Heroes With Their Hands in the Air

So I got the group together to go see Heroes With Their Hands in the Air last night. I thought it came together quite well.

The play ran 90 minutes with no intermission, which turned out to be just about the perfect length. It did what I think Finton (the director) wanted it to do without dragging on at any point. Seeing it all put together from start to finish was pretty powerful. Even though I'd seen almost all of it during rehersals, I found the finished product really moving. There was one point where I almost cried.

They had one last-minute actor substitution due to illness, but he grabbed the ball and ran with it. Aside from one line (from a London taxicab driver) that no one can do better than the original actor, he did a fabulous job.

From a techie standpoint (do costume designers count as techies? backstagers at least), I have to say that the set was pretty awesome. They had a black and white map of the bogside of the floor and another one on the backdrop, along with a seperate backdrop made up of headlines, quotes, articles, and transcript exerpts. Afterwards, a few of us went up and examined it more closely. One of my groupmates was brave enough to walk right up onto the stage to get a better look of the backdrop, but no one shoed him away, so I guess it was alright. I think he was trying to read something. The stage is level with the first row of seats, so it's not that big a deal to walk right up to the set.

It's going to Belfast and Doublin after it closes here. Really good stuff.

Bloody Sunday weekend

This weekend is the 35th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. We went down to the Ancient Order of the Hibernians Hall last night (it's a men's club) to watch a documentary about it produced by CBC. Afterwards, a few representetives from the Bloody Sunday Families answered questions.

It was really quite powerful. I thought I knew about Bloody Sunday already from sitting in on rehearsals for Heroes With Their Hands in the Air, but seeing the actual footage and photographs really drives it home. If you look at the evidence and the footage, and hear the eyewitness accounts... it's horrific. Fourteen men died. Most of them were young. My age. Younger. Seventeen, some of them.

An eighteen-year-old woman was run over by an armored personel carrier. A father was shot trying to help his dying son. A man was shot dead with his hands up in the air-- the bullet passed from one armpit to the other without damaging his arms. A few people were killed crawling for cover. One seventeen year old was bleeding out on the pavement with a severed spinal cord when a paratrooper came up and shot him in the back. He died of a punctured lung.

I know this is treated as a political issue, but I don't see how it can be. It's a human rights issue, plain and simple. Innocent people were killed. It was wrong. Whether it was a result of premedetated malice or not, it was wrong.

In the Q&A, one of the family members said that the reason they're still fighting this battle is because they don't want there to be any more bloody sundays. They mentioned a school in Fellujah where American soldiers opened fire on civilians and children. The soldiers there used the same excuse that the paras responsible for Bloody Sunday used: they conjured up a fantasy gun battle; all evidence of which apparantly vanished shortly after it occurred. No bulletholes anywhere near them.

When soldiers are sent to control civilian populations but not trained in how to do it properly, innocent people die. They died on Bloody Sunday. They died in Fellujah. They've died elsewhere. It's a simple fact. I can't see anything political about saying it's wrong, and that it shouldn't happen again.