A romance story set in WW II, currently playing at the Zach Theatre in Austin, does not bear any resemblance to the job the lead male character chose for his military career. He was a bomb disposal expert; this play is not a bomb!
Based exclusively on letters Bob and Jean wrote to one another during the war, it is all held together by connecting dialogue spoken by their son Robert Schenkkan. His role on stage is portrayed by Jamie Goodwin, but two weeks ago he was in Austin, at the PBS Studio, to read along part of the script with the two actors Jake Robertson and Maggie Anderson (lead photo). Before commenting on the play, I will let the famous playwright Mr. Schenkkan describe the origin and intent of this marvellous creation.
“The attic was full of books, poetry, plays, seashells, and papers from my father’s war service, and up in the attic there were these boxes of the correspondence between my parents, and they were very open about this. This was no secret, but of course I was a kid. I was more interested in the grenades,” he said to general laughter. “But over time, I really began to wonder about them. And so finally, after many, many years, I opened the boxes, which had traveled with me all over the country, and pulled them out and started to sort through them. It was a very odd and profoundly moving kind of experience to look at my parents at this age, Jean is 22, Bob is 24 or 25.”
“Most of them were handwritten – beautiful handwriting, I have to say. Then put them in order and began to look at this journey that they both took and it was fascinating. Obviously as their son it was interesting to me, but I thought it had an appeal that went well beyond that.”
During World War II, “Bob and Jean are both experiencing, as are so many Americans at this moment, a profound and wrenching transformation. You know, the world is really going to hell in a hand basket. We look back now, and well, of course, good guys won, but that certainly wasn’t the way it felt in 1943.”
Each of them gets posted to a different place and, in the case of Bob, on overseas duty in the Pacific. “They’re being thrown around the world and around the country, and they’re having all these experiences and meeting all these people that they would never have met before. And that is changing both of them. At the same time, they’re trying to keep hold of this beautiful relationship that bloomed just a moment before he left. So, their love is a love story for a reason.”
“One of the first things I discovered is that when they met for the first time in North Carolina, they actively disliked each other. They hated each other. And so that was startling.”
“He describes her as this sorority girl, southern, long hair, blue eyed. And of course, they’re both actors, so there’s that,” a remark that elicited many chuckles in the audience. “Who’s gonna be the star in this relationship?,” he asked rhetorically.
“They are apart for 14-15 months and over that time there are tremendous changes in them. She almost breaks it off. I mean she does put the brakes on: she thought she was being rushed into marriage.
“She wasn’t sure, yeah, Jane was a remarkable person, a remarkable human being, but she was unusual for a woman in that time. She really was focused on her career. She was an artist [an actress]. She was going to pursue her art at the highest professional level. And marriage: she wasn’t sure about marriage.”
All this is played out on the sand-filled circular Whisenhunt stage at the Zach Theatre, an intimate venue that seats 130. This seems just right as we are thrust directly into a sometimes loving and sometimes confused relationship of the 1940s. Theatre goers are put in the mood by a collection of period paintings of service men and their spouses that are owned by Dave Steakley, Producing Artistic Director at the Zach. They adorn every available display space in the lobby, and, together with a particularly large painting of General Eisenhower, are really quite evocative of that time 83 years ago.
Some of the dialogue sounds overdone, but as it is taken directly from the letters it can’t be dismissed. She asks “What did I think about before you?” He says “We have met in the profoundest regions of the spirit.”
One theme that recurs is Stoic philosophy. Bob was a stoic, and naturally greatly admires the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius who wrote the most famous book on Stoicism. A pivotal point comes when Stoicism fails to sustain Bob, but I won’t give away the plot. Another nice touch is when Bob invokes Walt Whitman’s astronomer, as he views a star-filled sky. Such literary touches are important, but are so fleeting they might pass over the head of anyone not being attentive.
Both actors are superbly cast: youthful, naïve in just the right circumstances, and engagingly beautiful. Goodwin is also sterling in his role as the modern-day son of Bob and Jean, looking back 80+ years at the high and lows of his parent’s romance.
A breath of fresh air, this play made a simultaneous World Premiere here in Austin and in Tucson, with a cast by the Arizona Theatre Company. In what will certainly be rated as one of the best productions to appear in Austin in 2025, going to see this is not optional!
Photo of the 3-person cast at the Whisenhunt, and lead photo, both taken by Dr C Cunningham
Bob & Jean is on thru April 19, 2025
https://tickets.zachtheatre.org/overview/15943