KHVIETNAM

Khalil Farah Dr. Richardson Theater 2100 26 October 2010 In both “The Vietnamization of New Jersey” and “The Life and Times of Tulsa Lovechild” there is an examination of how a person’s upbringing causes them to become the person they are. This is especially pronounced in regard to the culture and the family that a person is related to as they are grow up. In both the plays, the war in Vietnam and the way it changed the American families are present throughout. In “The Life and Times of Tulsa Lovechild,” Tulsa’s family is almost entirely composed of her mother. Her mother exists as a memory/ghost hybrid which also serves as her conscious in the face of a world which has lost the values of the 60’s. Tulsa seems to seek the culture, which her mother grew up as a part of, even though that is a time past. It is almost as if she is living as a person not of her time. This ends up hurting her prospects in the present. She writes her graduate school paper on Bob Dylan, a singer who is iconic of the 60’s, and yet that knowledge is utterly useless to her in the present. Her mother has even moved beyond the ideas of her youth. She tells Tulsa that she is “tired of being angry” and therefore she has been able to settle down. Tulsa is living on, as a memory of sorts, of the 60’s and its forgotten ideals. This out of place-ness that Tulsa has is a contributor to the humor that pervades the play. She is constantly reminded how her ideas are no longer relevant to her exasperation and the audience’s humor. Ironically, she desires to be like her mother, whose whole philosophy was a reaction against her own mother’s values. The fact that Tulsa’s dad left her mother for the war could be an explanation of this. Tulsa subconsciously blames the establishment for taking her father away from her mother and leaving her with her stepfather for who she clearly holds some contempt. In “The Vietnamization of New Jersey” the Vietnam war is shown in a very different light. The characters of the 60’s in “The Life and Times of Tulsa Lovechild” were very concerned with the Vietnam War and its ideological implications. The war is not just something that has an effect on the members of the generation but it seen as a war between the evil old guard and the good youth. This is not the case in “The Vietnamization of New Jersey.” In this play, there is no mention of the war in any of its political contexts. The war’s only effect is on the family in the way that it robs them of their son Davey. In fact, the profoundness of their son Et is humorously mocked in the way that the family ignores it repeatedly throughout the play. Davey, however, is different than his family in that he has some ideological agenda which he seeks to progress. He looks negatively on his parents’ prejudice and thereby seeks to open their mindset. The similarities in both of these plays are that the youth are more concerned with the bigger pictures than the adults are. The adults are concerned with the effect that politics has on their families solely and are not worried so much about how it changes the world at large. It is interesting in that both authors make the point to depict the 60’s as a time in which the youth were in charge or the state of the world while the adults were concerned with the state of their children. Both the plays deal in a time period where society was experiencing a shock as a result of the youth asserting themselves over the establishment of their parents. The blindness that the adults show to the concerns of the youth is what drives the humor in both plays. Both plays then, take the conflict of the era between adults and youth and show how that conflict manifests itself within the familial structure.