http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/27/arts/dance/healing-wars-by-liz-lerman-portrays-soldiers-trauma.html 2014-09-27 00:51:40 ‘Healing Wars,’ by Liz Lerman, Portrays Soldiers’ Trauma Liz Lerman’s latest production, “Healing Wars,” deals with the traumatic effects of war on soldiers and on those charged with healing them. === MONTCLAIR, N.J. — “Healing Wars,” the latest production by It’s a representative introduction to the show, which opened on Thursday at the Alexander Kasser Theater at Montclair State University, and its frustrating mix of past and present, real and fake, heavy-handed and understated. The subject matter could hardly be more potent: the traumatic effects of war on soldiers and on those charged with healing them. At times, the episodic production honors that material and affectingly brings it to life. Elsewhere, facts fall inert, with some of the randomness of war, and the show takes on the clumsy awkwardness of “historical re-enactments” in TV documentaries. Ms. Lerman makes many poor choices. A section disapproving of Hollywood representations comes off as smugly self-congratulatory. In a segment screening a viral 2010 video of soldiers in Afghanistan dancing to Lady Gaga, the show’s dancers block the soldiers’ images. But the worst decision is to have the spirit of death (the robust Samantha Speis, swooping in African-based motion) speak like some kind of sassy, modern-day teenager. It scuttles the work’s worthy attempt to balance the evolving science (and hype) of medicine with spiritual claims. The eight dancer-actors play multiple roles. The choreography too often seems inadequate or superfluous, and the acting swings from overwrought to “Our Town” naïve. The shaky artifice is set into relief by Mr. Hurley’s personable authenticity, yet the work improves whenever he is onstage. His simple re-enactment of how he lost his leg in 2006 — somewhat confusingly, in a car wreck in Bahrain — is one of the show’s best examples of how dance can amplify storytelling. One dancer plays his seatbelt. Later, Mr. Hurley removes his prosthesis and does a weight-sharing duet on a bench with Keith A. Thompson. Folding and unfolding, it resembles a dance expansion of a physical therapy session, but since Mr. Thompson represents Mr. Hurley’s friend who died in the crash — the memory that will haunt him forever — the scene is also the closest that “Healing Wars” comes to finding artistic expression for what it distinguishes as “absence,” something different from loss or nothingness. In the clunky introduction to that scene, a therapist reads Mr. Hurley a Civil War diary entry about the demands of the fallen. This seems to be the rationale behind the juxtapositions of conflict in Shiloh and Baghdad: the consolation of similarities in the past. Those may have healing power, yet the show is more distinctive in its emphasis on the pain and guilt of caregivers, the wider wounds war inflicts on society. In its rush to heal, “Healing Wars” is not nearly as ugly or harrowing as it should be — it ends with disco-ball Northern Lights prettily illuminating dancers portraying the dead — but I could have listened to Mr. Hurley all night.