Thomas Bird's 'Bearing Witness' a war story with heart
Thomas Bird wasn’t sure how to overcome the generational gap that divided him from his father, a World War II veteran who had helped liberate a concentration camp.
“The World War II veterans fought a good war — they ended fascism’s rise in the world,” Bird says. “We, their sons, wanted that same experience.”
As a young man, he thought he would find that experience in Vietnam. Instead, he found himself and his generation “getting bogged down in a guerrilla war for a mission that proved cloudier and foggier all the time.” When American soldiers fighting in Vietnam arrived home, they had difficulty finding support from the rest of society — including, for Bird, his own father.
Bird tells his story of their reconciliation — and his unlikely path to theater — in a one-man show, Bearing Witness, playing at Downstairs Cabaret Theatre through Nov. 27.
The show’s producer, Barbara Ligeti, says that although the show is specific to World War II, Vietnam and concentration camps, the message of the show is universal: “Once you have dialogue, once you tell your story, then healing can begin.”
The story behind how Thomas Bird got to be on a stage talking about his father begins with his transformation from a rough college jock to a devoted thespian.
After fighting as an infantry soldier in Vietnam, Bird went to C.W. Post College on Long Island to pursue his dream of becoming a college football star. When an anti-war demonstrator on campus called him a war criminal, Bird reacted “in a blur” and punched the demonstrator. He was arrested, thrown out of college and threatened with prison time. Instead, he was put under house arrest and underwent a chemical treatment program intended to treat his rage.
When he returned to college, his dreams of football were ruined and he was ostracized by his peers. “I was literally lost on campus, just going through the motions,” he says.
When someone finally reached out to him by inviting him to be in a play, he immediately agreed and found himself playing a fairy in an avant-garde, Alice-in-Wonderland-meets-Hells-Angels-themed summer production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
“I remember thinking, ‘My parents are here seeing their veteran son dressed up as a Hells Angel in a fairy band doing a bump and grind. What are they thinking?’” says Bird. “Me, I was loving it since I had never behaved like that before in my life.”
Ironically, the only group on campus that would accept him — the theater people — was largely composed of anti-war demonstrators who had been at the protest that led to his expulsion.
Bird says he was “really turned on to theater” after being cast as a prison guard in a production of Marat/Sade. The director needed to block a fight scene between Bird and another actor —the same guy, it turned out, whom Bird had punched two years earlier. Bird looked at the director and said he didn’t want to touch the other actor.
Despite their history, the other actor gave him permission to rough him up. “He looked at me and said, ‘You’ve got to do what the director says. It’s for the play. Everything’s OK. The past is forgiven and forgotten,’” Bird recalls. With a laugh he adds, “and then he said, ‘Just be careful of my jaw — it still hurts.’”
That experience taught Bird that theater could heal. After college, he moved to New York to study acting and eventually started the Vietnam Veterans' Ensemble Theatre Company (VETCo). Through the group, Vietnam veterans staged well-known plays (such as ones by Arthur Miller) and presented new plays about the marginalization of Vietnam veterans in society.
Some of these plays received critically acclaimed productions at the Public Theatre, and in 1987 Bird co-produced the award-winning documentary, Dear America, Letters Home From Vietnam.
Ligeti notes that Bird more recently founded the Walking Point Foundation, an organization that brings all art forms to veterans.
“He stepped down from the stage to become the facilitator for others to have creative experiences,” she says.
But his very personal story has now brought him back on stage. He tells the story of how he and his father were able to heal and unite despite the trauma caused by the Vietnam War and the horrors of the concentration camps. The process of writing Bearing Witness was sparked by a visit to Mauthausen, the concentration camp in Austria that his father helped liberate. The trip allowed Bird to see firsthand the place that had traumatized his father.
Bird says he shares a lot of “rugged material” in the performance, including his combat stories as an infantry soldier and his experiences as the son of a witness to the Holocaust. But dramatically, it’s effective. Because some of the material is rugged, “when love and healing emerge, it’s more fulfilling than if everything was rosy. That’s my style.”
Ligeti finds it appropriate that he tells this story through theater, which allows audiences to themselves partake in “bearing witness” through the “palpable, real-time experience” of seeing a live actor perform.
“A theme in society is, ‘Do not forget,’” she says. With theater, “These wars aren’t just things in history books. They really come alive.”
If You Go
What: Bearing Witness, written and performed by Thomas Bird.
When: 2 p.m. Sundays, 7 p.m. Thursdays (except Nov. 24), 8 p.m. Fridays, 8 p.m. Saturdays; also 2 p.m. Nov. 26; through Nov. 27. Talkbacks with the actor/writer are scheduled after the show Nov. 20 and 27.
Where: Downstairs Cabaret Theatre, 20 Windsor St.
Tickets: $25 general admission (discounts available for seniors, full-time students, military personnel, groups and DCT members). Free for World War II veterans. Call (585) 325-4370 for reservations.