Bob Kerr: Play picks up on never-ending story

Bob Kerr: Play picks up on never-ending story

And the story in, say, 2035 will surely tell of wives like Norma Wisniewski who watched their husbands lose interest and not want to leave the house and get angry over the smallest things. That’s what happens. It always does. And the more people who know about it, and think about it, the better.

Brochu started writing in 2008, but parts of the play have been with her for years.

Ten years ago she met a woman who had two children suffering deformities that had been traced back to Agent Orange through their father.

There was the guy she met at a 40th high school reunion who never revealed he had been in Vietnam. There was an argument at a dinner party about the rightness and wrongness of the war decades after it was over.

The play is set in 2004 in Plymouth as a family comes together around a wedding. It also comes together around all the years of resentment, disappointment, detachment and struggle that having a Vietnam veteran in the family can create. Joe Rego is the father. He was a Marine medevac pilot in Vietnam. He kept some distance from some of his family. And when we meet him he is dying. One of his sons is dealing with a disability that is not fully described.

But in father and son, we suspect that Agent Orange has left its mark.