What are we doing here, sarge? Uh, we’re doing a play — Tyler Rive in Iraq and Back
"What the fuck am I doing here?"
Based upon the month and a half he was in Iraq building water treatment units for the United States army, Tyler Rive’s play Iraq and Back offers theatergoers insight into life during wartime. "The audience will get a first-hand view, that's 99.99 per cent true, of what goes on that doesn't usually make it into the news," he says.
Rive remembers one incident in which he had to pick his way through a boneyard by walking in another's footsteps, because the area had not been scanned for mines. "It was fucking scary," Rive says of his time in Iraq. "You're working in a war zone, you're in constant danger, but the work still has to get done."
Rive embodies more than a dozen characters throughout his 55-minute play, including soldiers and contractors of varying nationalities. He doesn't portray any Iraqis, however, because he met few nationals when he was there. "My only intention in writing this was to tell my own story of being a foreigner in Iraq,” Rive says. “It's about growing up, about becoming a man, and about taking responsibility for yourself.”
The other show in Ghost River Theatre's Double Solo bill is entitled My Autopsy. The show's creator, Hamish Boyd, describes it as a "spiritual self-evisceration. It's all about birth, death and rebirth.”
"I'm an old hippie," he laughs, adding that the play explores these themes through his own life story, which includes LSD trips, meditation and questioning the meaning of life and religion. "I got to a point where I compared Jesus and Dracula," Boyd says, recalling an analogy he developed as a boy attending confirmation class. "They're both dead men flying and, if you drink the blood of either one, you'll live forever.”
His various experiences in My Autopsy include meeting an ex-convict while hitchhiking to California, performing autopsies in Yellowknife, visiting meditation masters and seeing the burning ghats along the Ganges River in India where Hindus are cremated.
Boyd builds his work towards some personal conclusions about the meaning of life. "We are all things, yet we are nothing," he says.
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