Letter: School’s production on Vietnam impresses

Burbank High School’s play production class once again impressed my family so much last week with their theatrical documentary “Vietnam 101: The War on Campus” multimedia production. The professional caliber of the young actors and the real-life highlighting of events was a surprise for my wife, who is just young enough to have missed comprehending directly what this tumultuous time was about.

“The War on Campus” effectively enriched her understanding of events surrounding herself as a tween, when her parents displayed so much fear, overprotectiveness and distrust of society during her elementary school years and thereafter.

For me, it brought back, in heart-wrenching fashion, the emotions and conflicts of one growing up in Scarsdale, New York, with concerned friends heading for Oberlin College (the setting of the play) and having three brothers in the Army and Navy at the time, one based in Saigon in the late 1960s, and the daily (nightly) ferocious arguments between my Republican WWII-hero bomber-pilot father and my sweet, informed unquiet Democratic mother.

Upsetting days that now my 11- year-old son has a powerful image of that this incredible time was so real, not so long ago, thanks to drama teacher Brooks Gardner and this brilliant Burbank High School class.

Bill Purcell
Studio City