Stage Fight

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A Scottish regiment bolsters the U.S. in Black Watch

Pavel Antonov

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They run, March, curse, fight, sing--and occasionally die--on a cavernous expanse of stage nearly half a football field wide. In their dress-up uniforms, they're an exotic-looking bunch: wearing kilts, playing bagpipes, sporting tam-o'-shanters with a red feather. This Scottish army regiment seems out of place in Iraq, transferred from Basra to bolster U.S. troops bogged down in the "triangle of death" near Baghdad. But their plainspoken, Highland-accented gripes about the war have a familiar ring. "You're no' really doing the job you're trained for," says one soldier. "You're no' defending your country. We're invading their country and f______ their day up."

Black Watch, a galvanizing, free-form stage piece from the National Theatre of Scotland (it debuted in 2006 at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and has toured Britain, Australia and three U.S. cities), is the highlight of a remarkable recent surge of plays about the Iraq war. Hollywood, traditionally the go-to vehicle for telling war stories, had its own flurry of interest but after a few star-studded box-office underperformers (In the Valley of Elah, Redacted and, most recently, Body of Lies) has largely retreated to its foxhole. Theater has stepped into the breach, using an impressive arsenal of stage weaponry to grapple in more imaginative, varied and visceral ways with the U.S.'s extended tour of duty in Iraq.

The plays have ranged from politically loaded docudramas, like David Hare's Stuff Happens--an account of the Bush Administration's run-up to the war, with a focus on British Prime Minister Tony Blair's role as overzealous cheerleader--to angry satire, like Embedded, a biting if overwrought send-up of the selling of the war, featuring Administration stand-ins with names like Rum-Rum and Gondola, written and directed by Tim Robbins for his L.A.-based Actors' Gang. The war has been a jumping-off point for psychological family drama (Christopher Shinn's Dying City, about a war widow reunited with the brother of her husband, recently killed in action) and for polemical journalism (George Packer's Betrayed, based on his reportage about the plight of Iraqi citizens who went to work for the Americans early in the war, then were abandoned to face sectarian revenge). Some plays are stripped-down monologues, like Judith Thompson's Palace of the End, in which an Iraqi woman, a British weapons expert and a U.S. soldier who took part in prisoner abuse tell their stories; others are more ambitious, experimental and experiential. Coming soon to off-off-Broadway: a 3 1/2-hour environmental-theater event called Surrender, in which audience members are put through simulated training and deployment to Iraq, taught how to search for insurgents and then sent back home to go through rehab at Walter Reed. Turn off your cell phones, please, and return the M-4 rifles on your way out.