Lone Star – 01 December 2023

The unspoken difficulty of a production like Lone Star (Off-Broadway), is that military PTSD is not fun to watch in real life the way it is in the movies. Lone Star was very true to one of the most difficult elements of PTSD for both the person experiencing the PTSD and everyone around them– the fact that it cycles, crops up without warning, dissipates quickly, effects memory, and, worst of all, traps a person in repetitive thought patterns that manifest in repetitive words that are not always connected and easy to follow.

It’s hard to watch in real life. And it’s hard to watch on stage.

In an effort to mitigate the amount of time the audience spent experiencing this repetitiveness, Lone Star used a couple of theatre conventions with varying degrees of success. The show opened on a lengthy monologue from the returned veteran’s wife about not knowing why he wasn’t home and her experience as a spouse. During this  ~15 minute section, she sang and played guitar a little bit. The lighting design was changing, seemingly without purpose as she moved around the stage, alternating between anger, quietness, and melancholy folk songs. It was an idea that was easy to grasp, but not well integrated into the dramatic structure of the piece.

The transition from this monologue into the rest of the play, which took place outside a bar, was facilitated by a lengthy projection show of historical images/footage of war juxtaposed with cartoons drawn of the characters in the play. I thoroughly enjoyed this montage, but also felt confused as to its integration into the dramatic structure of the play– it felt like a very sloppy transition, and a completely unnecessary one as the set was not shifting.

The scenes between the veteran and his brother (occasionally interrupted by a foolish character who brought a little levity to an otherwise dark and heavy show) were genius in that they showed what it’s like to live with PTSD and to live with someone who is living with PTSD, in a way that was not at all pedantic or educational. They did not instruct the audience on how to help– they simply showed how ill-equipped most people are to help properly, even if they want to. Lone Star simultaneously showcased the humanity of violent people and the cruelty of kind ones by developing this relationship between brothers.

The despair and the agony and the fear were palpable. The story evoked a Sam Shepard kind of feeling where a normal situation feels increasingly awry as the audience uncovers what has the characters stuck. I applaud Lone Star for not offering answers, because the truth is that in terms of military PTSD, we don’t have a whole lot of tried and true answers. In the US, people in the military receive extensive training on what to do during their time of service, and are often neglected after it. Lone Star shone a light on that without discussing it directly by showing the burden that these veterans can be on themselves and their loved ones, and that no one has any idea where to look for help. No options are discussed because in real life people in this situation often feel that they have no viable options. And sadly, they are often right about that.

Though not quite there in dramatic structure, the reality that Lone Star depicts has that inescapable ring of truth, characters that confuse you but ultimately win you over, and lots of attention to detail cleverly interwoven into these moments that provide a window into the psychological elements of what it means to live through a war– to survive, but lose your ability to thrive.

I attended this performance on a free ticket from Show-Score.