I am told that when Joseph Heller's We Bombed in New Haven was running on Broadway, Jason Robards had one rather unsettling evening. Mr. Robards was playing an Air Force captain whose duty it was to send pilots to their probable deaths, but he was doing so in a play which insisted upon two actor-audience intimacies now much in vogue. One intimacy had to do with the fact that an actor is not just an actor or a character but a person. Mr. Heller's point, in the play, was that whereas actors and characters always wind up safe in their dressing rooms, persons can be killed. He wanted us to remember that in actual warfare there are no actors, only people.
The second intimacy had to do with acknowledging the fact that we, an audience, were present at the play and could, if we wished, take a hand in it. There came a time in the evening when Mr. Robards understood that all of the fictitious killing was quite real. Appalled, he tried to put a stop to it. He was informed by his immediate superior, however, that orders could not be questioned, that the bloodshed must go on. Mr. Robards, thoroughly angered, retorted that it would not go on because - turning to those of us seated out front - we wouldn't let it go on. We would halt the vicious cycle, now that we knew.
Mr. Heller was, of course, here using the actor-audience relationship for the purposes of irony. He assumed that we would certainly not intervene on Mr. Robards' side, that we would continue to sit there as we always do sit there, allowing war to go on as we always do allow war to go on. Our silence was to indict us, our refusal to act in the theater was to become our refusal to act in life.
Except that on this particular evening Mr. Robards is said to have finished the scene with his usual bitter discouragement, starting toward the portals to execute his orders and make way for the next sequence, when he was suddenly summoned back to the footlights. A little knot of audience members had got up from their seats, come down the aisle, and were now standing grouped at the edge of the stage. He had been quite right, these unexpected activists told him, and they were not going to permit the fighting to-continue.
Apparently Mr. Robards, who at least wanted the play to continue, tried gentle persuasion, urging the interlopers to return to their seats quietly. They wouldn't. They'd been invited to protest and they were protesting. If the way to stop war was to stop this play, they would do it. That's what the play had been asking them to do all along, wasn't it?
On they went,. refusing to heed Mr. Robards' plea that there were other scenes to be played, until, out of his element, and at last out of patience,' Mr. Robards exploded, "What do you want me to do? he cried. "I'm only an actor!"
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