I haven't posted about this in a long time 🎭

[dorchadas]

We went to the theatre.

Thirteen Days was the last show that I was going to go to before all theatre was cancelled last year, and at the time they vowed that when the Plague Year ended they'd put on the same show again. Well, the Plague Year hasn't quite ended yet but it's ended enough that they were able to put on a show, so I bought theatre tickets for the first time in a year and a half, my parents agreed to come visit and babysit Laila, and sashagee and I went for a Sunday matinee.

Thirteen Days is about the Cuban Missile crisis, like the movie of the same name, both adapted from Robert Kennedy's memoirs, though the play obtained special permission from the estate to adapt dialogue from recently-declassified transcripts of the meetings. lisekatevans played Bobby Kennedy--the play has an entirely-female cast--and did most of the narration. If I have a criticism about the play, it's that a lot of the action was told, not shown. Maybe it's because there wasn't enough recorded dialogue to come up with a satisfying script for those meetings, or maybe it's because they weren't as exciting as the meetings that we did see. I would have liked to see some of the meetings that President Kennedy wasn't present for where EXCOMM hammered out their recommendations, though.

That said, the atmosphere of the play was terrific. There was a real sense of danger in the air, at the possibility of global thermonuclear war, and even though I already knew all the historical events I was still in suspense about what would happen next. I already knew about Stanislav Petrov, and a couple years ago I read Able Archer 83: The Secret History of the NATO Exercise That Almost Triggered Nuclear War and learned how close I was to dying in atomic fire before my first birthday, and the common thread of all of these is (pessimistically) how many times humanity came to the brink of a nuclear war or (optimistically) how we always pulled back from the brink. I had that in mind the whole time I was watching, especially since we only got the American perspective. As in the Able Archer incident, the Soviets had no way of knowing what was going through the Americans' minds. That applies to everyone, actually--the most memorable moment for me was after multiple discussions about a quid pro quo removal of missiles in Turkey, how the Americans wanted to remove the Turkish missiles anyway, how they'd have to talk to NATO, how they can't remove the missiles in response to the Soviets' actions because that looks like bowing to a thread, President Kennedy shouts, "We've been talking about this for a WEEK and no one has told [the Turks]?!" The flow of information was definitely much slower in the days where you'd have to wait for news to come in over the wire, and those scenes where the stress breaks through stand above the various "Mr. President, we recommend invading" ones.

The play is definitely in the "America, Fuck Yeah" mode. Since it's based on Robert Kennedy's memoir, it's about how in the face of unwarranted Soviet aggression, America's steady head and firm resolve forced the Soviets to back down and prevented war. But any changes would make it a completely different play, and it's worthwhile to present America's perspective--that's certainly what the people in those meetings believed they were doing. And with already having to cut out a lot of meetings, adding in a Soviet or Cuban perspective as well would have required changing everything and presenting an entirely different play.

It's currently getting great reviews and runs through the end of the month.

Comments

[earthspirits]

I saw the film. The play version sounds fascinating. Yeah, those were scary times for the world, not that times aren't scary nowadays too.