Silent Men Speaking

Please see Carl's new web site for performance information: SilentMenSpeaking.com

During the Viet Nam War I was either in high school or college at Penn State. None of my brothers served. I only knew a few guys from my home town that went. At Penn State I knew a lot of returning GIs who were in college by then. There was something mysterious about them to most of us. They walked around campus in their green Army jackets with beards and long hair and tattoos and looks on their faces that I was too young and naive to understand.

Later I fell in love with two Viet Nam vets. Both relationships ended badly – at the time I didn’t know why. I do now. I regret that I was as unaware of what hells they had been through but then, at the time, they themselves didn’t know the tolls those hells had taken.

Carl Thomsen is a beautiful man. He is tall and muscular and rugged looking. Until tonight I had never seen him dance and, I have to say, I have never been as devastated by a performance in my entire life. His performance of the dance he wrote and choreographed, Silent Men Speaking, is mind-numbing. From the minute he appears, alone, on the floor, until the dance end some 65 breath-taking minutes later, his body and what his body can do, is the only thing that exists in the room. He speaks the words of the stories he is telling and there is a soundtrack that he moves to and they are fine but it is his body, his movement, his metamorphosis, that is the focal point.

The West End Theater is a perfect venue for this dance because it is old and battered and hard - a bare wood floor, brick walls draped with black fabric, spotlights that follow him as he carries his audience into a world where no one would want to go except in the safety of art. His body is a helicopter, a machine gun, a soldier in boot camp, rain hammering mud, bullets splattering mud, parts of bodies, broken bodies, bodies in chains being tortured — dead bodies. You cannot tear your eyes away and, unless you are blind or dead inside – you cry.

His stories are culled from the stories of four Viet Nam vets, David Bianchini, Allen Gaskell, Marc Levy, and Robert Vinson. They tell the stories of a little boy who played with little green army men and then became one; a priest who left the seminary to become a helicopter pilot; a boy who became a medic because he didn’t want to be a butcher and came to believe there wasn’t much difference; and a kid from a terrible home who became a soldier, a prisoner who spent six months in solitary confinement, an alcoholic and then a mountain climber. All the stories are achingly honest.

The sound collages by Jeffrey Steele are perfect – the sounds of helicopters and jungle birds and machine guns and rain is interspersed with Steele’s own music and excerpts from Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son”, Billy Bang’s “Tet Offensive”, and the requisite Doors and Buffalo Springfield snippets. Thomsen moves with unearthly grace and ungodly power through them all.

His Dance of the Burning Monk is shattering. I found myself scarcely able to breath – I remembered all too well images in the paper and on television of those monks so devastated by the war that they set their own bodies on fire in protest. And Thomsen’s final dance, The Wall: With every one of them a piece of me died... reduced me to sobs.

I wish I had the power to make this performance available to everyone. I wish anyone who thinks that war has good purpose would experience it and, for Christ’s sake, learn the lesson. Carl Thomsen has created something extraordinary that deserves a much greater venue than The West End Theater in Gloucester. Maybe a few might learn...

My father served in World War II, a war that was necessary if ever a war was necessary. Later in his life he used to watch World War II movies with John Wayne and Robert Mitchum and Burt Lancaster. I often watched them with him. We didn’t talk about it but it was a thing we did together. One time in the middle of some heroic moment my father looked at me and said, “You know this is all bullshit, don’t you?”

Bullshit? I didn’t know what to say. “Yeah,” he said, “they like to make out like it’s all glorified heroics but it’s not.” He sat silent while John Wayne did some amazing thing. “War is waste,” he said at last. “It’s waste and bullshit and vanity.”

I forgot about that until I saw Carl Thomsen dance tonight. I’ll never forget either of those things – my father’s words, or Thomsen’s dance again.

Thanks for reading.

Please see Carl's new web site for performance information: SilentMenSpeaking.com