The following is a review of the play “Surrender,” which we attended on Halloween night. The play will have a limited run from January 7-12, 2009 and I strongly recommend getting tickets and considering very carefully which you'd rather be: an observer, or a participant. Both will immerse you, in much the same way an avatar is immersed into a virtual world, into a dreamscape of mixed reality. As an observer, you won't simulate execution, but you'll become a voyeur while your friends learn to kill without mercy in under an hour. Spoiler alert: this review spares no detail, right down to the dirty feet of the Iraqi woman who locked eyes with me as the American soldiers flooded in...
A devil in red spandex holds a red-glitter pitchfork and an angel in stilettos with a feathered halo wired to her head block our path then move into the costumed crowd while we race past.
“We're not going to make it on time,” I say.
The Halloween parade densely draws a formation on Sixth Avenue, attendance bolstered by beautiful weather and the fact that it's Friday night. Fairies eat cupcakes with pink icing. The inevitable pimp in purple velvet smokes a cigarette as a secret service agent nearly gets mowed down by cops on motorcycles while staring at a man in dark shades wearing a sandwich board that shows the dwindling value of his 401K. Sarah Palin impersonators appear on every corner. Finally, we reach Wooster and Broome.
“You're late,” says a man in fatigues and combat boots. “Who is the observer and who is the participant?”
“Observer,” I instantly volunteer as Josh , the participant, steps forward.
Josh is asked to sign forms to verify that he believes himself to be healthy enough physically to deal with what's going to happen to him in the next three and a half hours. A man in combat fatigues explains that there's a safe word, if he needs to be removed from the action: MEDEVAC.
“Repeat it back to me,” he says, looking Josh dead in the eyes. Josh repeats it. I am dressed as a time traveler, for the party we are planning to attend after completing field research on conflict. We are all in various states of disguise. A civilian takes me into the theatre to observe Josh Fox's Surrender, co-written with Sergeant Jason Christopher Hartley, who now stands before us with two lines of people who have already been costumed for the show. Briefly, everyone looks at me when I sit on a gray bench along the wall in my layered dress, the silvery white tulle under a transparent sheet of black mesh. Hidden rooms flank the perimeter.
The sergeant demands that the soldiers do push-ups while waiting for “changing room” to finish up. I know Josh can hear him and I wonder if he's panicked as a result. Some of these people are actors and some are skittish or enthusiastic participants. In some cases it is easy to tell one from the other. A man with arm tattoos and a woman with yellow shoes sit on the bench with me. We are the only spectators. Josh appears in full military ensemble and only his round black glasses, which he pushes up on his nose, give him away as a non-military type. Even his hair appears to have been cropped with military precision, but surely this is the work of his Iranian Scotch-drinking barber and not some trickery recently accomplished backstage. He looks my way nervously and I start to take notes as the soldiers are trained in how to handle a weapon.
“Call me Sergeant Hartley, but never sir. All of us here work for a living. You will move as a group,” he says. “I know we're all New Yorkers, good at being individuals, but...”
The actors become a squad in training with red-tipped black plastic guns. First lesson: never call them guns. By now they know that the weapons have three settings: safe, semi and auto. Because they are never to “flag their buddies” they are to keep their fingers off the triggers and barrels pointed at the ground. Always. Unless they plan to kill someone, in which case the weapon's setting will be shifted from safe to semi, never auto, because auto is a spray of bullets and they're not supposed to flag their buddies. Besides, it's unsportsmanlike, and against the Geneva conventions.
My view from the gray bench as the firing squad advances as a unit, is of one particular woman. By now, Josh has stopped nervously trying to catch my eye because he's avoiding being singled out for push-ups and is, I suspect, more than a bit uncomfortable about handling the weapon. This woman, however, with her dominant blue eye focused unflinchingly on me, does not angle the barrel away from my body cavity the way the people pointing at the other two spectators do. Is she part of the production, trained to make the observers a part of the action, or is she, like Josh, completely new to this and perhaps drawn to it for reasons that might or might not be revealed? This is only Act One. It reminds me of Second Life: a simulation that feels real. She is an avatar, and the actions in which she is now engaged, whether she's a paid professional or not, are reflective of some part of herself. Surely, this is not real, I keep reminding myself. The guns—the weapons—are plastic. But he just said, “Never to point a gun at anyone unless you plan to engage, which means kill.” And she's pointing, and engaged, and she knows that I just heard what he said and is therefore trying to send a message: I could kill you, and I would. I stare back at her. In my leather bag there's a kaleidoscope, a viewfinder with slides that show exhibits from the Museum of Jurassic Technology and a laser kit that comes with sets of rainbow and 3D glasses. I want to look away from her. I can't. The moment feels like a dream crash, that fleeting space between awareness and explosion.
“Why shoot someone once when you can shoot them twice?” Hartley asks. “There are two types of infantrymen—the quick and the dead. You're going to want to stop and think about what you're doing along the way. Don't stop. Shoot, move, communicate. No flagging your buddies. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Get that mantra burned into your brain. Security, security, security. Look everywhere for threats.”
“Houses” are formed from cheap aluminum beams and planks on the floor. The squads stack up and learn how to clear a room. They stand in a tight formation, an unquestioned hierarchy of four bodies each with a different role in the group. I wonder what will happen if anyone is killed in battle. The troop surge in Iraq must have consisted of many new fourth wheels. Watching them learn how to function as a team is like watching a table of small children learn from blocks about colors, shapes and letters. There are no foreign alphabets when one is learning to interpret a particular set of symbols that form words. Language is the currency of the human experience. Written history is what makes us real. This is a play, I remind myself--a created experience that involves not just watching, but becoming immersed.
“The number one man chooses the path of least resistance,” said Jason Hartley, meaning, I think, that the squad leader is responsible for guiding the squad through the room clearing by swiftly identifying enemies (people with weapons) and civilians (people with no weapons). “You want to stay in contact,” he says of the squad, “not so much that you lose balance, but enough to know they're there.”
It occurs to me that this is a valuable lesson of war that should be put into practice more during times of peace. In fact, there are many such lessons, such as the ability to surrender to a process of collaboration and to overcome the ego's desire for extreme individualism in order to see beyond the limitations of entrenched social systems.
“We usually protect our personal space and all,” Jason Hartley continues, “we're Americans. But it's good to see we're getting over that.”
In virtual worlds, as in theatres, it often becomes impossible to separate fact from fantasy (it all becomes experience), which makes it more likely that immersive participants will let themselves go more deeply into the moment. When the squads start clearing the makeshift rooms with invisible walls, it becomes more apparent who the actors are and who, like Private Fouts, is completely new to this.
“The doorway is the fatal funnel,” Hartley continues. “If you're going to get killed, that's where it's going to be. Your squad leaders are god...the team leader in the infantry is the hardest job in the Army...double-tap...it's a grey area as per the Geneva conventions to shoot someone who is unarmed, it's a war crime...this isn't Halo. We're not doing any headshots. Hit them in the liver, the lung, the body cavity...”
An enemy is then introduced into the room. The demonstration squad emerges from among the participants to demonstrate his execution very matter-of-factly.
“Quick,” Sergeant Hartley says. “You can get in multiple shots before he hits the ground...or you can capture someone you want to tame.”
As he runs his hands along the dead enemy's body, he shares methods of searching for intelligence while I continue to toss that sentence around in my mind: or you can capture someone you want to tame.
A squad leader's job is to make sure the search for intelligence (in Vietnam, my father told me, the intelligence he discovered consisted mostly of cash, rice, photographs and drugs) is conducted by someone other than the shooter. Firing a weapon is altogether a different story from searching the body. But here's what I mean about the steadfast devotion created within a squad—dedication so intense that you can actually kill a real live person in front of your squad and the people in it will unflappably continue to move as a unit. Allegiance so intense forges a sense of unity and interdependence that fail to reach their full potential in modern societies in peaceful times.
In the infancy and adolescence of humanity, combat has offered an opportunity for extremely complex collaboration, while the work of creativity has been marginalized and left to individuals or those working in concert with relatively small groups. The paradigm is shifting because the Internet encourages, for the first time in recorded history, a major upgrade over collaborative destruction: collaborative creativity. As a result, eventually, destruction can become the marginalized act of isolated individuals. I imagine that this is a necessary next step on the long journey toward recognition of the paint-stroke of infinity in Rumi's lines:
Out beyond ideas of good and evil, there is field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn't make any sense....
“Don't step on the body,” Sergeant Hartley says. “We don't want to disgrace the dead.”
I can't tell if he means it.
After the soldiers are taught how to lock arms and carry the walking wounded, he breaks off and helps each of the two groups. One of the participants, who is very clearly not a part of the production because she has been giggling nervously on and off since accepting the weapon, wants to know if she's supposed to “understand the whole going-in-and-killing-someone thing.”
“This is all about killing,” Sergeant Hartley says plainly, without giggling back as an empty courtesy to match her nerves. “We're going into a small, poor town looking for insurgents. There are only three types on the battlefield. Friendlies, enemies and civilians.”
The soldiers disappear in the sudden loud darkness. The sound of gunfire begins immediately. Josh Fox appears on the bench next to me. He smells like time travel—cold air and smoke.
“You can go look in on them wherever you want,” he says, pointing at the wall behind me, which contains a hidden room where a silver mesh screen partially obscures a scene: a robed man with a gun, shaking, rocking on his heels as he crouches on the floor, barrel trained on the door. His fixation is so intense that he doesn't look up to see us standing there, but his praying wife does, and she locks eyes with us as if she's caught the gaze of god and we can prevent what's about to happen. It's so real, right down to the dirty feet, that for an instant I'm scared that these people are actual war hostages, spared the insanity of Gitmo or Abu Ghraib by agreeing to take their show on the road like circus tigers. Suddenly the dark room is filled with American troops. As soon as the man—the enemy—raises his gun, he is instantly snuffed out by newly-trained executioners. His body falls and the woman falls weeping on top of him after his body is searched for intelligence. The soldiers clear the room and move on.
“We just taught them to kill without mercy in under an hour,” Josh Fox said. “Josh did it.”
I follow him across the theatre to another silver screen, behind which sits a woman in a headscarf, holding a baby, her eyes lined in black. The other woman in the room is holding a gun, waiting. No, this is not a real war. She will not die, tonight, and I am only an observer. But we don't look away. Elsewhere, bullets are fired and someone screams. Between us hovers a mutual awareness of eventuality interpreted two different ways and yet, there's so much of a connection between us in that moment that it doesn't matter who either of us are. Being an avatar in an immersive virtual environment is similar to this feeling. Who is she, really? Who am I? In this moment, it doesn't matter. She is an Iraqi woman with a baby. I am an American journalist watching through a silver screen as troops flood the room and I think back to my father telling me about Vietnam.
“Did you kill anyone in Vietnam?” I ask. I am eight.
“What do you think we were doing over there?” he asks, laughing nervously the way the woman with the weapon laughed even though it was plastic and nobody can die from a fake gunshot wound.
He snaps his fingers in the air to tell me what it sounded like when bullets missed his head. The soldiers disappear. The woman still holds the baby, watching with the same dead-eyed stare over the dead body, which lies for the appropriate amount of time before a miraculous resurrection to await the next invasion. This reminds me of snakes I once discovered in the virtual world of Second Life. My avatar, Eureka Dejavu, plays a pungi in the desert while two black snakes slither and hiss and then loop around and start the process again, over and over. Experiencing "Surrender" is almost like being surrounded by robots programmed flawlessly to impart an accurate snapshot of the current state of human evolution. This is hard to understand, which is why I look forward to reading P.W. Singer's book Wired for War as soon as possible.
One room holds a man in a silver hood as an American soldier circles nervously, so much so that I start to wonder why she is alone and if she might scream MEDEVAC at any moment. Eavesdropping on her plight, I begin to feel the full weight of the absence of her squad. The troops burst into the room and the squad leader demands an explanation for the hooded man, whose hands are tied behind his back and whose neck is limp as a hanging corpse. Josh Fox is beside me again.
“Does Sergeant Jason Christopher Hartley have any confirmed kills?” I ask. He shakes his head.
“I can't talk about that. He's open about it but you have to get to know him first. He wrote a book. People are used to straight narratives,” he says. “Novels, TV, those are narratives that go from A-Z. But this is more like the Internet. You have to find your way through it. Do you want to see the hospital?”
Two smiling women push what appears to be a bar out into the center of the room. They are dressed as flight attendants, which reinforces the feeling that this is a simulation full of avatars. They smile widely, as if they have no idea they've landed in a war zone. For every role, there's someone willing to fill it. Josh Fox and I walk past them, down a small flight of steps to four nurses in pale blue scrubs hovering over a soldier on a cot, a sheet pulled up to her neck as last-ditch lifesaving measures are enacted.
“They keep trying to get her back in but if they can't, there's a death room back there,” says Josh Fox as one of the nurses enforces the suspension of disbelief by pulling a bloody rag out from under the sheet.
The nurses mumble about the end of the war like a choir of hushed whispering angels stuck in purgatory, the thin white curtain off the death room glowing ghostly behind them. Josh Fox and I watch the woman die. The sheet is lifted over a face that will disintegrate in the ground long before it will fade from memory. Light glazes her features momentarily and then she is a specter.
The Lord brought her to us...bring an end to this terrible war...you did what you could...
“Would you like a beer?” one of the flight attendants, a chipper blonde, hands me a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon as I walk back into the main room of the theatre. The soldiers are all there at Kuwait International Airport, drinking beer from small blue plastic cups and listening to music. Private Fouts and his squad leader were recounting the battle.
“I was just so grounded by your voice,” he says. “I was afraid I was going to mess it up. I didn't know if I was supposed to go right or left. At first it didn't look as if he had a weapon but then he looked away from the window and pulled it out from his robe and I fired.”
“I'm a big Geneva convention breaker,” the squad leader responds. She has delicate blue eyes like cornflower paint on transparent teacups. “If a girl has a weapon she's not a woman anymore as far as I'm concerned but that's not the law.”
I'm almost surprised that they can see me. Is the squad leader an actress with no war experience? I want to ask, but either way, she's still in character for the “intermission.” Jason Christopher Hartley approaches.
“I have questions for you,” I say, “but Josh Fox says I should wait until I get to know you better. So I'd like to know you better. I'd like to read your book.”
“What publication are you writing this for?” asks the squad leader.
My notebook is more than halfway full now with notes on war and peace, life and death. People always want to know who I'm writing what for, and I almost never know yet. Am I being perceived as a real journalist or an actress at the Kuwait International Airport, where the bleachers that once sat in darkness are now illuminated.
“You're happy out there,” Jason Hartley said, “for someone to tell you what to do.”
Military precision leaves no room for guesswork. Imagine what would happen if we could harness that power through the Internet, which requires people to generate content from their own lives in order to remain relevant and interesting but also requires the approval of the global digital culture in the form of links, support and action. It isn't just about numbers, but the devotion and interest of one's followers, each of whom are also at the center of his or her own movement. This is the first time that we've had both an opportunity to express authentic individuality and the infrastructure for organizing with military precision that requires the ability to give over to the riptide of the greater good, governed by the opinion of the world's people as we gain more information and develop a constantly improving sense of productive collaboration. President-Elect Barack Obama has already indicated that we aren't doing enough to create jobs through the Internet, which is nothing more or less complicated than one virtual world that allows us to reflect on the “real” world and have fun while solving complicated problems. That's how Sergeant Hartley got started—with a blog about his experiences as a soldier that was shut down by his superiors and eventually turned into a book, “Just Another Soldier,” published by HarperCollins.
Another squad leader slams his chest into Private Fouts and shouts, “best room clearer in the infantry!” as we are asked to take our seats on the airplane together for the reintegration into society. This, my father once told me, is where the military most fails the homeward bound soldiers (and their families) after they've been trained to respond to conflict with lethal combat.
On the airplane, an episode of the television show “Friends” is shown. Ambassador Cynthia P. Schneider often says that the main reason why people in the Middle East perceive Americans as friendly is because of that program. I wonder if it has been chosen tonight for that reason or because sprightly Rachel Green (at the spa, her buttery blonde highlights shining) is the perfect backdrop against which to splice footage of dead people. Iraqis, specifically, with their faces blown off, heads blown apart, bodies burnt and limbs torn to shreds.
“It's about corporate greed,” says Rachel Green's friend Phoebe Snow as the flight attendants take shape at the foot of the bleachers. One has a microphone and starts to gush about duty-free luxury goods. One holds a book called “Who is Picking the President?” Suddenly, a man with a gun is upon her, and I'm not even sure where he came from or how he got there. He smears blood on her face but she doesn't notice because she's completely absorbed in the task of selling totally useless items.
“You can no longer hear your own heartbeat in the shower,” an American soldier says. “The escape is fantasy, so what choices are you going to make now?”
Behind him, a row of troops in uniform become high school cheerleaders. We. Are. The. Mus. Tangs. Wel. Come. Home. To. You. Go. Red. Go. White. Go. Blue! Stepping over the body of the stewardess, they beam as a screen above their heads prompts the crowd to applaud. The soldiers clap as if it really is their homecoming party and they are safe in the bosom of the alma mater, complete with fading floorboards and cold air because heating oil is too expensive.
The cheerleaders begin to call the heroes to the stage. They are thanked for their heroism, one at a time until one of the soldiers is called to the podium to deliver a prepared eulogy for her fallen buddy. The participants had not been informed ahead of time that they would be singled out for any solo acting, and I wonder if Private Fouts will end up with a scene or if he'll be among those who are thanked and sent on home to try and adapt to society again as if nothing has changed.
“It is a special quality to be so dissatisfied,” she says of the body now resting on a bench near the slain stewardess. “I think that's what drove her to the military...None of us will ever have our fill of life.”
The folded flag is presented to a weeping woman and Private Fouts is called to the stage as a wheelchair is rolled his way.
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“You have been severely wounded,” says the doctor, who earlier was his squad leader. The details of the operation are scant and punctuated by the threat of spreading gangrene. The amputation of his left leg is scheduled for after visiting hours.
“Don't say anything incriminating on your site,” a fellow inmate at the hospital tells him. “Even if you're feeling crazy, don't tell. You can lose your benefits.”
The actors around him, patients who have lost their limbs or minds or both, are dressed in animal costumes. He is clad as a dog but doesn't realize it until later, when I show him my pictures. He is stunned to know that two nurses had remained by his side—he never saw their faces. But he did see the face of a woman who sang like an angel. A real angel. Not an actress or a soldier or a mother.
On the floor, human bodies slither toward the chopping block, personifying cows in the slaughterhouse. A soldier's first day on the job, he learns how to slit the animal's throats and hang them while their blood drains.
“I don't want to be a faker,” says a co-worker who pretends that he got his leg crushed in Iraq instead of by a cow, because the lie, he claims, attracts more attention from women. “We've all got to be as real as we can be.”
A man hangs at the front of the slaughterhouse, his hands in chains, his torso filthy. It is unclear, even as meat is removed from his body, whether he's supposed to be a man or a cow. Perhaps he is beyond both.
“How did I get here?” he asks. “Why can't I ever get back? I could destroy the entire universe before I could get myself to stop loving this. I could never go back to the way I was before.”
Chefs on both sides of the stage have been heating electric burners. The coils glow red and the meat is placed in the pans. It takes a few minutes for the smell of sizzling meat to permeate the air and by then we are at a wedding rehearsal, watching Jason Christopher Hartley's reintegration into society. Someone is getting married. The angel who sang at the feet of Private Fouts is a mother now, with advice about love.
“You've got to give yourself over to it,” she says, as I realize that the bride is the woman who held me at gunpoint earlier. Her fatigues have been replaced by a black dress and her long loose hair has escaped her tight soldier's bun.
“Last night I had a dream,” someone in the wedding party says. “I said yes to everything, as if my body wanted to give over to something...”
The cooks hang the meat on a wire before us, which can only possibly result in craving or aversion.
After the play, while the soldiers change back into their street clothes I talk to Sanford Wintersberger, who posted the line prompts for the actors to follow on the screens above their heads. His business card has the words Karaoke/Painting/Digital on it. He has glasses and a beard, and a woman comes and stands at his side while he reports statistics on the percentage of slaughtered civilians that have been killed in various wars, starting with ten percent in World War I, fifty percent in World War II, seventy-five percent in Vietnam and now ninety percent in Iraq.
“We are running a holocaust over there,” he says. “Everybody is in denial, either because of what we have been told or because it's too much to handle to think about where our money is going.”
Reality is changing. The global narrative created by the access of the Internet aids and facilitates development in the physical world. The United States military is setting up shop in the virtual world of Second Life. Soldiers are becoming storytellers. Activists are becoming surgically precise as they reach target demographics. Third graders don't just create shoebox dioramas any more—they can become immersed in ancient cities. Peace is not the absence of conflict. Violence is a sign of failure. The new global economy includes the narrative of what it means to be alive, right now, and telling this story in a compelling way, to an immersed audience, creates jobs. The Internet serves the collective ability to survive challenges that are far greater than any of the individuals composing the ever-shifting global population, and yet requires the unique individuality of individual ideas and actions. Immersive experiences such as "Surrender" will become more common in the physical world.
Back out in the night, we become curious observers of another costumed spectacle. The same way I will always remember the first night I went into Second Life and discovered another dimension, I will never forget how it feels to see the physical world so differently, as if for the first time. I am grateful for the opportunity to dress the part with nobody missing a beat. Tonight, avatars rule.
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