Catch-22 Program

DIRECTOR’S NOTES
SETTING
The action is set during World War II on an air base off the coast of Italy.
CATCH-22 was published in the mid fifties but it was when it was discovered by college students of the 1960s, who saw it as a mirror of the moral corruption of the Vietnam War, it became a huge best seller. I suspect that is when those of us who could be the parents of these student actors first read it. Regardless of our
politics or views on the war, it certainly seemed tremendously relevant to the chaotic times we lived in.
Is CATCH-22 relevant today? I have been asked that question a fair number of times recently. I have also been asked if I (in collaboration with the rest of the department as we ultimately make season decisions together) set out to find a play that resonates with current politics and particularly the Iraq war. Well yes…and no. I didn’t go looking for a “war” play or a “relevant” play. Certainly relevance is high on our list of criteria for scheduling plays but I wasn’t intent on choosing a play that provokes questions about our latest state of war. I had been involved in a
production of CATCH-22 over 30 years ago and remembered it as fast and darkly hilarious and full of good challenging roles for young actors, so that’s why I brought it to the season planning table. In the process of mounting this play, have I found it to be particularly relevant? You bet.

Consider some of the questions it raises:
* Whose interests are really at stake in war?
* Is the instinct for self-preservation always necessarily
cowardice?
* If it is good for the economy, does that automatically
make it good for us?
* Is it unpatriotic to question the decisions of our leaders?
* Can sane behavior ever be expected in the midst of the
insanity of war?

The B-25s of the 15th Air Force are long silent now and the Second World War, that so molded and sharpened Joseph Heller’s vision, is ancient history to our young people. Still, when 20 members of a National Guard Quartermaster Company in Iraq
recently refused to go on a supply mission they considered suicidal, I had to wonder. Is CATCH-22 just one man’s skewed fictional take on the epochal events that shaped his generation?
Or is it a seminal definition of the madness that overtakes us when
war becomes its own justification? It seems those soldiers in the desert, right or wrong, offers up a disturbing echo of Heller’s world of catch-22’s. And it is anything but faint.