Wellfleet's 'Johnny' hasn't got its tone

Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun
One-act play adapted by Bradley Rand
Smith from Trumbo’s novel
Directed by: Neal Huff. Sound, Nathan Leigh. Lights, Kevin Hardy.
At: Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, Wellfleet, Sundays through Tuesdays, through July 11.
508-349-9428,
www.what.org

WELLFLEET -- A US infantryman comes home from World War I with no eyes, no ears, no mouth, no arms or legs -- with nothing, really, but a furiously functioning mind. From this horrific premise Dalton Trumbo crafted his 1939 novel, ``Johnny Got His Gun," pulling the reader into Johnny's inner darkness with an unstoppable flood of ferocious prose. It is hard to imagine a more potent response to the ravages of war.

It is also hard to imagine a more interior one. The strength of Trumbo's approach comes largely from his insistence on keeping us trapped, along with Johnny, inside his head. And yet the cumulative power of the story has repeatedly tempted adapters to transfer it to stage and screen. The problem, of course, is how to keep us inside a character as we watch an actor from the outside.

Before he went on to fame on Broadway (in ``Take Me Out" and, more recently, ``The Little Dog Laughed"), actor Neal Huff grappled with this conundrum at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater. That was in 1992, just after the first Gulf War. Now that the United States is back in Iraq, Huff is back in Wellfleet with ``Johnny" -- but this time as director, not actor. In his place onstage as Joe Bonham is Aaron Staton, a quintessentially beautiful fair-haired boy.

Huff and Staton give Bradley Rand Smith's one-man adaptation plenty of fury and fire. Staton rages and weeps and sweats as he slowly realizes the hideous extent of his injuries, and the contrast between his physical perfection and what Joe calls the maimed ``side of beef" he has become only underscores the loss. What this performance needs, though, is more modulation of tone, more moments of stillness between the shouts to let us grapple with the horror on our own.

Instead, Staton starts out loud and gets louder, leaving himself nowhere to go for the highest-pitched moments of anger and despair. I saw an early performance, though, so he may settle into a less rushed and pressured pace as he continues to explore the role. Certainly he has the vocal and physical skills to pull it off.

The production could also provide more shading and variety in what is, after all, a nearly 90-minute monologue. On a bare stage backed by a black curtain stands a single wooden armchair, lit by a hanging lamp. The starkness feels appropriate, as do the occasional changes of lighting to signal shifts into remembered joys or recurring nightmares. But the pattern of Staton's movement from standing to sitting to crouching to standing again doesn't always mesh with the movement of the text. The actor's physical presence, and the way he manipulates it in space, could -- and should -- shape the arc of the story with more definition and rhythm.

Part of the problem lies in the script, which sometimes seems to lift chunks of the novel and place them directly onstage. Joe's lyrical descriptions of boyhood pleasures provide lovely and necessary respite on the page, but spoken aloud they feel too literary. It's like watching someone read instead of hearing him speak.

WHAT clearly aimed to present a play that speaks to the current war, and that's a noble goal. At its best moments, ``Johnny" can be eloquent and even moving. If only it could carry us more decisively, more smoothly, into the painful world it so longs to make us see.