at first, actor Lolly Ward had qualms over doing a satire about the Iraq conflict. “I didn’t want to forget what other people are going through, in this war,” says Ward, ’93, MA ’94, a member of the Los Angeles-based Actors' Gang. When Embedded opened last fall, “I thought, I don’t know who’s going to get angry about this, what kind of conversations I’m going to have out of this,” she says. “But I knew I was fired up about it.”
Written and directed by the troupe’s co-founder, actor Tim Robbins, Embedded hits out at the Bush administration and at self-censorship practiced by some journalists assigned to American military units. It also portrays the thinking of the 19th-century neoconservative philosopher Leo Strauss, who proposed that deception is a necessity in politics. Given the tense political climate in the United States, Ward wondered if protesters would boycott the play.
Cut to a year later: Embedded has enjoyed two successful runs in L.A.; its off-Broadway outing was extended twice; and the Actors’ Gang recently took it overseas to London’s Riverside Theatre. There is talk of them touring other European countries.
Critics haven’t always been impressed—the New York Times gave a nod to the “hard-working” cast but said “the territory plowed here has already been strip-mined elsewhere” in our 24/7 electronic culture. Audiences kept coming, though.
Ward plays three characters: the mother of Jen-Jen, a soldier injured in circumstances strikingly similar to Jessica Lynch’s; Amy Constant, a well-known reporter who accepts and writes what the Army and government tell her (and often has to retract the stories after fact-checking); and Woof, a member of the president’s inner circle, a.k.a. the Office of Special Plans, based on an amalgam of Bush officials.
Acting has been part of Ward’s life since her childhood in Bethesda, Md., but she says she didn’t take it seriously until Stanford. The English major acted in and wrote for Gaieties and joined the Stanford Improvisers.
After graduation, Ward moved to Los Angeles. Day jobs taught her about the industry while she saved up for stretches of full-time acting. (Embedded’s long life has allowed Ward to quit her most recent job as executive assistant at Paramount.)
Ward’s parents, avowed Robbins fans, alerted her to the existence of the Actors’ Gang when she arrived in L.A., but she didn’t have time to pursue it. After seeing the Gang’s production of Oscar Wilde’s Salome a couple of years later, she was hooked. “It was so wonderful, so beautifully acted. It was funny and smart, and I thought, I don’t care what these people are doing next; I want to be involved with this group,” she recalls.
Since joining them in 1999, Ward has had roles in Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Klaus Mann’s Mephisto, where she worked for the first time with Robbins, whom she calls a “respectful” director. “With all his experience as a director, a writer and an actor, I feel like he really knows how to work with actors.”
Ward says she would like to act in films and do more writing, but she loves the immediacy of theater. She favors works “that are about an issue or a human condition, something that makes people think and want to talk about it afterwards.”
Something like Embedded. Ward says some of the best moments of the New York and London runs came during Q&A sessions after the show, when the cast, Robbins or invited speakers interacted with the audience. Guests included novelist Kurt Vonnegut, former Marine Anthony Swofford (author of Jarhead) and broadcasters John Simpson of the BBC and Amy Goodman of Pacifica Radio. Discussion topics ranged from unbalanced TV coverage on the eve of the war, to a firsthand account of journalists relying on Iraqi stringers for their information while they reported from the roof of the Palestine Hotel.
LAURA ALMO, MA ’98,is a freelance writer in Los Angeles.
