As L.P Hartley stated in his novel, “The Go-Between,” “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” In off-Broadway’s The Trial of the Catonsville Nine playwright/adapter Jack Cummings III translates the unfamiliar people and events of previous decades by employing modern sensibilities and thus creating a fascinating portrait of America’s cultural, social, and political history. Daniel Berrigan’s 1971 work tells of the infamous civil disobedience action he and other eight others took against the Vietnam War. Presented by Transport Group in association with the National Asian-American Theater Company, Catonsville Nine is a startling and fresh vision of where we’ve been as a country and affords a bracing perspective on our twisted treatment of marginalized populations. As he did with I Remember Mama, The Boys in the Band, and Hello, Again, Transport Group’s artistic director Cummings takes an established work and refashions it in a symbolic setting.
In 1968, at the height of America’s military action in Vietnam, progressive priest brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan and seven additional protestors stole more than 700 draft records from an army facility in Catonsville, Maryland, and set them on fire with homemade napalm. Daniel made the resultant trial into a poetic script which played Off-Broadway and briefly on Broadway in 1971. (Can you imagine an equivalent serious work on income inequality or the Trump presidency on today’s Main Stem?)
Gordon Davidson’s original production featured a full courtroom set and a cast of 16 including young actors such as Sam Waterston, James Woods, and Michael Moriarty. Cummings places the action in a bizarre chamber of memory with just three Asian-American actors playing all of the roles. Set designer Peiyi Wong transforms the small stage of the Abrons Arts Center into a ghostly archive. The audience is seated in onstage pews surrounding several tables littered with clippings, photos, LPs, and other memorabilia of the era. The small cast enters from the empty auditorium wearing heavy winter clothes as if they came directly from the street outside.
The extraordinarily versatile David Huynh, Mia Katigbak, and Eunice Wong shed their outer garments, examine the documents, and act out the trial, switching parts without ever losing the thread or creating confusion. Having Asian-American performers enact this story of the tragic ruin of an Asian country adds a layer of ironic resonance. To add to the contemporary perspective, Cummings has amended the script with updates on the various participants.
Fan Zhang’s sound design and original music and R. Lee Kennedy’s lighting get a tad overblown at times, obscuring the interactions between the intense trio as judge, witnesses and lawyers, but these are only occasional overreaches in an otherwise imaginative and haunting view of a shattering chapter of our recent past.
