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Casualties of war mount in 'Six Years''Greatest Generation' walking wounded in Humana Festival playBy Porter Anderson  Sharr White, right, with director Hal Brooks, takes a break in rehearsal for the Humana debut of "Six Years." RELATED
YOUR E-MAIL ALERTSLOUISVILLE, Kentucky (CNN) -- He sits among critics, producers and agents in the darkened theater, looking almost as cowed as the hyperventilating young recruit in his show. "Six Years" playwright Sharr White has come to the Humana Festival of New American Plays with the world premiere of a battlefield indictment played out in the family room. Hunched on a back row in the Actors Theatre of Louisville's sleek Bingham Theatre, he listens as his words are spoken by actors -- and more importantly, heard by an influential audience -- in five scenes that describe a 24-year relationship. Phil Granger, silent and absent since being discharged from the service six years earlier, is met in a motel room by his distraught wife in 1949 St. Louis, Missouri. By evening's end, the couple will be in another motel room, their marriage in ruins, their son a Vietnam fatality and their mission to watch other couples' children return from war at Travis Air Force Base in California. (See a gallery outlining the plot of "Six Years".) "I knew I wanted something that would speak to us now," White says. "And World War II seemed natural because of the mythology we've built around it as 'the good war.' ... "And yet to what extent do we go to war today because we're looking so hard for the next 'good war?' Just think about these comparisons that the administration tries to make today between World War II and Iraq." (In mid-March, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote in an opinion piece, "Turning our backs on postwar Iraq today would be the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis." Read about the dispute generated by Rumsfeld's statement.) The resonance for White's audiences in Louisville has been evident, some theatergoers approaching him afterward to share their families' struggles with the wages of war played out on the stage. All our sonsSeveral characters are at the darkening intersection of this drama that some have remarked has the bearing of an Arthur Miller play, along the lines of "All My Sons," the work about war profiteering during World War II and how it ripped apart a family. Phil, of course, is most immediately the victim, so traumatized by his battlefield experieces that he never effectively re-engages in the life he left at home. His wife, Meredith, steps in to drive the family's future, financial as well as social. "But you know, I really see this as a story about sons' fascination with their fathers," White says. "It's that, and the sons' needing to experience for themselves what has happened to their dads as soldiers. World War II veterans are famous for not talking a lot about what happened to them. Sons need to know." Michael, Phil and Meredith's son in "Six Years," enlists -- although fearfully -- for service in Vietnam, where he dies in action. In the play's most wrenching scene, Phil can't bring himself to try to talk his only son out of going to war. He's paralyzed as Meredith walks their son off to war, clutching her adolescent soldier-son's elbow. Battle strategy Phil Granger (actor Michael J. Reilly, rear center) returns from World War II traumatized in White's "Six Years." White, who works as a Manhattan advertising copywriter to support himself, his wife and child, was at a California community college when theater became an obsession for him. Studying at San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater, he worked his way through several difficult years of writing in New York that led to "The Hotel Project." It was in that 2003 piece, designed to be performed in a Marriott suite in Charlotte, North Carolina, that the characters of postwar Phil and Meredith were conceived. Despite White's honors, which include a prize in the Julie Harris Playwright Award program, it's unclear how "Six Years" will fare after its Humana Festival debut. In its 30 years, the Actors Theatre of Louisville's festival has established itself as the top U.S. new-play venue. Its special weekend in April designated for international critics, producers and agents can draw some of the most daunting audiences of any season. The company boasts that more than 90 million Americans have seen plays in productions that followed Humana Festival debuts. But White's show met with a respectful, even regretful response from influential New York Times critic Charles Isherwood, who found the best efforts of director Hal Brooks and the Louisville cast delivering "a frustratingly flat theatrical experience." So White and his agent, Peregrine Whittlesey -- she's known for nurturing the work of such writers as Pulitzer Prize-winning Nilo Cruz -- now will work on their next moves after the play ended its run this month. Does "Six Years" go to some of the country's powerful regional-theater system professional stages? Or is the best move to attempt a staging in New York? White is a robust man who seems even now to wear that California tan of years ago. But he looks peculiarly vulnerable in that back row of the Bingham Theatre as he watches the disintegration of his Granger family onstage. But White in his mid-30s already has reached a peak of production that many playwrights will never know. "I haven't had this real exposure to the greater theater community before this. I still can't believe it's happened, really," he says. Wherever "'Six Years" takes him, White is one of the lucky ones, and knows it. "I'm working on copy about skirts," he says, back at the advertising agency days after the show's debut. "And it's OK. This has been great." For information on the Actors Theatre of Louisville's new production of actress-playwright Regina Taylor's "Crowns" -- about African-American women's tradition of wearing fabulous church hats -- on April 19-May 14, call (502) 584-1205. 
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