I EXPECTED THE NEW ANTIWAR DRAMA Embedded to be artless, thudding propaganda, filled with commonplace observations passed off as a major exposé. What I didn’t expect was a play that might have been written for a convention of conspiracy-mongers. Theater of some kind is what I anticipated when I arrived in Greenwich Village to see it last weekend. The chatter of a Lyndon LaRouche meet-up is what I found.
Embedded, written and directed by Tim Robbins, follows three groups of Americans–soldiers, journalists, and administration officials–from October 2002 to June 2003: the five months that led up to the war and then three months of fighting and occupation. President Bush is represented by his underlings, while the Baathist regime in Iraq might as well not exist: A Saddam Hussein character is mentioned, but his name is “the New Hitler,” a heavy touch meant to criticize America’s hawks for exaggerating the Iraqi dictator’s genocides. War’s violence is limited to two scenes, in one of which an American soldier kills an Iraqi family after they fail to stop their car at a checkpoint.
Meanwhile, Robbins studs the play with yuk-yuk references to the political philosopher Leo Strauss–to say nothing of obscure and questionable accusations served up as obvious and true, or journalistic wrinkles from well over a year ago delivered like this morning’s news. To keep ’em laughing, Robbins throws in several over-the-top crudities about presidential advisers (two “Dick” Cheney jokes, for example).
ROBBINS WAS AMONG THE MOST OUTSPOKEN of entertainment figures to criticize the war in Iraq. Under his own byline in the Nation magazine, on the podium at protest rallies, before a select audience of Washington media, the Oscar-winning actor made a pulpit of his celebrity to let the world know that people who thought the way he does are unable to voice their dissent in America’s hostile political climate. A production at one of New York City’s most respected theaters is just the latest manifestation of the ruthless manner in which he’s been so efficiently muzzled.
The driving idea of Embedded is that the United States manipulated the Iraq war for the sake of public relations and thus silenced antiwar critics. Surely, there is some truth to the charge that the United States pursued a self-interested strategy in its dealings with the press.
But Robbins’s assault can’t be taken seriously so long as he ignores every element of the war that gives any context to the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam. Worse than politically silly, the play is dramatically unsatisfying. Except for when the journalist characters recite genuine reportage from the front, the life-ending and life-changing drama of battle is absent from Embedded, reduced to a couple of stand-alone speeches designed merely to score political points.
Much attention has been given to Robbins’s portrait of administration officials as war-crazed Straussians, but no less ridiculous is Robbins’s caricature of American military personnel. At the opening of the play, tender little soldiers troop off to war like kids being sent to summer camp. One of these woe-is-me innocents, a fictionalized Jessica Lynch, is told by her simpleton father: “If I had made any money, you wouldn’t be going off to war.” The story of Jessica Lynch plays like an old-fashioned damsel-in-distress flick, but in this one, all the moustache-twisting villains are in Washington.
Just to make sure nobody misses the point, the Straussians wear funhouse masks with bubble cheeks and laughing eyes, and they speak pidgin Plato and a haphazard lingo of military terms (“weapons of annihilation” instead of “weapons of mass destruction,” in another swipe at the exaggerations of hawks). The group represents several top military advisers, all working out of the Office of Special Plans, which has become, for conspiracy believers, the central processing center for all the lies Bush used to rush an unprovoked United States into attacking minding-its-own-business Iraq. But again, such politics create a problem for theater: Who but the most devoted Nation reader gets jokes about the Office of Special Plans?
The characters at the Office of Special Plans represent the president’s key military advisers, with their surnames infantilized into “Rum-Rum,” “Woof,” and so on. Stacked together like a chorus, they face the audience and say things like “Plato kicks Socrates’ ass” and “As Leo Strauss would say . . .” If I had a nickel for every time someone actually said that in Washington, I wouldn’t be able to make a local phone call. Still, Robbins gives it a try, with the Richard Perle character quoting, “‘Moral virtue has no application to the really intelligent man, the philosopher.'”
IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, Terry Teachout hunted down the source of this misquotation in a paraphrasing of a paraphrasing of something Strauss said. Yet it gives a fair reading of who Robbins imagines Strauss to be. In Robbins’s view, Leo Strauss and the neoconservatives believe in the noble lie, the desirability of philosopher-kings, and many other shockingly antidemocratic ideas. As source material, Robbins appears to have relied on the work of anti-Strauss scholar Shadia Drury and one or two LaRouchies for whom the work of Strauss has all the offensiveness of Plato’s Republic without any of the subtlety or comic irony.
Still, the production of Embedded is peppy, and the actors occasionally bring this leaden material to life, despite many humorless moments (like the use of Edwin Starr’s old 1970s standard “War, unh, what is it good for?” as incidental music). Also, to its credit, the play is short, running a lean ninety minutes without intermission.
David Skinner is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
