The art of forgiveness

David Renzi

Friday, April 11, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

For his first full-length play, Tony Del Valle merged the incongruous themes of AIDS and Vietnam, and came up with "The Art of Forgiving Robert McNamara."

Del Valle, a graduate student in UNLV's master's of fine arts playwriting program, based his work on a mostly autobiographical story -- a story that ultimately has less to do with either issue than with forgiveness.

Hence the title. The story begins in April 1995, with the publishing of the former defense secretary's memoirs on the Vietnam War, "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lesson of Vietnam," and his arrival in Los Angeles for a book signing.

L.A. also happens to be home to Bobby (Eric Kaiser), a disgruntled Vietnam veteran who never got over the war.

"(He) is intent on assassinating McNamara at the book signing," Del Valle says. "His brother died in the war, he was in the war himself. He didn't mind that McNamara was incompetent, but when he reads the book and finds that (McNamara) didn't believe in the war or think it was winnable, but continued to escalate it, he's pretty riled up about it."

Careful not to embroil his friend in any legal problems, he emphasizes that "the assassination part is totally fiction."

Del Valle, who was diagnosed HIV-positive in 1994, was dealing with the issue of his own mortality when he went to L.A. and had an epiphany. He began to read his friend's books on Vietnam and soon forgot his own troubles.

"It all came together," he says. "I was supposed to spend the week visiting my friend, and I ended up spending the week reading everything about Vietnam. It became an obsession."

So much so that he began thinking of Bobby and Jimmy (David Cousins), another Vietnam vet who was visiting Bobby when Del Valle arrived, as models for characters in a play.

"I was tired of wallowing in self-pity and didn't want to write another AIDS play full of gloom and doom," he says. "I needed to wrestle with something more universal."

Which, it turned out, was forgiveness. And McNamara was the metaphor.

"The book, I thought, was so outrageous, and I thought about why he wrote it," Del Valle says. "It seemed he was writing it to be forgiven. It seemed there was so much hatred. The editorials were so anti-McNamara. He seemed to want to be forgiven."

Del Valle, 44, now with full-blown AIDS, was also seeking absolution.

"I was obsessed with hoping that other people forgave me for things I had done. Then it dawned on me: I hadn't forgiven people," he says. "I had been estranged from my family for 10 years, and it seemed to all come together."

Director Davey Marlin-Jones says the characters -- which also include Russ Marchand, who plays Bobby's son, Lance; and Shannon Hammerstein, who plays the emotionally lost Annette -- are an amalgam of people who have touched Del Valle's life.

Each of them are dealing with issues of mortality -- the mortality of a marriage, the mortality of ideas, the mortality of promise unfulfilled.

A former journalist who worked for Stars and Stripes in Europe and the Korea Times, Del Valle had written some one-act plays before "The Art of Forgiving Robert McNamara."

"This isn't like anything I've written before," he says. "It was a play that wrote itself. I wasn't interested in Vietnam or McNamara, but the tie-ins were there. The tie-ins were issues of forgiveness."

Bobby and Jimmy present both sides of the Vietnam coin: the soldier who can't let it go and the solider who won't allow it to beat him.

"He hasn't worked and won't take responsibility for his life," Del Valle says of Bobby. "The war is an excuse for him not to take responsibility for his life. (Jimmy) has dealt with it in a positive way. It dawned on him that his anger wasn't getting him anywhere."