Home / Chronology / Six Years / More About Six Years The following articles appeared in Actors Theatre's subscriber newsletter prior to the 2006 Humana Festival SIX YEARS When Americans talk about World War II, we usually tell a story of good’s triumph over evil. In the common telling, the War started at the end of 1941, with the attack on Pearl Harbor. We don’t dwell on the 300,000-plus American soldiers who lost their lives in battle, or the millions of Europeans who began losing their lives with the invasion of Poland in 1939; our memory doesn’t quite reach back to the election of Hitler in 1933. D-Day has become the day that changed the tide of the war in Europe—the unstoppable Americans stormed the beaches. The term itself has been co-opted and catch-phrased. Until Saving Private Ryan, how much did anyone who wasn’t there really think about the brutality and carnage they witnessed as they claimed the shoreline in France? This is a myth about a simpler time, when the U.S.A. saved the world and claimed super-power status, when the Greatest Generation came home, and the Baby Boom started. There’s no room to think about, much less discuss, what lies beneath the flimsy surface of the American Dream. The poet-soldiers of World War I gave lasting testimonies to their comrades who came home shell-shocked. M*A*S*H* (at least the television show) gave an insight to the fragility of the human body and soul in Korea. America’s collective feelings of guilt and anger over the treatment of Vietnam veterans was given voice in movies like Born on the Fourth of July (as well as the vitriol of the 2004 Presidential election). But World War II was a good war, wasn’t it? Our amnesia about WWII and the post-war boom seems a peculiarly American one—we only remember the positive. Is this the legacy of Depression-era stoicism? Did the GI Bill and booming economy mitigate and erase the war’s effects? In Six Years playwright Sharr White questions this silence, examines the psychic damage that lies behind the public story that focuses on the heroics and not the scars of the battlefield. White’s play is concentrated on one GI, tracing the effect of his debilitation on his wife and family. Phil went off to war six years before we meet him—but when everyone else came home, he couldn’t He spent four more years wandering through America, unable to re-acclimate after his experiences in that cataclysmic time. Meredith kept the home fires burning, waited as she lost her job at the plant, planned for a future that might not be, and became a pariah when her mother-in-law died of heartbreak and her friends began to have babies. White follows Phil and Meredith from 1949 to 1973. After finally arriving home in their small town, so long after his fellow soldiers, Phil must face his abandoned wife, and see if they can put the pieces of his broken mind and their broken marriage back together. White brings us back to these members of the Greatest Generation, peeking into their lives every six years, as they move through twenty-four tumultuous years of American history. They follow the post-war era’s familiar script—the cookie-cutter house, the rush to get ahead—except that they share the secrets of their marriage in a way our parents and grandparents most likely never did. There are family stories and skeletons, but they never touch the mysteries of how our parents or grandparents met, why they stayed together or split up, whether they really loved each other. We can never know what happens in other people’s houses, except when storytellers like Sharr White take us inside. America changed in this era. Just stop for a moment and think about the Eisenhower Interstate Highways, television (black and white to color), and commercial airline travel. Think about the homemakers who baked cookies, learned to build warplanes, then returned to their cookies again, becoming (perhaps unwittingly) the mothers of the Women’s Movement. The country went from the General President to the giddiness of the Kennedy Inauguration to the Cuban Missile crisis, the death of the dream in Dallas, and the reelection on Richard Nixon. We went from World War II into the Cold War through the Korean War and to the Vietnam War, with the only constant that nothing stays the same, save a new war every cycle, despite the best intentions of those who survived the last one. Phil and Meredith give us a glimpse into the Greatest Generation, and provide an insight into this quarter century of social, technological, and political change. In Six Years, we see these changes through the prism of a marriage, where everything changes, and yet the same two people struggle to make sense of the world, both inside and outside their home, together. — Julie Felise Dubiner SHARR WHITE Sharr White spent the 80s in Southern California, divvying his week into surfing and not surfing. He passed weekends in a warehouse and workdays in class, on the waves, and in arcades. "I went to this community college called Orange Coast College, which is made up of surfers forced into college by their parents. I was going to be a marine biologist or an oceanographer." But then he took a few acting classes, got sucked into the theatre whirlpool, cut his hair, and said to himself, "I hear American Conservatory Theatre's a good place to go to school so maybe I'll move up to San Francisco, get into ACT, and become an actor. It was such a ridiculous idea." Sharr White’s most outrageous ideas find a way of working themselves out. White graduated from ACT’s acting program in 1993, and wrote his first play while in school, a collection of five monologues entitled Body Parts. Following a successful production of his work in San Francisco that summer, he moved cross-country to New York, where his focus shifted from acting to playwriting. He is the author of several critically acclaimed plays, including Safe from the Future (Lost), The Last Orange Dying (Hate), Iris Fields, and The Escape Velocity of Savages. In between drafting his full-length plays for submission ("Rejection, rejection, rejection," he recalls), he teamed with director Ron Bashford and producer Matt Olin, and began to self-produce his work "guerrilla-style" in New York with the play series Absolute Scratch. The last Absolute Scratch play, Heaven (And All Things Lovely), was performed in 1997 on-site at Times Square in a 38th floor Marriott Marquis hotel suite, courtesy of an adventurous manager who replied to Olin and White’s dramatic proposal with "How many chairs do you need?" The answer was thirty-five. Under available lamplight, and with a captivated audience, the inspiration for The Hotel Project was born. The Hotel Project (2003) consisted of two site-specific one-acts performed in a Charlotte, North Carolina Marriott suite. White’s one-act was a twenty-minute scene between a husband and wife struggling to reconnect after their disparate experiences of World War II on the front and at home. Afterward, White could not let go of the characters he’d created in that room and in that brief moment—he was compelled to continue the story of Phil and Meredith in Six Years. White’s exploration of site-specific theatre in Absolute Scratch and The Hotel Project now define his dramatic aesthetic. White finds his milieu, imagines discrete moments set there, and develops his characters according to time and place. Who are the people who inhabited this space, lived through this era? White delves into the personal stories pocketed within broader historical events in Six Years and the Vietnam era The Escape Velocity of Savages. Both plays explore the private sphere surrounded and penetrated by a chaotic and complex exterior world, and expose an unfamiliar facet of the ‘war at home.’ Now that World War II is over and the Axis powers defeated, Phil and Meredith are fighting their battles at home and sometimes against each other. They are the unseen and uncounted postwar casualties. In Six Years, Sharr White reminds us that the private struggles to cope with violence and loss continue long after the armistice. — Joanna K. Donehower