The Few, the Proud, the Defiant – Nina DaVinci-Nichols

Chris Chalk and Stephen Lang in John Patrick Shaney’s Defiance. Photo by Joan Marcus.

The playwright John Patrick Shanley commenting on his own work says "Defiance is a necessary step in the life of an individual and in the life of a nation, but it is an intermediate step." Understanding the play as a step in part explains its shape and size, short, sharp and inconclusive. Defiance is the second play in a planned trilogy, which begun with Shanley’s play, Doubt. It represents a brief, jolting experience of defiance in a context where unquestioning obedience prevails, in the U.S Marines.

Set in 1971 at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, the work delivers a shock. A black Captain Lee King (Chris Chalk) confronts the base’s white CEO Lt. Colonel Littlefield (Stephen Lang) with a report of his sexual offense 20 years earlier with the Captain’s wife, Margaret (Margaret Colin). No matter the content of the officers’ talk, its style is slam bang Q and A in those abrupt barks meant to terrorize enlisted men into submission. It cows the audience as well.

In one sense, racism is secondary to both the sexual crime and to the immediate challenge of insubordination or defiance. There are no rules in the Marine’s written code covering the moral situation in the past. At the same time, the circumstances created by Captain Chalk hinge on the powerful white Colonel Littlefield having coerced, if that says it, the powerless black wife. Nor are there rules applying to the situation in the present. Human behavior is on trial. Mrs. Littlefield accepts this revival of the past with equanimity, suggesting with her unflappable response that she recognizes sexual misconduct as one of the games that little boys play. Defiance presents the two situations as parallel in their separate contexts: marital infidelity and military disloyalty. The Colonel is the obvious bridge between them.

The timing of the Captain’s revelation is problematic; just why so long a time elapses between the event and its disclosure remains somewhat murky. The answer given is that Captain Chalk’s wife only just told her husband about her dereliction. That fails, however, to explain her motive, whereas his willingness to defy his commanding officer is a strategic ploy. He is handed the opportunity to shake the power structure and seizes it; his position is fool-proof. The Colonel cannot reprimand the Captain publicly without damning himself and bringing down both the social and the military hierarchy under attack.

Shanley chooses an equivocal posture here with the military context or rather, chooses the military context in order to dramatize the equivocal nature of experience. The Marines as a dramatic entity describe an attitude, a fixed either/or, yes/no to human behavior, which mainly exists in shades of grey. It defies gridlock definitions on which military order is based, the very ones which tend to simplify understandings of responsibility and authority. Shanley wants to expose the implications, unspoken assumptions and commonplace governing of a seemingly straightforward event, those that impede the practical day-to-day operation of an organization as dependent upon hierarchy as the military. The point, however, is metaphorical and obviously applies widely, say, to university, corporations, family.

Shanley tackled similar circumstances of the Episcopal Church with his first brilliant play Doubt. A human propensity that inhibits behavior based on faith. The church appears again in Defiance in the person of Chaplain White (Chris Bauer), who visits the Littlefields in an effort to defuse the atmosphere in camp resulting from rumor, speculation and gossip about the commander’s sexual misconduct. Both plays expose conditions of belief and obedience as necessary to regulation and to structure; whereas the qualities otherwise tend to be categorized as childish or at best typical of mindless complacency. In this, Shanley shares the Socratic conviction that "the unexamined life is not worth living." Not that the topics surveyed, problems of race and racism, love and duty, submit to easy resolution onstage or off. This rather is to notice that Shanley is engaged, and engages his audience.

The acting is brilliant, exceptional by Chris Bauer and the production over all professional in every way. The stage of City Center Stage I is vast, so at times the disparity between space and intimate action caused a slight sense of dislocation. The commanding officer’s living room in his house on the base sprawled like a playing field, though his office resembled a reasonable size.

"Defiance" by John Patrick Shanley. Produced by Manhattan Theatre Club; directed by Doug Hughes; design team features John Lee Beatty, Catherine Zuber, Pat Collins, David Van Tieghem. Players in alphabetical order are Chris Bauer (Chaplain White), Chris Chalk (Captain Lee King), Margaret Colin (Margaret Littlefield), Stephen Lang (Lt.Colonel Littlefield), others.