Compulsion Dance and Theatre’s latest production, "First Day in December," looks back to the night the Vietnam draft lottery was launched. The play arrives just after the U.S. launched strikes on Iran and just ahead of the 50th anniversary of the draft. The play opens tonight at the Diversionary Black Box Theatre.
Richard Fouts was an 18-year-old freshman in college on Dec. 1, 1969.
"That was the night of the first draft lottery since World War II," Fouts recalled. "And on that night, each day of the year was put in a blue capsule, 366 capsules, thrown into a big bin and mixed up. And then Colonel Daniel Omer from the Army withdrew capsules one by one, and that was your draft number. So it determined the order in which you go to Vietnam. So it was over about a 90-minute period — just an excruciating 90-minute period of finding out when you were going, if you were going to war."
That night — and the impact it had on Fouts and his fraternity brothers — is now the topic of a play, "First Day in December," directed by Michael Mizerany.
"When I read the play, it's a story I've never heard of before," Mizerany said. "So that intrigued me, and it tells a story of five people affected by it and how they're close friends, but as the numbers are called, the friendships start to fracture because one's a football star and he feels like, 'I don't have to go because I shouldn't, because I'm a football star.' So you don't go because you're a football star, but I have to go because I'm not one? And so it becomes a thing about privilege and race and entitlement."
But President Richard Nixon had the idea that everyone would be eligible based on age, with no college deferments.
"So the idea was to make it completely equitable, make it completely fair. But what happened is it just kicked the anti-war movement into high gear after that," Fouts noted.
Fouts did not start writing the play until 2013, after he heard a NPR interview with Denis O'Neill, author of " Whiplash: When the Vietnam War Rolled a Hand Grenade Into the Animal House." O'Neill's experience that night was similar to Fouts', and it inspired him to write the play. The passage of time allowed him emotional distance and a chance to see things with new eyes.
"I started to see some of the humor, which is crazy," Fouts said. "That night it was pure drama. But one of the guys, you know, was curious about how do we get out of this? So those conversations began and they became kind of funny because people were like, well, if you're involved in religious studies you can get out of it. 'Oh, I'll just go to rabbi school.' Another guy said, you know, if you flunk your medical exam, you don't have to go. Well, how do you do that? You can eat and become obese, which somebody did. You can cut off a finger. There's all kinds of things you can do to flunk your medical. And so these crazy conversations started to occur. And so I put a lot of that in the play."
The timing of the play's opening provides a context that no one could have expected.
"Well, it wasn't planned, obviously," Mizerany said about opening days after the U.S. conducted military strikes against Iran. "What's really odd, there's a line in the play that says it wasn't approved by Congress. I'm like, that is totally what's happening now. This war was not approved by Congress."
For Fouts, it made him think, "Here we go again."
"And as Michael was saying, there's a line in the play where, this wasn't approved by Congress. The draft wasn't approved by Congress. It was done by executive order. Congress didn't push back. And here we go again, you know, (with) Congress not involved," Fouts said.
Performing this play in the extremely intimate Diversionary Black Box Theatre places the audience right in the room with the characters. It's an intensity Fouts feels.
"Oh, it's incredible because they just take me right back to 1969 every time I see them," Fouts said. "I get so emotional because, I mean, we're talking over 50 years and I watch them and each of these characters is based on my own fraternity brothers, and a couple of them didn't come back. So I told Michael, 'Is there some switch so that I can turn off when I watch this play?' Because it just takes me back."
"First Day in December" opens tonight at the Diversionary Black Box Theatre and will run weekends through March 22.
