"BRING 'EM ON"         

   EXCERPTED FROM NEWSDAY- 02/28/08  

    By Sean Divid Bennet
    Directed by Frederic DeFeis
    Set - Fred Sprauer
    Lighting - Al Davis
    Costumes - Lois Lockwood.
    Seen on February 23
    Article by Steve Parks

         "Bring 'Em On!" an episodic drama that takes its title/inspiration from 
one of the president's more egregious statements regarding the invasion of Iraq,
is a political indictment posing as anti-war tragedy.

         Sean David Bennett's play, making its world premiere on Arena Players' 
black-box Second Stage, takes both the long view of modern war (one segment 
takes the perspective of a Holocaust survivor) and the view of the moment 
(it all but anoints Barack Obama as George W. Bush's successor). Along the way in 
what amounts to an endorsement of "the man with big ears," Bennett, who premiered
 "A House Divided" at Arena in 2005, examines the human fallout of war in 10 sharply
 focused vignettes.

          We're introduced to these artfully drawn mini-dramas by a buffoonish commander
in chief (Rob Rosin) who marshals the masked faces of armed conflict: War, Pestilence,
Famine and Death. Next, we meet two unmasked musicians decompressing in postwar 
Austria: the pianist widow of a Jew who died in a concentration camp and her cellist colleague, 
a gentile who bears the guilt of escaping persecution and extermination. Gail Merzer Behrens
as the widow and Judith Anderson ( Edie Falco's mother, who appeared briefly in "The Sopranos")
ward off the reflected horrors of unbridled power with tears of forgiveness and acceptance.

          In separate stories, Rosin, as a World War II bombardier facing the end of his days
four decades later, is haunted by an innocent child-victim's face. Torturing himself worse
than any enemy could, he cannot forgive his actions - any more than Vito Pipitone, 
playing a veteran of the Iraq war, can forgive his slaying of blameless civilians. 
He is left a homeless panhandler on Third Avenue, avoiding the Veterans 
Administration's bureaucratic notion of treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.

          Eva Mastrangelo as an older sister, and Deanna Kupres as her soon-to-be 
coming-of-age brother, deliver a deceptively gentle portrait of a suicide bomber 
too young to be tempted by heavenly virgins. It's the sole glimpse Bennett offers
 of the "other side" in the "war on terror." But these Muslim siblings powerfully 
undercut the hubris of the president's challenge to terrorists everywhere:
 "Bring 'em on" only further endangers those in harm's way - American troops 
and innocent civilians.

          Still, Bush the Younger is too easy a target for a dramatist as skilled as Bennett,
recipient of the 2004 Edward Albee Playwriting Fellowship and a member of the 
Kennedy Center's Playwriting Intensive, where he was tutored by the likes of 
Pulitzer Prize winner Marsha Norman.

          Bennett's disarmingly (in more ways than one) closing argument - a pledge of 
allegiance not to "lead us into war based on a lie" - is far too strident to move 
those not already converted. It's a bit like saying that Saddam Hussein was a 
bad guy. Well, no kidding. But even Saddam got a trial before they hanged him.