Poetry, life, and death First Stage Providence aims high with Not About Heroes By Bill Rodriguez
	Not About Heroes By Stephen MacDonald. Directed by Bob Colonna. With Nigel Gore, and Rudy Danda. At First Stage Providence through October 16.4

Good theater, even great theater, can be so simple. We don’t need a cast of thousands and Broadway production values to remain absorbed and deeply moved, as First Stage Providence is demonstrating with Not About Heroes, by Stephen MacDonald.

First Stage amps up the challenge by being an itinerant company, with producer Cait Calvo mounting no more than one play a year at locations of opportunity. The book-lined space at the Providence Athenaeum had the perfect opening weekend ambience for this story of two poets, but the production is certain to make surroundings melt away when it moves to a library and a church auditorium in its travels for the next few weeks.

Throw together two people in a conflicted situation, whether diplomats in A Walk In the Woods or the doomed duo in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, immerse us in their plight, and we’ll follow them anywhere for a couple of hours. Here we become acquainted with World War I poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon as they get to know each other in a hospital. The stakes are life and death, not just in their debates and writings, but also out in the world, where such rhetoric can fall short.

For Owen (Rudy Sanda) was a rising star of a young poet who died on the battlefield a week before the war ended, just after impressing the public with literary gifts they expected to look forward to. A fellow British officer, Sassoon (Nigel Gore) also wrote protest poems, and as the older and more successful writer became Owen’s mentor and friend. Not About Heroes is a memory play, opening in 1932 but mostly flashing back to the men meeting in an army hospital and becoming fast friends over the remaining year of Owen’s life.

We first meet them in a highly charged moment in the hospital, when the hero-worshipping 24-year-old brings a stack of Sassoon’s books for him to autograph. We have briefly heard Sassoon lament not having somehow stopped Owen from returning to the fighting, so this scene of a cranky older man condescending to a worshipful boy is as poignant as a later exchange when Owen leaves the hospital.

The two actors nail the characters, under the modulating direction of Bob Colonna. Sanda is bursting with vitality as Owen, sent there as a shell-shocked "nerve case" — stammering, hands shaking. But Sanda keeps the electricity dialed down in most scenes, which makes the uninhibited second act, when Owen is out of the hospital and making a splash in the literary world, all the more effective. Gore amplifies the energy cleverly, between his lines, as reserved Britisher Sassoon mutely reacts to the brash young pup. Director Colonna paces the play, waiting till toward the end to unleash Sanda and let Owen burst into physical action as Sassoon reads the young man’s letters and imagines battle scenes, and Sanda marches in formation, crawls across the floor or leaps onto a desk, at one point flipping upright after tottering about in a handstand. After the hospital and before returning to war, upon Sassoon’s introductions Owen enters the literary world, dazzled that H.G. Wells would want to bend his ear for an hour, and not merely meeting poet Robert Graves but coming to call him Bobby.

As you might expect, a major feature of this play is the poetry of its two subjects. (There’s also some bonus bad verse in a gift volume that Sassoon presents as a going-away present, which puts the unsentimental, tough-minded poems of the two into perspective for us.) The program cover page reproduces the hand-written first draft of Owen’s "Anthem for Doomed Youth," complete with cross-outs and inserts. In the play we get to hear them discuss the word changes that Owen makes, and which he notated on the manuscript page as "Sassoon’s amendments." In this way, playwright MacDonald reminds us that literary works, like lives, are not inevitable but rather the consequences of persistent choices.

This production is also a reminder of how helpful a simple prop or vivid costume can be, especially with such a physically intimate staging as this. Not only does the golf-obsessed Sassoon not have to mime the occasional putt, he has antique clubs to swing. Not only is Owen in khaki soldier garb, it is authentic doughboy battle dress, eventually with a WWI steel helmet.

Even if Iraq were just another name on the Mideast map today, this powerful production of Not About Heroes would be a must-see theater event. Even if First Stage Providence were putting it on in someone’s basement rec room, it would be a shame to miss it.