Love in the DMZ

Julia Cameron’s desk drawer held a masterpiece for nearly 10 years. Although her play in letters, “Love in the DMZ” was performed for a short run in Los Angeles in 2005 and published in an e-book along with two of her other novellas in 2013, the timing now seems right for her affecting story of a Kansas couple torn apart by the Viet Nam War to go viral. The perceptive Vivian Nesbitt, owner of the Sol Acting Academy in Albuquerque, is leading the charge by producing this unbridled delve into love and conflict on the school’s small stage. Nesbitt is determined to make sure Cameron’s genius prose is no longer shut away in darkness.

Walking in to the Academy’s improvised theater space, the preshow soundtrack sets the mood for the era with that unmistakable 1960s music of unrest and protest: Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Doors, Marvin Gaye and Edwin Starr. Cameron sets her study in 1968, during the heart of America’s involvement in the fight. Josh Heard plays the part of Husband, an officer who cares deeply for his men while trying to keep a foothold on the fact that he can’t rationalize combatting in this foreign jungle realm. Catharine Pilafas tackles the role of Wife, a sympathetic yet fraught mother raising their two boys in an idyllic rural setting.

Heard bursts onto the stage as an exclamation to the brutalities surrounding him. As he regroups in the respite of his barracks, he begins his letter home by nonchalantly describing the landscape and creatures of the Gulf country as though he were on a scientific expedition. As the months go by, his brave attempts to reassure his wife and sons that he’s holding up just fine begin to deteriorate. The shallow distractions give way to more grave ones and his shame confines him to question not the purpose of his mission but rather his own dark desires for stimuli congruent with the vestiges of war.

Heard submerges himself in a very physical depiction of the Husband, approaching the role with an essence of the character’s experience. That tactic works well with how Cameron expertly voiced the Husband’s letters—a persona she amazingly found within her. Heard taps into that consciousness with admirable skill and care, reaching beyond his own scope of familiarity with a situation taking place years before he was born, landing an authoritative portrayal of a changed man.

Back in Kansas, Pilafas wears pajamas when writing to her husband and uses their flowing softness as a connection to their intimacy, instinctively hugging herself and twisting her hair as she looks for the right words to rekindle their stolen moments of privacy. She also starts out writing chatty news, sharing homespun stories of normal life and flirting to gain her husband’s arousal by dropping hints that his brother is paying her some attention.

When his letters wane and then flip in tone and style, Pilafas employs a distinctive technique for suggesting that she’s reading between the lines. She measures her actions right to the required level and the outcome is a deliciously baked rendition of a heartsick and exasperated woman wondering if she has lost the rational thinking battle and must surrender to an enticingly stronger, illusionary power thousands of miles away from her reach.

Cameron brought her longtime friend and colleague Daniel Region in from New York to direct “Love in the DMZ.” Region’s connection with the material is intuitive, and though he received a draft deferment that kept him out of military service in the late 60s, he writes about Viet Nam veterans and their struggles in his 2014 fictional memoir, “Tales from Thurmons Corners” with great passion. Region has been an actor and director for decades and spent years as a radio and television broadcaster, which accounts for his proficiency in selecting the perfect songs for the show.

Heard and Pilafas are both teachers at Sol Acting Academy and have appeared in numerous local stage, TV and film productions. For this undertaking, they relied on Region’s keen understanding of his generation’s national tragedy as a starting place for their motivations. With Cameron’s gift for putting pen to paper (she is a prolific writer and author of the vastly popular, “The Artist’s Way” method) and with Region’s gut-felt interpretation of her beautiful phrasing, the Academy is making way for this work to be wildly successful wherever it continues.

On assignment for ABQToDo.