The Sand Storm - A Play

     It is somewhat difficult for me to write my reaction to this play.  Call it spoiled if you will but I have become biased toward Tim O’Brien’s stories. Perhaps “The Sand Storm”  might have a greater impact on me if I were to see it performed in all of its sensual format. Something meaningful seems to have been lost in a mere reading of the script. My initial reaction was, this guy, Sean Huze, is just another angry whiner who needs to grow up. As I read the pages, I could feel anger directed at our government and society. At times this anger seemed like that of some little kid who didn’t get his way.

Iraq-war1: mediafreedominternational.org

     This tone carried through a great deal of the play. Most of the monologue involved graphic descriptions of dismembered bodies. There seemed to be little real emotion or human factor attached with these shocking scenes and I was left with the attitude that says, “yes, war is horrible, tell me something new.” My point is, the play, as a whole, seemed to be a little on the generic side for me. Some of the flavor of this play was a failed attempt to place Iraqi Freedom on the same level as the Vietnam war. There was and forever will be only one Vietnam. The armed forces before, and currently participating in the Middle East are volunteer forces.

     In the last few pages, Sean Huze does present us with moments of the emotional, introspective impact war can have on a man when Cpl Rodriguez tells us, “Maybe some of us are walking dead, soulless shells of the men we were” (Huze 17). For me though, even that line, as deep as it may sound, has a hollow ring to it. I did not come away from a reading of this play with anything more than I already know about war. People get mutilated and killed, do things they never thought they were capable of, and come back changed people. The real deep emotional lesson of being human did not come across clearly to me.

Here is the Schedule for: The Elephant Space Theater if you want to go see the play.