Set in 1968, Therapy and Resistance tells the story of the Viet Nam War draft resistance movement and the attempts of one draftee to get a deferment as a manic-depressive schizophrenic with paranoid tendencies.
Cast & Crew
first presented at Dreamland Arts in 2010
Written and performed by Carlyle Brown
Directed by Noël Raymond
Designers
Lighting design by Mike Wangen
Sound design by Amy Finch
Press
Therapy and Resistance at Dreamland Arts
by Shelby Meyers on the City Pages Dressing Room Blog, September 7, 2010
Award-winning playwright Carlyle Brown is currently performing his latest one-man play, Therapy and Resistance, at Dreamland Arts in St. Paul. Brown’s new work focuses on telling the story of a Vietnam War draftee pursuing deferment.
Brown is a 2010 honoree of the Otto René Castillo Award for Political Theatre, and his one-man play The Fula from America has toured the country to critical acclaim.
Therapy and Resistance is Carlyle Brown’s third one-man performance. Directed by Noël Raymond, it shares a story of a young African American man taking part in the draft resistance movement during the Vietnam War. The man claims to be a manic-depressive schizophrenic with paranoid tendencies, and shares a personal narrative from 1968 with cutting political satire that can easily reflect the feelings of today.
Despite the single actor in this one-man show, the story includes a compelling cast of characters in order to tell the tale. From the behavioral psychatrist to the recruiting officer, audiences will be able to get a glimpse of the effects of war from various angles. As Brown recently noted, solo performances of this nature are more than just storytelling, they are an act of sharing.
Video
Resources
Therapy and Resistance Source Material
“The art of war is of vital importance to the state. It is a matter of life and death, a road to safety or ruin… He who wishes to fight must first count the cost…”
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 6th Century BC
“You can kill ten of my men for everyone I kill of yours, but even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.”
—Ho Chi Minh to the French, late 1940’s
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”
—Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech, American Society of Newspaper Editors, 16 April 1953
“Tell the Vietnamese they’ve got to draw in their horns or we’re going to bomb them back into the stone age.”
—General Curtis Lemay, May 1964
“We should declare war on North Vietnam…We could pave the whole country and put parking strips on it, and still be home for Christmas.”
—Ronald Regan, 1965
“One of the greatest causalities of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society…shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Draft beer, not people.”
—Attributed to Bob Dylan
“I’m not going to be the first American President to lose a war.
—Richard Nixon, October 1969
“Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in living rooms of America – not the battlefields of Vietnam.”
—Marshall McLuhan, 1975
“War does not determine who is right-only who is left.”
—Bertrand Russell