The Body of an American

photo by James Leynse

“If you will do this, I’ll own you forever” – photojournalist Paul Watson hears before taking a picture of a dead American soldier in 1993 in Somalia, where he was covering a civil war for the Toronto Star. This picture got him a Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography. The words he heard haunted him for many years. These words and Mr. Watson’s story captivated the attention of the playwright Dan O’Brien when he heard an interview with him on “Fresh Air” on NPR. He decided to reach out to Paul, and so began a two-year pen-friendship, which later became the grounds for the play, The Body of an American.

The New York production by Primary Stages features two actors Michael Cumpsty and Michael Crane. The physical resemblance between actors and their real life prototypes won’t leave you confused, as Michael Cumpsty looks very much like Paul Watson, and Michael Crane’s dark hair and thick beard are reminiscent of O’Brien’s. Though sometimes, more so in the beginning, the actors swap roles as if they are settling into them. The two actors on stage also impersonate other characters in the play, which, along with the intensity of the story of that famous picture in the first scene, creates a swirl of a tornado-like force and takes your breath away for the remainder of the show.

Minimalistic set design by Richard Hoover consisted of two chairs and the white siding of a house in the back, functioning as screens for video projections by Alex Basco Koch. Projections were helpful to give the audience a necessary visual context in the beginning as not everybody is familiar with the picture of a dead soldier that Paul Watson took in 1993. As for the use of them as backdrops with snowed branches in Wisconsin or palms on the beach in LA, I am not sure it was necessary.  The words and the characters were powerful enough and carried the piece. More than that, I found the scenes with no projections the most captivating as they were stripped down to the two essential components of theater – the play and the actor.        

There is a recurring theme of feeling foreign to your own life and your own body and of the shifts between the words and the speakers. “If you will do this, I’ll own you forever”, to whom do these words belong? Was it the ghost of the American soldier William David Cleveland, one of many soldiers who died protecting interests of the USA in the international war conflicts? Was this voice inside the head of a war photographer, covering these conflicts for fame, adrenaline and money? Or do these words belong to a writer who is trying to summarize somebody else’s experience?

It is striking how lifelike and complex the portrayal of Paul Watson by Michael Cumpsty is. Paired with the character of the playwright Dan O’Brian, they create a very interesting duet. Juxtaposed against each other as a celebrity and his biographer, as a fearless war reporter and a writer who is fighting his wars in the comfort of his study, Watson and O’Brian look at each other as if they were looking in the mirror. Both haunted by their ghosts, both struggling to find, not the words, but who they belong to.