Review: Street Theatre Company's DOGFIGHT

It's 1967 and a young Marine, returning from a life-changing experience in Vietnam, is on a bus bound for San Francisco, the site of his last hurrah in 1963: a momentous night before he shipped out for Okinawa in the company of friends and cohorts with whom he'd created a bond he thought would last forever. That initial scene in Dogfight - the hit off-Broadway musical with music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul and a book by Peter Duchan, based upon a little-known movie of the same name that starred River Phoenix and Lili Taylor - serves as a gateway to the story of Eddie Birdlace and his fellow Marines and a winsome, idealistic young woman who left her imprint on his heart despite his best efforts to forget her.

Now onstage in a compelling production from Street Theatre Company, directed by experienced Nashville director/actor/producer Cathy Street, Dogfight is an engaging, sometimes confounding and upsetting, yet altogether moving experience that only helps cement STC's vital role in introducing new, cutting-edge material to local audiences. Impressively cast and superbly performed by Street's fresh-faced young ensemble, you're likely to never forget actor Jens Jacobson's Eddie Birdlace, his Marine cohorts or the women with whom they interact on that fateful final night stateside - and Eddie's Rose Fenny may well be the most memorable character living in this startling piece of theater, particularly given the heartrending performance of Audrey Johnson in this confident revival that practically demands you see it.

With a musical score that shows the heavy influence of Sondheim-infused theater on contemporary composers, Dogfight seems almost timeless, and certainly the story could be set during any time of war and have much the same impact. But here in America, while we still struggle to define the role of the Vietnam conflict and its aftermath on our nation's psyche and our shared sense of patriotic fervor and confusion about what that undeclared war really meant to each of us, the story is more potent and potentially more devastating. The answers don't come easy...they didn't 40 or 50 years ago...and still today we seem uncertain and somewhat reluctant to seek them out.

While Eddie, his friends Boland and Berstein and the rest of their band of brothers, engage in a night of debauchery, full of bravado and the brashness of young men about to embark upon a grand adventure, the political ramifications of the conflict in Southeast Asia are just beginning to simmer. It's that four year stretch between Eddie's visits to San Francisco during which public opinion boils over and everyone's preconceived notions of American exceptionalism were first called into question.

Those socially combustible elements provide the backdrop for what transpires during that initial trip to the city by the bay. As has been Marine tradition for years, Eddie and his friends stage a dogfight, a gathering of the testosterone-fueled young men who have each put $50 in a pot to award to the winner of a misogynistic contest to find the ugliest girl in town. It's on his search for a winning candidate that Eddie meets Rose in a shabby diner and sets out to woo her and convince her to be his date.

Eddie is foul-mouthed and abrupt, lacking in the social graces yet somehow remaining likable and attractive, while Rose's worldview is beginning to change as she quietly pursues her love of folk music and its undercurrent of pacifism and activism. Jacobson perfectly captures Eddie's duality - a little boy becoming a man in the only way he know how is effectively mixed with a genuinely heartfelt sense of honor - and his strong vocals help to bring the Pasek and Paul score to rich, vivid life onstage. Jacobson's shared onstage chemistry with Johnson's Rose is palpable, ensuring the pair's interactions are limned with humor, pathos and a sweet innocence.

Johnson's Rose is an ethereal beauty, looking for all the world as if she has stepped out of a mid-1960s teen magazine. She imbues Rose with so much heart that yours might very well break while watching her react to the circumstances in which she finds herself. Elegantly understated, Johnson never goes for the easy choice as she becomes Rose, but rather she breathes life into her with no hint of falseness or actorly over-compensation. She lends her voice to some of the score's most moving lyrics, sweetly conveying an inexperienced young woman who is starved for affection and needs an adventure of her own making to propel her into adulthood.

There comes a moment in the two hours-plus musical when Rose invites Eddie to her room, to introduce him to her beloved record collection in which her hopes and dreams currently reside, but ostensibly to share those intimate moments of a young couple finding themselves in the first throes of passion/love/romance/discovery. As the two actors disrobe, with their backs turned toward each other - in anticipation of what is to come and in a metaphorical display of their characters' vulnerability - you suddenly feel as if you've stumbled into a very private moment. The result? You are neither shocked nor surprised, only filled with the same sense of discovery on full view in front of you.

Of course, those shared romantic scenes are countered with shockingly graphic scenes, including one of the near gang rape of a prostitute and the off-putting and appallingly sexist actions of those little boys playing men before they go off to fight an increasingly unpopular war. But as difficult as it may be to watch those scenes, they fairly crackle with an intensity that drives home the show's whole reason for being. If anything, Dogfight shows off the depth of the Nashville theater talent pool, serving as a harbinger of what's to come in the future.

Jacobson and Johnson are given ample support from an ensemble of young actors - a creative blending of newcomers and local stage veterans - who are tremendously focused and committed to bringing Dogfight to life. No doubt, this is a labor of love for the entire cast and crew, evidenced by the product now onstage at STC's current home at Bailey STEM Middle School. Kyle O'Connor, as Bernstein, and Taylor Kelly, as Boland, play the other two-thirds of The Three Bees (Eddie Birdlace being the third) with honesty and fearlessness, showing off their characters' warts and all with enthusiasm and ferocity.

Margaret French plays Marcy, another working girl from the streets of San Francisco, with a well-modulated sense of self and timing that lends credibility to her performance, while Kate Byrd manages to make the most of her brief time in the spotlight to deliver a searing scene filled with dread and menace. Yet it's almost unfair to single out any of the actors so seamless are the performances and so fluidly the musical's action plays out before you. Street's cast is uniformly impressive in their performances and they deserve recognition, so kudos to Christopher Anderson, Tyler Evick, Katelyn Grogg, Mary Kate Hughes (devastatingly effective as Ruth Two Bears and quietly effective as Rose's mother), Jonah Jackson, Gerold Oliver, Shelby Terrell, Sawyer Wallce, Scott Wilson and Kaila Wooten for their estimable contributions to the impact of Dogfight.

Music director Randy Craft's five-member band deliver the requisite support for the beautifully performed work, providing a perfect performance of the show's intelligent score, while Craft's expertise as a vocal coach is evident in every performance sung onstage.

Randall Pike's set provides the company with the perfect backdrop, which is lighted by Steven Steele with his always impressive skill, while Renee Sola's costumes help to set the show's time period so evocatively in your mind.

• Dogfight. Music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. Book by Peter Duchan. Directed by Cathy Street. Music direction by Randy Craft. Presented by Street Theatre Company at Bailey STEM Middle School, Nashville, through June 21. For further information, call (615) 554-7414, or go to www.streettheatrecompany.org. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes (with a 15-minute intermission)

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