Not About Heroes looks at a poetic bond forged in war

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Out of the Great War’s great despair and suffering came poetry that brought eloquence and voice to soldiers’ bad dreams. And, as depicted in Stephen MacDonald’s 1982 play, Not About Heroes, deep friendship, too.

Friends expect to lose friends in war, but it’s sudden and painful all the same. At Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre, two soldiers find companionship for a short time, a bond expressed through their many writings, which are woven into this beautiful and poignant play. Keenly directed by Bob Paisley, in this centennial year of World War I’s beginning, Heroes brings that war up close and personal. One needn’t have seen war to understand it here, where it lives through the eyes and words of two who have fought at the front.

It’s a true story: Writers Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon meet in Craiglockhart military hospital in Edinburgh, in 1917, when this play begins. Already, their firsthand knowledge of war — trenches, machine guns, barbed wire, mustard gas — has seeped into their writing. Having enlisted in 1914, Sassoon (Robert Gibby Brand) is a well-known poet by this time, now a war hero. But battle, specifically the European conflict’s length and horrific strategies, has turned him to pacifism. “They have to stop it,” he insists.

Instead of being court-martialed, he’s sent to a hospital in Edinburgh to be treated for “shell shock.” There, he continues his protest via verse. Also at Craiglockhart to recover is the younger Owen (Seth Macchi), another enlistee, who senses that his battle fatigue is viewed as cowardice. He aims to return to France.

Slightly starstruck by Sassoon’s presence in the hospital, Owen seeks him out, a book by Sassoon in hand. Their friendship finds almost immediate form through collaboration, as they work together over a desk on a draft of Owen’s “Anthem of Doomed Youth” — The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells — to grasp the right words. Sassoon, a mentor of sorts, makes suggestions and edits (including the change of “Dead” to “Doomed”).

The play feels very personal, these men’s deepest thoughts and darkest experiences — and their need to speak “truth” — elevated through their affinity with, and use of, language. Adding to the depictions is the elegant, multilayered work of Macchi and Gibby Brand, who give vivid voice to their characters through monologue and conversation.

It’s a quiet and moving play (but not a slow one), just two poet-soldiers finding their way through a terrible wound in world history — “not a war about heroes but the deaths of boys.” Crisp, detailed dialogue re-creates these figures and the bond they developed, their letters, diaries and poetry incorporated so seamlessly into the script that they become natural elements of these staged interactions.

I last saw Macchi this past summer, in the KC Fringe Fest production Bad Auditions, a comedic and largely improvisational show that changed somewhat from night to night. Hilarious and inventive, Macchi stood out in the performance I attended. Here, he turns to his serious side in a portrayal as effective as it is different.

The accomplished local actor Gibby Brand makes a profound impact as a sensitive, wise and angry Sassoon. He imparts conflicted emotions and transparency of thought in an artful portrayal that’s both subtle and intense.

Paisley’s simple staging and set, arranged in the round, adds to this show’s intimacy, keeping actors close to the audience on all sides of the house. Derek Boyd’s lighting design and John Story’s sound heighten the play’s dramatic moods. (The realistic period clothes are by Erica Sword.)

It doesn’t give anything away to say the men’s relationship was brief. “War is not glorious,” they agree, but their poems are. We come to know these writers through the playwright’s exquisite script and the words left behind by Owen and Sassoon. It’s a sad story, certainly, but a humanizing and instructive one, bringing their legacy to light while enriching our lives.