The Body of an American, Gate Theatre

Photo credited to Simon Dutson.

The Body of an American is a play about a photograph. We get to see the photograph multiple times throughout the opening of the play. We see it in pixels, distorted up and close. We see the version they printed and the version they didn't. We see it from the view of the photographer who took it, from the view of various bystanders and from the family of the body. The only person whose view we don't get is the view from the body itself.
The Body of an American is not the body's story. It is the true story of Paul Watson, a Canadian photojournalist who won a Pulitzer prize for his photograph of a fallen helicopter pilot in Mogadishu. It's a story told by Dan O' Brien, an American playwright, who also appears on stage, played by Damien Malony. The story follows Dan's attempts at meeting Paul, their shared emails and confessions and finally the conversations from their days spent together in a room in the middle of the Arctic tundra.  The two actors inhabit a great range of characters in order to tell the story, placing themselves in the bodies of various people, seeing the world through their eyes. Part of the job for an actor or a playwright but the opposite job of a photojournalist who normally seeks to distance himself from the lives of his subjects. Yet with his career in the midst of the action behind him, Watson finds his subjects coming back to haunt him and struggles to relief himself of the guilt he has accrued. Dan is in awe of his subject and perhaps his desire to place himself on stage alongside him is an attempt to resolve his feelings of worth. By the end of the play we know a lot more about Dan and Paul, though still very little about Staff Sgt. William David Cleveland.