History Repeats Itself, First as Tragedy, then as Farce ( Karl Marx)
The Bellingham TheatreWorks’ production The Ghosts of Tonkin by Steve Lyons, opened at ACTLab, (formerly ACT’s Central Heating Lab). It concerns the famous Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which severely escalated what is commonly called “The Viet-Nam War” although Congress never declared war on North Viet-Nam, which would have been constitutionally necessary in order to officially call it a war.
The Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which passed Congress on August 10, 1964, authorized President Lyndon B. Johnson to escalate the US involvement in South Vietnam and begin bombing Hanoi and other strategic targets in North Viet-Nam. Only two senators opposed the resolution, Wayne Morse (D-OR) and Ernst Gruenig D-AK)
Needless to say the reasons Johnson asked for the resolution were based on phony evidence of a supposed attack as well as election pressure. Johnson was running against Senator Barry Goldwater, who was proposing to use nuclear weapons and bomb “North-Viet-Nam back to the stone-age.”
It had not been that many years since the Communist witch hunts and the Domino Theory was very prevalent; if “Red” China and Communist North Viet-Nam succeeded in turning South Viet-Nam Communist, then the whole of Southeast Asia and ultimately the rest of the world will become Communist and take away our Amurrrrican way of life!!!!!!! was the rhetoric of the time. As we all know, Goldwater lost by a landslide, but his policies,-of escalating the war,-won.
Ghosts of Tonkin is a fictionalized version of the events told from the point of view of the deceased Wayne Morse with a few fictional characters thrown in. Doris, is an attractive Naval Intelligence Officer working for the Secretary of State, who “interpreted” certain evidence to “prove” that an attack on American warships had taken place. From the grave, Doris and Morse meet and re-enact the Senate Committee hearings and overhear the meetings in the oval office, in an attempt to change history.
It was unfortunate that most of the audience were people who lived through the Viet-Nam protests, rather than young people. I know that as soon as I sat down and saw the maps of Viet-Nam I was flooded with memories and emotions; the arguments with our elders, Buddhist monks lighting themselves on fire, acne-ridden teen-agers being drafted, humorous folk-legends of draft-dodging, plans to flee to Canada, and the pictures of Napalm.
But the play itself and the production did little to engage my attention. It was fairly low energy, not particularly dramatic and difficult to follow. The device of having Wayne Morse and Doris as participants and narrators did not work well and it seemed that the material would have been more informative as a Ken Burns documentary. The direction by Mark Kuntz, worked against the play, with actors having their backs to the audience, indistinct diction, as well as ineffective double casting.
The one big laugh came when Morse made a speech about any president who enters into a war based on phony evidence will not be thought well of in history. Lyndon Johnson did not start the American involvement in Viet-Nam and his administration had some solid achievements behind him. The farce that Congress and a large portion of the American people fell for with the weapons of mass destruction was on all our minds.
Ghosts of Tonkin. Bellingham Theatre Works at ACT Theatre, The Bullitt Cabaret. Thru May 10 Tickets: http://www.acttheatre.org/Tickets/OnStage info: http://www.bellinghamtheatreworks.org/