Shearin’s ‘Dinky Dau’ Touches a Nerve

A female peace activist verbally attacked the playwright in the alley outside the theater. On another occasion, a Vietnam veteran remained in his seat after the performance, reduced to tears. Yet again, another patron followed the actors backstage, seeking out a confrontation with the cast.

The circumstance triggering this behavior is a pair of haunting one acts about post-Vietnam stress, “Sleeping Dogs/Dinky Dau” at Theatre/Theater in Hollywood.

John Shearin, 44, a Vietnam combat veteran who wrote, directed and acts in the production, has clearly touched raw nerves among both liberals and conservatives. The focus of the most intense controversy is the resonant “Dinky Dau,” in which Shearin plays a zonked-out bush vet who abandons the real world for the woods after being spit at by a Berkeley campus radical on his return from the war.

“People think my character Eddie is me speaking,” said Shearin. “But Eddie is a product of the imagination, the worst possible case of what I might have become and what some vets did become.”

Shearin’s daunting character clashes with a mountain hiker, who is a civilized university teacher and one-time war protester. It is their conflict that is deeply and almost equally unsettling to both hawks and doves in the audience, challenging them to reexamine prior convictions.

Some playgoers get what Shearin calls “my ambivalence toward the Vietnam peace movement and the war effort.” Others angrily read their own politics into the play (which has been extended through April 30 at the 24-seat back stage space at Theatre/Theater).

In a letter to a Times critic who reviewed the play, Neil Harold of Oakland accused Shearin of being a Sylvester Stallone/Rambo character and “a propagandist for the sore losers in the Pentagon.” Shearin calls that “a serious misreading of the play.”

On the other hand, Shearin described an incident when he was approached by a Vietnam combat photographer and his wife. “The husband said the play had been ‘a healing experience’ and had made clear to his wife what he had tried to tell her but never really could.”

“People love us or they hate us,” said Steve Burleigh, an actor in the accompanying one act, “Sleeping Dogs,” about drugs among soldiers. “No one is indifferent to us.”

Shearin’s production is part of a six-play “Dinky Dau” cycle he has written about the legacy of Vietnam. (“Dinky Dau” is a Vietnam combat term that means going crazy with the fear of battle.)

Shearin, who went to Vietnam in the mid-’60s as a “kid from North Carolina with a sense of mission,” soon began spending his free time writing letters home to friends telling them “to stay out of the draft--avoid it like the plague.

“I was once on a mission where the official kill count included dead water buffalo and dogs.”

When asked, Shearin will say he killed a couple of Viet Cong soldiers, shooting from a chopper. “I saw them drop, and I have to tell you I didn’t feel a thing about it. They were trying to kill me.”

It’s these ambivalent signals in the thematic scheme of the play that Shearin has been storing up for 20 years.

“The bitterest experience in Vietnam (and implicit in the play) was coming out with the feeling I could never trust my government again. The government had lied to us. Remember that word disinformation ? My parents were liberals--my dad was an actor and opera singer. But I was brought up with a strong sense of duty. It took me a long time to shed fealty to the U.S.A., right or wrong.”

Like his character Eddie in “Dinky Dau,” Shearin returned home and attended college, William and Mary, where he earned a Phi Beta Kappa key as an English major. The philosophy professor in the play was modeled on a professor Shearin had at William and Mary, “a civilized man used to living by rules of social behavior.”

Shearin experienced student contempt on the campus. “The hippies were looking to me to apologize for something I’d done, and I apologize for nothing. They wanted from the vets a mea culpa , which wasn’t germane. The soldier was blameless.

“Perhaps our guilt was naivete. I believed in Camelot. The fundamental point of the play is that it’s no good to think of peace and love if you don’t apply it.”

For Shearin, the aftermath of Vietnam was a familiar litany of alcohol and a broken marriage, to a ballerina. (He’s now remarried and the father of two children.)

Of all the Vietnam war movies, said Sherin, “ ‘Apocalypse Now’ comes closest to capturing the psychological and mythical aspect of the war. But ‘Deer Hunter’ moved me the most. After hearing ‘God Bless America,’ I went in the restroom and cried for 15 minutes.”

Vietnam--”don’t call it ‘Nam if you didn’t fight there!” yells Shearin in “Dinky Dau”--required distance before Shearin could dramatize it. “The war was enough to feed me artistically but not enough to destroy me psychically.”