Sobering up When the dead just say no BY MEGAN GRUMBLING
	Bury the Dead By Irwin Shaw. Produced and directed by Joshua Douglas and Will Stewart. Presented by Running Over Productions, at the Presumpscot Grange Hall (across from Tortilla Flat), through May 7. Call (207) 653-8898.

A couple different intoxicants are at play in Irwin Shaw’s 1936 antiwar social satire Bury the Dead (directed by Joshua Douglas and Will Stewart of Running Over Productions, at the Presumpscot Grange Hall), and as it happens, liquor is the least of them. This is wartime. Casualties are mounting and the Generals maintain a steady diet of grain alcohol, but it’s the triumvirate war cocktail of military fervor, religious righteousness, and patriotism that is keeping the rest of the nation pretty well buzzed. And so it is unpleasantly sobering for the masters of war when six dead soldiers stand up in their trench graves — and refuse to lie back down.

After opening their company’s exploits last fall with the fun and campy bloodbath The Zombie, Running Over Productions has wisely moved from spectacle and gore to a more nuanced take on the zombie genre, a fine script written by a prolific and political writer (Shaw was blacklisted during the McCarthy purges). Their shift in approach is mirrored by the excellent make-up/wound design of Sarah Tarling and Christian Matzke, who have wrought realistic and strangely lovely injuries for each of the six soldiers — glistening head wounds, pierced lungs, pale and bluish intestines opened in the abdomen.

The soldiers who bear these afflictions are beseeched, for the good of the nation, to lie back down. The Generals (Rob Pellerin and Todd Manter, with some nice baritone frenzy) demand, exhort, and urge the men to wash death down with the war cocktail. When none of that works, they turn to the fairer sex. One by one, the soldiers’ women come to the trench to try to convince them into their graves. As the men relate their reasons for standing up, Shaw balances the more acute edge of his satirical skills with something softer, a more lyrical attention to the common, material, and tangible.

There are things that Private John Schelling (a subdued Jeff Pellerin) just hasn’t had enough of, as he tells his farmwife Bess (Cindy Pellerin), like " green fuzz over a new field, silks from off the ears flyin’ in the wind. " For Private Henry Levy (Bob Tkacik), women alone are reason to live. In a particularly simple and lovely monologue, he recalls for Victory Bond dancer Joan (Jana Regan) how he loved to watch the soft sway of the ladies’ hips. Tkacik’s Levy has a gentle, almost self-effacing ardor, and it’s a wistful moment when he says that he would gladly walk the earth, undead, just to look at all the fine long legs out there.

Elsewhere, the class question surfaces. The leader of the soldiers’ movement, Private Tom Driscoll (a more strident Keith Anctil, whose low and bitter laugh runs under much of the play) tells his estranged, blind sister (Eve Strugar, eerie and mellifluous) that he has some things he wants to say to the working-class guys who " swing the big machines, " and who " leave their homes behind to pick up guns. " And when the downtrodden Private Webster (a hangdog and beaten Will Stewart) says he’s standing up because he wonders what God likes so much about the better-off folks, who don’t have to go to war to feed their families, his angry wife asks the Big Question: " Well, what took you so long, then? "

I probably needn’t mention that the Presumpscot Grange Hall is not an Equity house. There are a couple of seasoned actors in the cast, but in large part this is a production of enthusiastic novices. That makes for some pacing problems in the second act, but overall there’s something extremely appealing about their newness, about seeing such an activist play performed with such a greenness, and particularly in the case of the soldiers. Standing throughout the play in the dimly lit trenches just off the end of the stage, some of them are subdued nearly to the point of swallowing lines. But this thoughtful production is somehow even the more compelling for that. The unaffected commonness of their dead men is more striking, perhaps, than over-practiced theatrics could render.

The rise of the soldiers wins some sympathizers among the living. As Private McGurk (Joshua Douglas, all irrepressible piss and vinegar and a fine living contrast to the dead men) says, " It’s the smartest thing I’ve seen yet in this army. " You know your culture’s in some trouble when it’s the zombies who have the greatest presence of mind. Their reawakening in the trenches is what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity.

Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com.