In the summer of 1932, some 17,000 veterans and their families descended on Washington D.C. to demand the pay that Congress had promised them years earlier as a bonus for their service during World War I – but (in a budget compromise) didn’t plan to deliver the money to them until 1945. In the depths of the Great Depression, when many were jobless, homeless and hungry, the veterans couldn’t wait that long. They traveled from throughout the nation, called themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force, or Bonus Army, and set up several camps throughout the capital city.
It’s a little-remembered moment in American history that playwright Sam Collier attempts to dramatize in “A Hundred Circling Camps,’ a production of Dogteam Theater Project, a new Off-Broadway theater company.
The play needs work.
“A Hundred Circling Camps” is probably at its most successful in introducing us to a quartet of intriguing actual historical figures who were involved in the events.
There is Walter W. Walters (Jose-Maria Aguila), an ex-sergeant and out-of-work fruit picker from Portland, Oregon who came up with the idea for the Bonus Expeditionary Force (a play on American Expeditionary Force, the official name for the U.S troops who fought in France). He commands the BEF as if it were a real army, with an insistence on discipline (and perhaps an overinsistence on loyalty – rooting out not just Reds but those he considers traitors.) The plan was to stay in their makeshift camps until Congress was persuaded to pass new superseding legislation.
Walters comes into conflict with Pelham D. Glassford (Alex Draper) who was himself a Brigadier General in the war, and sympathetic to the ex-soldiers’ complaints, but has been appointed Superintendent of the DC Police Department, and needs to keep order – which becomes more tense after the Senate refuses to pass new legislation on their behalf.
Then there’s Marita McKee as Sewilla Lamar, whose brother and first husband died in the war and traveled alone to D.C. from L.A., by foot and freight train. Adamant on behalf of the cause, she realizes it’s lost after the Congressional defeat, and tries to convince Waters to retreat.
“We have the sympathy of a hundred million people. We can’t squander this moment,” Waters replies.
“If you tell the vets to stay when you know they don’t have a chance…This will end with bloodshed.”
The fourth historical figure is Evelyn Walsh McLean (Lynn Hawley), wife of the owner of the Washington Post, but very rich in her own right ( owner of the Hope Diamond) who lectures the police superintendent on his duty to the vets, and buys them coffee and sandwiches en masse.
These four interact with nearly two dozen other characters (portrayed by the rest of the 14-member cast.) There are so many two-character scenes with these peripheral, fictional people that it starts to feel less like an effort to present the full picture and more like an opportunity to give every actor some lines.
“A Hundred Circling Camps” gets its awkward title from The Battle Hymn of the Republic, the same rousing Civil War-era song (which ends: “Glory, glory, hallelujah!/While God is marching on”) from which John Steinbeck took the title for “The Grapes of Wrath,” a novel that’s also set in the Great Depression. Little in “A Hundred Circling Camps” reflect that novel’s unrelenting sense of desperation; under Rebecca Wear’s direction, the marches and the songs feel more like entertainment than a show of anger, desolation or despair. A memorable exception occurs when a character named Morrow (Zack Maluccio) repeatedly tries to put on a pair of shoes that someone donated to the vets, but his feet are too bruised and broken down.
Although it’s only about 100 minutes long (with no intermission), Collier’s play seems to run out of things to say about the 1932 confrontation. How else to explain her decision to include scenes from other D.C. protests throughout the years? There are characters from the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968, which set up a Resurrection City as a mass demonstration to demand the government address the employment and housing needs of the poor, which had been planned by Martin Luther King Jr, and took place on a smaller scale after his assassination. There’s the Great Peace March of 1986, which traveled from L.A. to D.C. calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons. There’s the Occupy D.C. encampment from October 2011 to June 2012 protesting wealth inequality.
And the characters from these different eras talk to one another.
Whatever the points that Collier is trying to make by injecting these other eras, they’re not worth the diffusion and confusion.
The last scene is clearer. It takes place outdoors in DC in the 2020s – explicitly “not January 6” but otherwise unspecified. A young woman named Zoe (Naja Irvin-Conyer) is carrying a picket sign but we can’t see what’s written on it. She’s on a hunger strike, she says. Pop (Fidel Vicioso) comes over to offer her some soup, but she refuses; it’s a hunger strike.
“It really wouldn’t hurt your cause one bit if you just ate this soup,” Pop argues.
“I know you think that,” retorts Zoe, who is clearly frustrated with the whole world: “All my friends were here the first day And the second day and the third day. The news was here
They interviewed us. Now it’s just me.”
Pop turns out to be a veteran of the 1932 protest, which, given the timeline, requires some suspension of disbelief, but allows us to learn what happened in the aftermath of that demonstration. But the main point of the scene is apparently to ask us to consider: Do these protests matter?
“Somebody has to do something,” Zoe says to Pop about the unspecified problem that she’s protesting. “It’s an emergency and everyone around here is just living their lives.”
“Sometimes people change the little things, and that changes the big things.”
“That’s not enough,” Zoe protests. “That’s not fast enough.”
A Hundred Circling Camps
Dogteam Theater Project at Atlantic Stage 2 through August 4
In repertory with The Widow
Running time: 100 minutes with no intermission
Tickets: $33.85 ($23.18 for students, seniors and military.)
Written by Sam Collier
Directed by Rebecca Wear
Set design by Mark Evancho, light design by Calvin Anderson, sound and music design by Madison Middleton, costume design by Summer Lee Jack
Cast: Jose-Maria Aguila as Walter W. Waters, Alex Draper as Pelham D. Glassford, Lynn Hawley as Evelyn Walsh McLean, Zack Maluccio, Marita McKee as Sewilla Lamar, Kayodè Soyemi, Fidel Vicioso, Aidan Amster, Maggie Blake, Naja Irvin-Conyers, Gibson Grimm, Peyton Mader, Francis Price, and Katelyn Wenkoff.
