The Stage as a Classroom

Orange—In a play that recalled one of the darker moments in U.S. history, an Army Colonel walked across a dimly lighted stage Monday, handed a pistol to a lieutenant and ordered the man to put the gun to his head and pull the trigger.“You can't be serious,” stammered the horrified lieutenant as his superior officer loudly repeated the order.Upset and confused, the lieutenant let an awkward moment of silence pass, then he quietly told the colonel, a prosecutor: “I can't do it.”So went the chilling climax of a morality play at Chapman College's Waltmar Theater on Monday as students from the freshmen seminar program moved the study of war and peace out of the classroom onto the stage….This is how a local paper reported a play my class wrote and performed about the court martial of Lt. William Calley. As you may recall, William Calley was the Army Lieutenant who, during the height of the Vietnam war, led his platoon into MyLai 4, a small village in South Vietnam. Expecting to find heavily fortified North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers, Calley and his men instead encountered several hundred South Vietnamese civilians, most of them old men, women, children, and babies. The civilians were herded into groups. They were then shot. Calley was later court martialled in one of the most controversial trials in our nation's history.