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| Mercedes McCambridge,Tina Chen. |
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| William Redfield, Tina Chen, Robert Burr, Michael Landrum, Frank Geraci. |
Taking a cue from the love suicide plays of the Japanese traditional theatre, Romulus Linney
created a contemporary antiwar drama set in 1970 at Hawaii’s Schofield Barracks
army base (where Linney himself had been stationed in the 1950s). Its substance is the investigation made into the strange double suicide of an American four-star
Army general and his wife (neither of whom appears). Their deaths were an act
of protest over their nation’s involvement in the Vietnam War, a conflict that
caused the death of their own son.
During a Halloween party at the officers’ club, the
general and his wife performed a Japanese-influenced drama, including noh-like
masks (although noh does not have any love suicide plays), in which he shot her with a bow and arrow and then blew his brains out. The
meaning of the event is explored, as per the general’s posthumous request, at a
hearing convened for the occasion.
The reviews tended to praise Linney for his noble
intentions, but to censure him for weak dramaturgic skills. The plot,
characters, and language came in for some hard knocks. Brendan Gill and Walter
Kerr called the author “clumsy”; Julius Novick, who thought the play good, scored
it for its “sententious” dialogue and “implausible” characters; and Clive
Barnes offered this representative opinion: “The play takes a long time to say
very little, carries unlikelihood to even more unlikely lengths and leaves it
there, and makes unduly portentous that normally viable dramatic vehicle, the
military inquiry.”
A first-rate performance was provided by Mercedes McCambridge as a New England lesbian poetess who had known the deceased couple. She was nominated for a Tony as Best Supporting Actress, Play. The large cast included William Redfield, Jerome Dempsey, Robert Burr, Tina Chen, Del Green, Earl Hindman, Mark Lamos, John Berry, Alan Mixon, and others.
The Love Suicide at Schofield Barracks originally had been seen in
an Off-Off Broadway workshop performance sponsored by the H.B. Playwrights Foundation. In 1991, New York's Signature Theatre revived the play in a revised version that shortened the script from two acts to one and greatly reduced the cast size.