War-Drama Cliches Overrun ‘Fragments’

If you’re going to write a play about Vietnam, it had better be good. The Vietnam War has been so exhaustively dramatized that only an exceptional writer could find anything new to say.

John Jay Garrett is no David Rabe. Garrett’s “Fragments,” at the Attic Theatre Centre, blunders into cliche early on and never recovers its footing. Garrett strains mightily to show the horrors of Vietnam and the war’s personal cost on the home front, but his emotionally manipulative play is as belabored as Jeremy Aldridge’s direction, which relentlessly stresses the obvious.

Michael Moon has moments of ingenuous appeal as Jack Wilson, a young man who decides--for reasons apparent only to the playwright--to turn down a college scholarship and take a year off from school at the height of the conflict. Needless to say, Jack winds up getting drafted. And while his pregnant girlfriend, Rachel (Karina Logue), languishes at home, Jack wallows in the jungle, trying to avoid his inevitable fate.

The disastrous first act leaves no cheap sentiment unturned. The second act is a slight improvement--or perhaps we have just become acclimated to the actors’ cartoonish broadness. Despite brief glimmers of originality, however, this latest tour of Vietnam is hard duty, little more than a retread of what has been said many times before, and better.

* “Fragments,” Attic Theatre Centre, 6562 1/2 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends April 24. $15-$18. (323) 469-3786, Ext. 2. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.