On a road outside Dak To in 1967, the lives of two soldiers were changed forever. Thirty years later, in a remote trailer in California, these two soldiers come together for one last hurrah. Haunted still by the specter of America's longest war, they discover that their friendship may be the latest casualty of a war that will not end.

Last of the Boys, a fierce, funny and mesmerizing lament for a generation of Americans still trying to come to terms with the Vietnam conflict, is a world premiere and the latest work from award-winning playwright Steven Dietz. As one of the country's most prolific, versatile, and widely produced playwrights, Dietz has had numerous plays performed throughout the United States and worldwide to critical acclaim. Steven Dietz returns to McCarter Theatre following the success of his play Fiction, which was produced in McCarter's 2002-2003 season and recently at the Roundabout Theatre Company in New York. As with all of his plays, Last of the Boys is marked by a mastery of language and thoroughly dynamic characterizations. Its characters are defined not only by the stories they tell, but also by the way they tell them; their exchanges are laced with humor and hurt. Though the play reflects on the events of the Vietnam era it is not, Dietz says, "a historic play. This is about a world in which the same hard choices keep presenting themselves."

Last of the Boys, to be staged in the intimate Berlind Theatre, will be directed by McCarter Theatre artistic director Emily Mann. Ms. Mann's work on Last of the Boys will mark her return to the subject of Vietnam and the lives of war veterans, a topic in which she was entrenched over twenty years ago while writing her play Still Life.

Within the pages of this guide, you and your students will find information that puts the play in context as well as a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the artists that have brought this new play to life. Each piece of material has been carefully selected to help enrich your theater experience and engage your students' interests in every aspect of this theatrical journey.

The Visual and Performing Arts are considered Core Curriculum areas for the New Jersey State Department of Education. This production of Last of the Boys is designed to give your students exposure to the specific Core Curriculum Standards listed below.

Last of the Boys and Curriculum Standards

This production of Last of the Boys and related study materials will provide students with specific knowledge and skills to address the following Core Curriculum Content Standards in the Arts:

1.1	All students will acquire knowledge and skills that increase aesthetic awareness in dance, music, theatre, and visual arts.
1.2	All students will refine perceptual, intellectual, physical, and technical skills through creating dance, music, theater, and/or visual arts.
1.4	All students will demonstrate knowledge of the process of critique.
1.5	All students will identify the various historical, social, and cultural influences and traditions which have generated artistic accomplishments throughout the ages and which continue to shape contemporary arts.
1.6	All students will develop design skills for planning the form and function of space, structures, objects, sound, and events.

Last of the Boys is also designed to address the following Core Curriculum Standards in Language Arts Literacy and Social Studies:

3.1	All students will speak for a variety of real purposes and audiences.
3.2	All students will listen actively in a variety of situations to information from a variety of sources.
3.3	All students will write in clear, concise, organized language that varies in content and form for different audiences and purposes.
3.4	All students will read various materials and texts with comprehension and critical analysis.

This study guide enables teachers and leaders to explore drama as a mode of learning. Adding drama to the classroom is an active, process-orientated approach to education, in which the teacher and student interact together.

Drama-in-Education seeks to synthesize the activities of creative drama, arts-based curricula and theater conventions into experiences aimed at developing imagination, awareness of self and others, aesthetic taste and life skills. Often these goals are achieved through the examination of a particular theme or topic, which contributes to critical thinking about the world in which we live. By providing structures and contexts, which both excite the interest of participants and call for creative problem-solving, Drama-in-Education promotes deeper thinking about a wide variety of issues.

This guide has been designed for teachers to utilize drama methods in an exploration of the themes and situations presented in the play. We encourage you to adapt these lessons and activities to your individual teaching situations, and thereby to discover the importance and power of drama in the classroom.

The questions and activities throughout this guide are designed to help students anticipate the performance and then to build on their impressions and interpretations after attending the theater. While most of the exercises provide specific instructions, please feel free to adapt these activities to accommodate your own teaching strategies and curricular needs.

In an abandoned trailer park somewhere in the Great Central Valley of California, Ben, a Vietnam veteran, lives a solitary life. His routine is interrupted by a visit from Jeeter, Ben's garrulous buddy from the war. Jeeter has just been to Michigan to attend Ben's father's funeral, an event that Ben himself avoided. Jeeter has brought Ben a few keepsakes from the funeral, including the flag from his father's coffin and a suitcase containing a photograph of Ben's father with Robert S. McNamara, the former Defense Secretary and Ford Motor Company executive. Jeeter is accompanied by his latest conquest, a young woman named Salyer. Jeeter swears to Ben that this girl, the latest in a series of much younger girlfriends, is a keeper.

That night, while Jeeter is at a Rolling Stones concert with Salyer, Ben is visited by a mysterious figure who seems to be a young soldier. In reaction to his appearance, Ben unwittingly begins to embody Robert McNamara, responding to questions and accusations about the United States' involvement in Vietnam. This odd episode ends when Salyer and Jeeter return from the concert. Salyer is dressed oddly for summer with every inch of her skin covered. Jeeter had warned Ben of this and so Ben says nothing. Jeeter knows that Salyer's body is covered with tattoos of men's names, names he believes mark her sexual conquests. When Salyer goes inside, Ben confides in Jeeter about his strange encounter with the phantom and Jeeter offers what he believes is the obvious explanation. In Jeeter's eyes Ben is trying to win approval from his father who was once friends with McNamara, but who later disavowed him. Suddenly Salyer's mother Lorraine bursts onto the scene, looking for Salyer and blaming Jeeter for stealing her.

Salyer takes off with Jeeter in pursuit leaving Ben to deal with Lorraine. Over a whiskey, Lorraine reveals that the source of her conflict with Salyer is Salyer's father, a soldier who was MIA in Vietnam. Lorraine had lied to Sal about her father's absence until Sal visited the Memorial Wall and found her father's name. The experience so affected her she had her entire body tattooed with names of the Vietnam dead and missing, becoming a kind of human version of the Memorial Wall. Ben defends McNamara to Lorraine who will hear none of it. Her wounds are too deep. She leaves Ben alone in the night and he is visited once again by the phantom soldier.

In the morning, Jeeter returns and presses Ben for his opinion of Salyer. Ben's response disappoints Jeeter who assumes that Ben is still angry about an old unpaid loan that Jeeter owes to him. Salyer appears and sends Jeeter to find Lorraine. Salyer asks Ben about the young soldier, who is visible to her as well. She wants to talk to Ben about Vietnam but he resists. Salyer reveals that Jeeter has written a book based on interviews with Ben's father and that the book has already earned him a six-figure advance. Ben is stunned but hides it from her.

By midnight Lorraine and Jeeter have returned and the four sit around the trailer drinking and talking. Tensions mount between Jeeter and Ben whose long friendship and even deeper sense of mutual betrayal have reached a breaking point. Finally, there is an attack and Ben defends himself against Jeeter, Lorraine and the memory of his father. Only Salyer seems to understand him. The soldier returns and Salyer recognizes him as the ghost of her father. She shows him a corner of her skin which bears a tattoo of her father's name.

At long last the morning comes again and this time departures come with it. Each character leaves alone. Lorraine goes first, without Salyer. Sal goes next after urging Jeeter to continue his quests without her. Finally Jeeter says goodbye to Ben. It is unclear whether he will ever be back again. Ben is left alone, in the end, with only his father's mementos to keep him company, and he begins to iron the wrinkled American flag from his father's coffin.

In 1946 Robert S. McNamara joined Ford Motor Company as manager of planning and financial analysis, and rose to become the first president of Ford Motors to be selected from outside the Ford family. He was credited with the economic turn-around of Ford Motors and his superstar managerial skills attracted the attention of President John F. Kennedy. Kennedy invited McNamara to join his cabinet as Secretary of Defense. McNamara took on this role just five weeks after taking on the presidency of Ford. At the age of forty-four, McNamara was the youngest ever Secretary of Defense.

Although he had limited knowledge of military affairs, McNamara immersed himself in the subject and soon began to apply an "active role" management philosophy. As he told a TV interviewer just a month after his appointment, "The role of a public manager is very similar to the role of a private manager; in each case he has the option of following one of two major alternative courses of action. He can either act as a judge or a leader... I have always believed in and endeavored to follow the active leadership role as opposed to the passive judicial role."

At the start of his time in office, McNamara's management of the American defense department was guided by the fact that Kennedy emphasized the need for sufficient strategic arms to prevent nuclear attack on the United States and its allies. In accordance with Kennedy's defense policies, McNamara conducted a comprehensive review of the military challenges confronting the United States and made plans to increase the nation's limited warfare capabilities.

McNamara's career was to be defined by the tumultuous international affairs of both the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies. His first test came in April 1961, when a Cuban exile group with some support from the United States attempted to overthrow the Castro regime. The disastrous failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, carried through by the Kennedy administration based on planning begun under Eisenhower, proved a great embarrassment. When McNamara left office in 1968, he told reporters that his principal regret was his recommendation to Kennedy to proceed with the Bay of Pigs operation, something that "could have been recognized as an error at the time."

The Vietnam conflict came to claim most of McNamara's time and energy. During the Kennedy administration, the U.S. military advisory group in South Vietnam steadily increased, with McNamara's concurrence, from just a few hundred to about 17,000. U.S. involvement escalated after the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964 and in 1965, in response to stepped up military activity by the Communist Viet Cong in South Vietnam and their North Vietnamese allies, the United States began bombing North Vietnam, deployed large military forces, and entered into combat in South Vietnam. Requests from top U.S. military commanders in Vietnam led to the commitment of 485,000 troops by the end of 1967 and almost 535,000 by 30 June 1968. The casualty lists mounted as the number of troops and the intensity of fighting escalated.

As the fighting wore on in Southeast Asia, McNamara visited Vietnam many times to study the situation firsthand. He became increasingly reluctant to approve the large force increments requested by the military commanders. McNamara's differences with President Johnson over Vietnam policy led to his decision to resign from his position in 1968.

Robert S. McNamara left office on February 29, 1968; for his dedicated efforts, the president awarded him both the Medal of Freedom and the Distinguished Service Medal. Shortly after he departed the Pentagon, he published The Essence of Security, discussing various aspects of his tenure and his position on basic national security issues. In 1982 McNamara joined several other former national security officials in urging that the United States pledge not to use nuclear weapons first in Europe in the event of hostilities; subsequently he proposed the elimination of nuclear weapons as an element of NATO's defense posture. His book, In Retrospect, published in 1995, presented an account and analysis of the Vietnam War that dwelt heavily on the mistakes to which he was a prime party and conveyed his strong sense of guilt and regret.

Evaluations of McNamara's long career as Secretary of Defense vary from glowing to negative and sometimes scathing. One journalist reported criticism of McNamara as a "'human IBM machine' who cares more for computerized statistical logic than for human judgments." On the other hand, a congressman who had helped shape the National Security Act in 1947 stated when McNamara left the Pentagon that he "has come nearer [than anyone else] to being exactly what we planned a Secretary of Defense to be when we first wrote the Unification Act." Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote, "Except for General Marshall I do not know of any department head who, during the half century I have observed government in Washington, has so profoundly enhanced the position, power and security of the United States as Mr. McNamara." Although McNamara had many differences with military leaders and members of Congress, few could deny that he had had a powerful impact on the Defense Department, and that much of what he had done would be a lasting legacy.

"We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why. I truly believe that we made an error not of values and intentions, but of judgment and capabilities." (In Retrospect)

On the second day of rehearsal for Last of The Boys the education staff had the opportunity to sit down with playwright Steven Dietz and director Emily Mann to discuss their work on this world premiere production. Mann, whose play Still Life (produced at the American Place Theatre in New York in 1981) is a three character play dealing with interpersonal relationships between a Vietnam veteran, his wife and his mistress, returns to the subject of Vietnam for the first time since her work on that play. Dietz, on the other hand, was strongly influenced by a workshop of Still Life that he saw in Minneapolis in the early eighties. He jokingly admits that after seeing Still Life he decided that he would neither write a three character play nor a play about Vietnam because he felt both had been done so well by Mann in her play. It seems highly fortuitous therefore, that Dietz and Mann will collaborate to present Last of The Boys as the opening production of the 2004-2005 McCarter theatre season. The following interview reveals a little about why both Dietz and Mann feel passionately about this play at this time.

ED: What was the impetus for you to write a play that reflects back on Vietnam?

SD: I've had a long standing fascination with Robert McNamara. I have always found him the most fascinating of all of the amazing personalities and powerful men and women of the Vietnam era. His story, running Ford Motor, then running the Vietnam War, and then running World Bank - the story of a man like that and his particular talents and liabilities has always been a huge fascination of mine. What that grew into was several attempts to incorporate my questions about him into a play. Those questions took on the personalities of these two men, Ben and Jeeter, men who are living these questions. They are living the questions of the war - they are McNamara's legacy, they are McNamara's children, and they are his sons, in some way. In that sense, the play moved away from the political about McNamara and grew, hopefully, into something more personal, a story about two Vietnam vets and their friendship and the strands of their life, who they affect and who they are affected by. I would say it's a war story only in the sense that these men were forged during the war, but, to my mind at least, it is less a history of the war and more a history of the men and women who survived it and who have to survive it on a daily basis.

ED: What journey did the play take to eventually end up with its world premiere here at McCarter Theatre?

SD: The play was commissioned by San Jose Repertory Theater. They did not find a place for it in their season, so I had this play that was looking for a home and I had been made a home at this theatre with Fiction and so this is where I went with this play immediately. I had also been working on the play at the McCarter Playwright's retreat last year -

EM: That's right - you were working on it at the retreat - you went far on it during the retreat -

SD: I wrote a full new draft of it during the retreat and then we also did a reading of it here.

EM: And when I read it I was really intrigued. I felt that it was just startling and new territory, which is saying a lot when you are dealing with the issues of Vietnam and Vietnam veterans. And then we had another reading of it and I remember I was laughing and then I found myself just choking back sobs at the end and I just said "we have to do this. We have to open the season with this before the election." And then, boom. This is a very rare occurrence. This is not how quickly it is usually done. But, I got blown away.

SD: I think the timing of this on a lot of levels is very resonant. Luckily I had written a few drafts before Fog of War came out which I think tells the McNamara story better than I could have and it made me gratified to know that it wasn't just me – it was in the air. And to be able to have a play in hand when the issues of that play are in the air – that's rare. And then to have a theatre step forward at the same time, that's doubly rare.

EM: This is very deep for me and it's very important for me to return to this issue with Steven and this play. And I think it's important at this moment in time for the country to look at this. McNamara earned the right to say, "look at this" and (with his book In Retrospect and the eleven lessons*) he's telling us something very important. Before he dies he wants to make sure that we won't repeat the same mistakes. You know the old saying "Those who don't know history are condemned to repeat it" is such a cliché at this point but it gives me chills when I look at what he is trying to tell the nation and this administration and what we are doing.

ED: In the play there is this mysterious figure that is the young soldier. Where did that concept come from and how will the character function in the production?

SD: One of the things that the theatre does well and that I like to play with in plays is mystery. I enjoy things that are slightly out of reality, things that I do not encounter in my daily life, whether I either walk by them or they are there but I don't see them or notice them. There is this soldier in the play that is a young soldier in Vietnam, who in a sense haunts the play and in another sense drives the play. I'm sure that he is a representative of the young soldier that hundreds of thousands of families still remember and still see, that soldier who never grows old. Not only does he represent that to me, but he's also a tangible reminder to the audience and to the other characters on stage – the ones who see him or acknowledge him – not only of what was lost but of what has to be remembered. I'm making him sound more dire than I mean, but I would hope that people will understand that in some ways something like Vietnam can almost only be approached in a hallucinatory manner or in a way that embraces what one imagines as readily as one embraces what one sees or has done. And the play tries to incorporate that.

EM: And you know it's interesting if you look at this as part of a whole season. We're going to end the season with Hamlet, The Bells is a ghost story, so we are doing a lot with ghosts this year.

ED: Through not only the dialogue of this play, but also through the design elements and very specific stage directions Last of The Boys inhabits a richly theatrical world. What are the elements that are important in terms of creating this world on stage?

SD: There is a very important notion which is how do you create a world that someone can't walk past. Some of it is finding things that are out of place, in this case the ironing board, for example, some of it is the curiosity you get when one little thing is isolated anywhere. It engenders curiosity. This trailer that you see here, this is someone's life. That was my starting place. The question is not "what part of my own life do I want to write from?", but "what part of someone else's life do I want to write towards?"

ED: Are there specific things about the play that you are still grappling with or trying to solve through this rehearsal process?

SD: All of it is malleable until we find that we are all telling the same story. Even then it's malleable until we find out that our audiences are hearing the story that we are trying to tell, and, in reality, with a new play it is malleable with the first several productions. This is probably play number twenty-seven for me, but still, the fact of the matter is that I haven't written this play yet so I don't know what its rules are. In trying to do something new, which is one of the great gifts of writing, I have to find new ways to solve these problems.

EM: And on a very simple, matter-of-fact craft level, Steven is an artist and craftsman and what we are doing now is highly craft-oriented. It has a lot to do with understanding the craft of how these ideas; these notions can be best theatricalized. It is a lot of just moment-to-moment work so that Steven can hear it. I do think that great playwrights are great rewriters. You have to have an aural sense of the play. That comes with the process.

SD: You end up learning early on that you can be an arm folder – "it's perfect, do it" but to my mind, the day I wake up and I'm Chekhov I'll be an arm folder. Until that day I wake up with a guy who is trying to write some good sentences. So, I can't stress enough that a play existed and then a theatre existed and then our work began. I certainly never knew that when I was a kid, I figured that you write your play and then you're done, but the truth of the matter is, you write your play and then you start. I think of it as this - how much would you pay for a handmade item? How much are you going to pay for something that is completely labor intensive and a group of people sat down, for you, and made this? That is completely true about the theatre. What is happening in this room with this play will never happen again. It will happen differently, but it is completely handmade for this limited group of people during the run of this play. And that's what makes it fleeting, but that's what makes it crucial and resonant. I mean, when you think about it, it really is an inefficient thing to make art, but one might argue when it is made well its lasting value is worth it.