STAGE REVIEW : Dinky Dau Cycle: The Legacy of Vietnam

Dinky Dau, in playwright John Shearin’s one-act of the same title, is Vietnam War slang for going crazy in the heat and fear of battle.

And don’t say “‘Nam” if you didn’t fight there, if you never felt dinky dau, shouts an infuriated vet as he grabs the throat of an ex-Berkeley radical. “To you, it’s Vietnam. Say it! Viet-nam!”

To Shearin’s immense writing and acting credit, his stressed-out Vietnam veteran surviving in the mountains in the ‘80s is a jolting achievement in the hourlong “Dinky Dau” at the backspace at Theatre/Theatre.

The work is paired with a shorter but also harrowing post-Vietnam play by Shearin entitled “Sleeping Dogs,” which is set in Central Park. Shearin also directed these two-character one-acts which serve to introduce the first of his six plays about the Vietnam legacy, self-dubbed the Dinky Dau Cycle.

Prediction: You will hear of Shearin’s Vietnam plays again.

His work here skates dangerously close to melodrama but avoids excess through the rigor of his themes and the virtuosity of his writing. Shearin fills the stage with an intensity that expands on the dramatic literature dealing with post-Vietnam trauma--a subject that theater was dramatizing long before movies ever got around to it.

Shearin, a Vietnam combat veteran and also a veteran actor-director, writes from pain and compassion. But that empathy sneaks up on you. Madness seems palpable. His seemingly crazed, razor-incisive, Vietnam-scarred mountain character in “Dinky Dau,” for instance, is manipulative, frightening, and quotes Yeats.

Like his adversarial dove on the mountain, this bayonet-wielding adult dropout went to college too. “Where do you think I learned Yeats? In a bus station?”

As a warrior, he cries, he saw the craziness in Vietnam and loved and cheered the kids marching for peace back home . . . until he returned from the war to Berkeley and proudly tried to join students at a heated peace rally in famed Memorial Park--dressed in his freshly dusted uniform. A young woman, whose “flapping beads” kept hitting his chin, spit on him. He returned to his dorm room and cleared out for the woods.

The character’s visceral fervor and searing articulation explode the self-assurance of the play’s other figure, a philosophy teacher and ‘60s anti-war activist who is horrifyingly pushed to the dinky dau edge in the High Sierras where the poor guy had gone for a nature outing. Adam Small’s liberal, aghast hiker with his San Francisco department store gear is quintessentially cast.

In the “Sleeping Dogs” opener, a chilling Gerald Winn and a terrified Stephen Burleigh dramatize a suspenseful variation on the theme of Vietnam guilt and atonement.

Here again, years later, the past is now . The haunting plot turns on the responsibility for the death of three junkie soldiers. The denouement between the pair of veterans who were there happens on a New York park bench, and the end is curdling.

Shearin has stored enough away and has let enough time lapse to forge with measured heat the squalor and the icy tingling in the fingertips of dinky dau fear in Vietnam. Just don’t say ‘Nam.

At 1713 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Fridays through Sundays, 8 p.m., until March 5. Tickets: $8. (213) 871-0210.