Theatre Of War.(The Talk of the Town)

"Black Watch," a play about the famed Scottish regiment's deployment in Iraq, received rapturous reviews during its initial three-week run at St. Ann's Warehouse, in Brooklyn, last fall. ("In the final marching sequence, as the men moved forward and stumbled in shifting patterns, I found to my surprise that I was crying," Ben Brantley confessed in the Times.) All well and good; but, as a result, Susan Feldman, the theatre's artistic director, said, "we felt it didn't have a chance to have a diverse audience." So this season, when the National Theatre of Scotland brought the show back, Feldman instituted a "Pay for a Vet" program, whereby patrons could procure tickets for veterans who felt inclined to revisit what they had already experienced in the theatre of war in the theatre of Dumbo.

One recent Sunday night, forty-odd vets attended the show. Dressed in mufti, they were not always easy to distinguish from the rest of the audience, though there were certain indicators. (The burly guy wearing a sweater into which a stars-and-stripes pattern had been knitted was surely not a season-ticket holder at St. Ann's, at least not yet; and, for once, not every close-cropped head betrayed a hipster coping with early-onset male-pattern baldness.) During the show--which is based on interviews with Scottish soldiers but which includes plangent songs in dialect, and incorporates something approaching ballet in the representation of a fistfight--there was also loud laughter from certain quarters at the play's linguistic verite. (A typical line: "Fucking hell ay. If this is the Quick Reaction Force we're fucked. What the fuck are youse cunts dayin'?")

After the performance, the vets, gathered at the theatre bar, were drafted as theatre critics. "I really liked it, and I didn't think it was over the top," Kris Hrones, a former marine who served in Iraq, and who is now an assistant U.S. attorney, said. Hrones had particularly appreciated the depictions of the soldiers' limited entertainment options (dismembered paperbacks, porn). "Sex is the common denominator when everyone is scared or bored," he said. "Especially bored." Tony Davis, a Vietnam veteran, said that he had been moved by the concluding marching sequence. "They kept regrouping, even though they got shot at and killed--I kind of teared up at that," he ...