grandchild of a WWII Filipino military veteran was Barroga’s audacious attempt to capture the political spectrum through an intersectional lens of race and gender among civilians and veterans.

Early in the play, we are introduced to best friends visiting the memorial: Stu, an Asian American military veteran suffering from PTSD, and Dave, a Black American man who never served during the war. Throughout the scenes between the two, we learn that Dave has brought Stu to the memorial believing it might be a first step for Stu to heal from his trauma. Both are frozen once they get to the memorial, and throughout the play they fight as Stu relays his war experiences to Dave. The country that capitalizes its image in whiteness has pitted these two men of color against each other at a time when solidarity among disenfranchised communities should unite. Barroga explores this in numerous ways through the other characters of color, particularly Maya Lin, who seems to be left alone to defend herself against the media, white military personnel, and even some members of her own community. I felt at that time when I first read this play, Barroga was articulating the extreme polarities of politics and emotions that I was witnessing on the news and on campus with a clarity that I had not yet encountered on the page.

The play aesthetically is simple and complex, mirroring Lin’s original concept for the Vietnam War Memorial: a place of somber reflection on what was a racist war with the walls cut into the earth like a wound in our skin that would never heal. The scenes are fast paced, sometimes jumping time and space, and sometimes characters seem to move and attempt to collect their memories and emotions like ghosts on stage. The play’s structure, its emotional push and pull is a beautiful contradiction, something I had seen in my late grandfather: he was a proud US-Philippines WWII veteran despite having always been outspoken of the American imperialism that his elders had experienced at the turn of the century. I always viewed him as a living contradiction like Barroga’s characters; he seemed to both love and dislike the nation that gave him and his grandson better opportunities but also at whim would call us its enemies.

In the early part of Barroga’s career, she had written two plays with all white characters; maybe influenced by an upbringing in mostly all-white spaces in Wisconsin. Introduced to more Asian American playwrights on the West Coast, she began to write Asian and Asian American specific characters unapologetically. We see this maturation in Walls. As a woman playwright of color, she interrogates and meditates on the legibility of BIPOC folks to be recognized as American in a time of national grief and socio-political upheaval. The play also brings up the issues of the unspoken trauma military veterans of color face, as well as the lack of emotional, medical, and mental health support for veterans once their services have ended. In the telling of American history, how do folks of color in the U.S. tell their own stories of grief and healing? In addition, the play itself doesn’t describe the scenic design and the transitions from scene to scene, thus giving an opportunity for a director, actors, and a design team to really architect the space and excavate into the emotional depth and truth of Barroga’s play.

Barroga doesn’t provide answers to her questions but leaves the audience seeing the many perspectives in her web of a play. Since having first read the play in graduate school, I have always yearned for a regional theatre to revive this play knowing that the play will not be an easy one to put on. It’s restless and unnerving, with no simple resolution. Our discourse on race and American history has evolved and has become further complicated and nuanced. The lack of specificity of a Vietnamese or Vietnamese American perspective is a glaring oversight, which perpetuates the silencing of the Vietnamese community who had passed in the war and are not named in the memorial. The play gives no room to ask how the Vietnamese folx displaced by the war grieve the violence they had endured. In addition to these challenges, the play is inherently a globally reaching in scope given its subject matter despite that the entire play is set in the U.S.

Artists who take on this play must take great care to understand the generations living in the U.S. and abroad who are still affected by the war and its violence. Even though it is of its time, the sheer intellectual fervor and emotional drive that rest in the heart of Walls are still worth exploration, deconstruction, reconstruction, and examination. I know there is a team of artists who can do something very radical with Barroga’s Walls and give more recognition to a playwright who may have been ahead of her time.

In Walls, prolific playwright Jeannie Barroga weaves a rich tapestry of stories surrounding the competition to design the Vietnam War Memorial (“The Wall”) in Washington D.C. Set in the early ‘80s, and mainly at The Wall, the piece explores the war’s legacy and the memorial’s construction – including the convergence of politics and art – from the viewpoint of a wide array of characters. How do the racial and political tensions of an inherently contentious war affect our AAPI communities and a healing nation at large?

Walls premiered at the Asian American Theater Company in San Francisco, California, in 1989 and was subsequently awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Access to Artistic Excellence Award.

To read the play: Unbroken Thread: An Anthology of Plays by Asian American Women edited by Roberta Uno