The Trial of the Catonsville Nine

Coming at the end of The Trial of the Catonsville Nine is a film-clip of nine men and women (among them Fathers Daniel and Philip Berrigan) burning a pile of draft files. It works as a clincher, a final reminder that all the questions and speeches and arguments that have been spoken on stage in the previous hour and a half are quite real, quite serious. The documentary film of the real Catonsville Nine in action fits in perfectly well at the end of this play that recreates their trial. But it's hardly necessary, because Trial is a play that tries mostly just to document--in a very journalistic way--what went on in a Baltimore Federal Court for five days in October 1969.

Daniel Berrigan wrote the play almost entirely from the court transcripts of the trial, and (with a re-write job by Saul Levitt) Michael Butler's new production is very simply a competent condensation of the events of the trial of those nine Catholic radicals who raided the draft board of small-town Catonsville, Maryland and used home-made napalm to destroy 378 folders from the 1-A file.

It was, and is, a compelling trial. The defendants had already performed their "crime" for newsmen and when they got to court they freely admitted their actions. The prosecution contended that they had destroyed government property worth over $100, obliterated Selective Service records, and interfered with the administration of the Selective Service Act of 1967. The Catonsville Nine refused to agree that they had committed a crime, and contended instead that they had performed an act of conscience. In the courtroom, the prosecutor and judge tried to limit the trial only to the issue of whether laws had been broken, while the defendants, calling up their experiences all over the world with the poor who were often the victims of United States foreign policy, tried to put that policy, and especially the Vietnam War, on trial. That's the conflict of the play, a conflict that most of us have been watching for a long time.

James J. Sloyan, as Daniel Berrigan, hovers around the trial like a director stepping into scences at a rehearsal to set them in order. He plays a fine Father Dan, a quick, impish man with almost perfect self-knowledge whose impious sense of humor makes his testimony even more telling when that humor disappears for a description of the horrors of the United States air war on Vietnam. Sloyan slipped on a few lines in the first-night performance, but he never dropped his role as the poetic activist guiding an adamant but occasionally confused group of Christian radicals through the United States judicial system.

First-night insecurity may have been the only thing that kept most of the cast from succeeding completely in their almost uncanny recreations of the attitudes and mannerisms of the people they played. The well-cast roles of the defendants are dramatic plums for the actors who fill them; the actors are obviously advocates of the play's political position, and when they testify point-blank to the audience, it's personal as well as acted testimony. In that situation, it's difficult for them to speak their own opinions while trying to sustain someone else's identify, and the risk is that personal passion and dramatic skill will cancel each other out. An actor who gets too caught up in a speech can drop out of character. But Ann Whiteside, as Mary Moylan stands out in her management of the problem, letting her temper run wild as she describes her anger at discovering that American planes bombing the Congo had "mistakenly" hit two unprotected villages in Uganda. Real anger may not be enough onstage, but Ann Whiteside's anger is so well-transformed into the anger of Mary Moylan that, at least for a moment, the years and the distance between the Cambridge stage and the Maryland courtroom are forgotten.

Michael Butler, that "Medici of the counter-culture" who hully-gullied all the way to the Chase Manhattan after his production of Hair, may have taken on some real risks in deciding to produce The Trial of the Catonsville Nine in Cambridge. Berrigan's play has a certain amount of purely dramatic force, especially in proud statements of faith like defendant David Darst's: "People are sacred, an end in themselves. They can't be used as means." But most of that force is thrown against particularly contemporary, and particularly political problems; in a political trial it has to be. In Cambridge where those problems are recognized, there is little revelation in setting them forth on stage. Inevitably, Berrigan's play is' as much a documentary as it is a work of theater, a documentary in the style of WGBH's Murder One, a pilot attempt at condensing an important trial into an hour-long television re-creation for the purpose of public information. If anything distinguishes The Trial of the Catonsville Nine from this new form of reporting, it's Berrigan's effort to connect, to force recognition of the relationship between a criminal trial in Maryland and the burned and maimed bodies of soldiers and civilians in southeast Asia. The Catonsville trial was, for its defendants, a conscious battle to make the connection. The relationship is a necessary element of any retelling of the story. The Trial of the Catonsville Nine focuses on it, repeating it relentlessly, arguing with compassion, but at times without the passion of direct political outcry.

Watching the play, it's hard, to believe that the trial took place more than three years ago, and that some of the defendants have already been released from prison. But it's true: the connection between the trial and the war is now an old one, and no matter how important it is, it's been recognized and tucked away in a lot of mental files where it will get only the approval, and the dismissal, given and historical fact. The Trial of the Catonsville Nine can at least bring out those files and ignite them. If you go to the play, don't go to be entertained. Go to be reminded that the real causes of the trial are still with us.