HISTORICAL BACKGROUND. 

Much of  Manny’s War takes place during the waning days of World War II.  On June 6, 1944 Allied forces under the command of General Dwight Eisenhower stormed the beaches of Normandy in northern France.  By day’s end, the Allies had established a foothold on the European continent from which they would push eastward, driving the German army before them.  But the advance was slower than anticipated, and by December the Germans were still putting up stiff resistance, holding the Allied forces at the German border.  In a final act of desperation, Hitler ordered his armies to mount a huge counterattack, penetrating the Allied lines and destroying the invaders.  On December 16, 1944, the Germans struck, breaking through the Ardennes front in Belgium, and pushing the Allies westward for a distance of 65 miles.  Because this penetration created a bulging pocket of German troops deep in Allied territory, it came to be known as The Battle of the Bulge.  Eventually the Germans were thrown back, and less than five months later would surrender to the Allies, thus ending the war in Europe.

THE AUTHOR. 

Martin Andrucki was born in the Bronx where he attended St. Frances de Chantal grammar school and Mount St. Michael Academy.  He earned his B.A. in English at Columbia University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard, writing his doctoral dissertation in the field of modern drama. See his bio here.

His first exposure to live theater occurred during his freshman year in high school when he attended a performance of The Caine Mutiny Court Martial by Herman Wouk .  During the summer following high school, he acted in the Croton-on-Hudson Shakespeare Festival in New York, and in college he performed with the Columbia Players.  Andrucki continued his acting in graduate school, appearing in several productions at Harvard’s Loeb Drama Center.  He also began directing, staging productions of Brecht’s Galileo, and The Measures Taken, the The Second Shepherds’ Play, and The Channel Feeling by Frank Kinahan, at Winthrop House and the Loeb Center.  

Andrucki is now Professor of Theater at Bates College, where he has taught since 1974.  He has directed more than thirty productions in academic and professional theaters, and has appeared as host on WCBB’s series on Maine film and video makers, Wide Angle.  He has also taught modern drama and film studies at Harvard University, and performance technique to lawyers-in-training at the University of Maine School of Law.

About Manny’s War, Andrucki writes:

This is a story based one man’s real-life experiences during the second World War.  What fascinates me about the main character is the sense of guilt that haunts him throughout his life because of a single act of betrayal during his captivity as a prisoner of war.  This is compelling to me because of the way it throws into sharp relief the fundamental social and political struggles of the twentieth century.   At the risk of oversimplifying history, I’d say that these  conflicts have been between people who believe in the absolute value of the individual, the power of conscience, and the reality of natural law, versus the communist and fascist totalitarians who deny all of that, and see man as nothing but a blank slate waiting to be written on by society or the state.   Manny’s real-life counterpart, haunted by guilt for an a act of individual human disloyalty, helps us to see that the twin ideologies of communism and fascism, together with their current variants, were and are wrong, and that the voice of the moral law is real and persistent.

Andrucki’s other plays include Mobile Home, a dark comedy about a family in collapse, Chopsticks, a comedy about resettling in Maine, and The Nutcracker, a dramatized version of the well-known story by E.T.A. Hoffman.

THE SETTING.

Manny’s War is what is called a “memory play.”  That is, its events take place both in the current life of its protagonist and in a past time which the audience experiences only through his memory, the former providing a kind of foreground to the latter.  In this play, the foregrounded present is the office of Dr. Benoit, a psychologist who works for the Veterans Administration in Togus, Maine.  A table, a couple of chairs, and a few props serve to evoke for us this site of Manny’s struggle to come to terms with his past.  Looming over and behind the present, however, is the theater of Manny’s memories, a place populated by scenes from World War II: an Army camp in Florida, a troop ship in the mid-Atlantic, the front lines during the Battle of the Bulge, field hospitals, prison camps, and Manny’s own family home.  Because memory is so fluid, and ranges so freely through time and space,  and because the scenes of the action change so often and so quickly, this world of the past is not given specific or detailed scenic existence.  Instead, it is represented by a single-unit set, whose colors, textures, and dynamically slanting and undulating surfaces can accommodate the many scenes of Manny’s haunting story.

THE PLOT. 

The play begins in the mid 1980s as Manny Weiss, a man in his 60s, arrives in the office of Dr. Benoit, a psychologist for the Veterans Administration, to talk about his experiences as a prisoner of war forty years earlier.  Manny, we learn, has come to this meeting with a combination of eagerness and skepticism, feeling the urgent need to tell his painful story, but unconvinced that such a therapeutic process will provide him any real benefits.  After some preliminary banter with Dr. Benoit, Manny begins to tell the tale of the wartime experiences that have haunted him ever since.

At this point, the action moves back to 1944 at Camp Blanding in Florida.  Manny and his friend, Kleisrath, are eager to join the battle against the Nazis in Europe.  Manny, as a Jew, is particularly eager to confront the Germans who have targeted his people for extinction.   But the colonel’s clerk, Tidwell, is reluctant to present Manny’s request for immediate  posting to the front to his superior.  In the end, however, Manny’s persistence pays off, and he and Kleisrath are on their way to Europe.

We next encounter Young Manny and Kleisrath aboard an ocean liner headed for England.  Kleisrath’s enthusiasm for action has waned, and he wants Young Manny to join him in a pact, promising that if either is killed, the other will tell the dead man’s family what happened.  Young Manny scoffs at Kleisrath’s apprehensions, insisting that nothing will happen to them, and reaffirming his determination to strike a blow against the Nazis.  Eventually, however, Young Manny yields to Kleisrath’s entreaties and agrees to the pact.

On arriving in Europe, Young Manny meets an American sergeant who tells him that his division, the 106th Infantry, is woefully ill prepared to face the Germans, and that they will be occupying a twenty-mile long stretch of the front line as opposed to the customary five miles.

When Young Manny finally arrives on the front lines, he finds himself on the Schnee Eiffel, a long ridge several miles inside the German border.  It is through this sector that the Nazi forces attack, precipitating what was called “The Battle of the Bulge.”  We see Young Manny desperately ducking enemy fire as he tries to carry out his duty as a “runner,” someone who carries messages back and forth on the battlefield.   Overwhelmed by superior German numbers, the 106th soon finds itself in disarray.  Wounded by shrapnel from an artillery burst, Young Manny stumbles into a German foxhole and is taken prisoner.

From this point on, his life turns into a nightmare of cold, hunger, physical pain, and fear.  The latter arises when the German doctor who treats his wounded arm points out to Young Manny that his dog tags identify him as a Jew, and cautions him that this will put him in great danger from his Nazi captors.  Now shadowed by terror, Young Manny becomes obsessed with an ethical question: do I throw away my dog tags for my personal safety, thereby denying my Jewishness, or do I affirm my identity by continuing to wear them? 

With this new worry on his mind, Young Manny marches with his fellow captives through the freezing countryside of Germany during the worst winter Europe had seen in a century.  He arrives at a town called Gerolstein, where he and his fellow Americans are billeted on the top floor of an abandoned school house, while the German wounded are treated on the ground floor.  When he arrives in Gerolstein, the town is picture-perfect, untouched in any way by the ravages of war.  But while he is there, the first Allied bombers attack the town.  One of their bombs hits the school house, causing the second story to collapse on the first.  When he is hauled out of the wreckage several hours later, he is forced to carry litters bearing wounded Germans.

Eventually he is consigned to a movie theater where he is amazed to meet Tidwell, the soldier who cut his overseas orders back in Florida.  Over the course of the next several months, he and Tidwell develop an intense friendship, the kind of bonding that occurs when two people face immense hardships together, one helping the other to survive.  Along the way, Tidwell’s eyes begin to swell, gradually closing shut and leaving him nearly blind.

As a result Young Manny is leading Tidwell along when they encounter a brutal Nazi officer who demands to see their dog tags. Young Manny is certain that he will be shot for being a Jew, but the officer decides it is pointless to “waste bullets on this scum.”  Young Manny is now convinced that his dog tags are an unbearable liability amid the insane violence of the war, and so he removes them and throws them away.

Having told his story up to this point, old Manny decides he cannot go on.  Saying, “It’s harder than I thought,” he tells Dr. Benoit that he can’t go on with the session.  Dr. Benoit pleads with him to continue, but it is too painful for Manny to reveal the rest of his experiences as a prisoner.  He leaves Dr. Benoit’s office, convinced that the pain that drew him there cannot be relieved.  With his departure, Act I comes to an end.

The structure of Act II differs markedly from that of Act I.  The latter concentrates on the wartime experiences of Young Manny, presenting them in conventional forward motion through time.  Act II, by contrast, pays more attention to the present-day Manny, and presents his memories of captivity in reverse chronological order.

Manny returns grudgingly to Dr. Benoit’s office after she has informed him that she has new information about his case.  He demands to be told at once what this information is, but Dr. Benoit diverts him with new questions about his past.  It soon becomes clear  that she suspects that Manny is covering up some guilty secret from his wartime days.  Eventually, by manipulating his defensive responses, she lures him into talking about his homecoming from the war.

We then switch back to the past once again and see in Young Manny’s relationship with his father how difficult it was for him to readjust to civilian life.  Benoit, still not satisfied with his story, prods him to say more about Tidwell, suggesting that Young Manny may have abandoned him when he lost his sight.  This insinuation outrages Manny, and he defends himself by telling Benoit how he and Tidwell became separated:

MANNY: They took me away from him. . . .  The guards, the doctors.  I was sick.  They took me away from Tidwell.
​

We then see Young Manny, confined to an isolation ward because he has scarlet fever, learning that Tidwell, who has had his sight restored and who is relatively healthy, has been shipped deeper into Germany together with the other able-bodied prisoners.  Young Manny, distraught at this news, cries out, “He can’t be gone.  It doesn’t make any sense. . . . I’m back to just one arm.  How can you swim with sharks if you’ve got only one arm?”

With Tidwell gone, Young Manny hangs on to life by a slim thread, managing to survive until his prison camp is liberated at the end of March.

After the scene of liberation in the past, we return to the present, where Benoit has a surprise to spring on Murray: she has located Tidwell, who is waiting eagerly to hear from the army buddy he hasn’t seen in forty years.  She also tells Manny of her suspicions that he is hiding a guilty secret from her—that she surmises that perhaps he abandoned Tidwell when he lost his sight.  Goaded by this accusation, Manny finally tells her the rest of his story.

We return to the past and see Young Manny and Tidwell arriving at prison camp XII-A in Limburg, Germany.  When the camp official learns that Manny has no dog tags, he orders him to be sent to an interrogation center to see if perhaps he is a communist agent or an American spy.  For four days he is subject to brutal beatings, an ordeal that ends when a guard stabs him in the rectum with a bayonet.

Returning from this nightmare, Young Manny discovers that Tidwell is now completely blind.  He finds a doctor who lances Tidwell’s eyes, draining them of pus.  Manny then stations himself at Tidwell’s bed to keep watch over his friend.  During this vigil Young Manny, overcome by hunger, eats his sleeping friend’s bread.  This, we learn, is the act of betrayal that has overshadowed his whole life.

Returning to the present, we see Dr. Benoit urging Manny to contact Tidwell and to tell him the story that has been weighing on his mind for forty years.  When Manny finally does reveal his betrayal to Tidwell, his old friend is nonplussed, remembering neither bread nor theft.  The harder Manny tries to convince Tidwell of his guilt, the more Tidwell minimizes it.  Thus, despite his best efforts, Manny is unable to find genuine forgiveness from his friend because Tidwell can’t acknowledge his culpability.

As the play ends, Manny is ruefully resigned to bearing the burden of his remorse.

THE THEMES.

Manny’s War explores the meaning of conscience, that faculty human beings have for recognizing what is good and what is evil in their own actions.  Manny’s conscience is burdened by the guilt he feels for having betrayed his closest friend.  Unfortunately, no one else can appreciate the gravity of what he has done.  They are all  eager to provide absolution without first acknowledging the sin.  So Manny is paradoxically the victim of a too-forgiving world.

This play also examines the way the trauma of war can have lifelong emotional consequences for its victims—how they may never escape the psychological deformities that are imprinted on them.  For Manny, the past is seemingly more vivid, more of a presence, than the present itself.  As one of Eugene O’Neill’s characters says, “The past is the present, isn’t it?  It’s the future too.  We all try to lie out of that, but life won’t let us.”

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION.

1. Why is Young Manny so eager to join the war in Europe?

2. How would you describe Kleisrath’s attitude toward the war?

3. Do you think Young Manny should have thrown away his dog tags?

4. Why is Young Manny so angry at his father?

5. Do you think Manny is right in judging himself so harshly for stealing Tidwell’s bread?

6. Do you understand what Young Manny means when he says, in effect, that his real self has disappeared?

7. Have you ever had the experience of having some bad act weighing on your conscience?  What does one do about it?