Buffet of good, bad and weird

Most of Saturday's audience stayed for a group discussion. I didn't. If Accidens needs a formal discussion to explain itself, it's not a performance, it's a workshop activity. Accidens could have a number of meanings, all vacuous statements of the obvious. García lived, the lobster didn't, fate is a fickle notion. And there's a reason we never order steer, we order beef; we don't wrap the food chain around our heads when we eat. Humans have the capacity to rationalize. Call it hypocrisy, call it irony. As for Accidens, I call it nonsense as theater and no better as performance art.

- Howard Shapiro

In Conflict. Temple University is presenting In Conflict, a collection of former Philadelphia Daily News writer Yvonne Latty's interviews with Iraq war veterans that first appeared in book form and has been adapted for the stage by Douglas C. Wager, artistic director for Temple Theaters. The production premiered last season at Temple, won a prestigious award last month at the original Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, and moves to Off-Broadway's Barrow Street Theatre Sept. 18.

Here is an excerpt from Wendy Rosenfield's review, which appeared last fall:

"There are many triumphs in the piece, not the least of which is the sheer variety of vets and war experiences represented, 19 in total: a Vietnam-vet officer who 'bleeds red, white and blue'; an unabashed liberal enlistee who says he was sent to Iraq to be a 'bullet catcher'; a triple amputee who shyly admits, 'I miss my body'; a lost 26-year-old who spits, 'I gave up my soul - can't nobody give me a prosthetic soul.' Each story is fascinating, heartbreaking, heroic or all three. . .

"It is remarkable that with such a wide range of voices, the same themes emerge in most of their testimonies. They want the Veterans Administration to help care for their wounds, both physical and psychic, but tragically, they have mostly been abandoned.. . .

"Latty recalls, in one of the filmed segments that appear between monologues, the disorientation she felt upon entering Walter Reed Medical Center and seeing men and women . . . wearing the same baseball caps with shredded brims, the same T-shirts that declared their affiliations, but all missing limbs or faces. It is a similar feeling watching these uniformly excellent Temple students reciting the soldiers' tales. . .