Hoping to alleviate his deepening debt to a … It's a blunt, free-flowing documentary collage in which a platoon of all-American ''grunts'' once again stumbles ritualistically through the terrors of free-fire zones, trip wires, body bags, ''subterranean rat-infested bunkers'' and search- and-destroy missions - only to return home, if they return at all, to a country that would rather forget. The open-faced Mr. Chaves has many disturbing solo turns. Aghast to find himself overwhelmed by his first trigger-happy ''frenzy of killing,'' he soon loses another kind of innocence when a first shot of ''skag'' reduces his fit body to that of a crab-like rodent scuttling about mindlessly on the barracks floor.At the play's conclusion, Mr. Chaves and his colleagues revivify themselves for a musical finale that, like the opening, is a prideful anthem of solidarity. While the gore is left to our imaginations, we can't help sharing one soldier's urge to vomit. Screen Reader Users: To optimize your experience with your screen reading software, please use our Flixster.com website, which has the same tickets as our Fandango.com and MovieTickets.com websites. is the unsettling question that ricochets like an incantation throughout the play.As good as the entire cast is, the two original players are exceptional. Bonds, J. Kenneth Campbell, Vincent Caristi, Richard Chaves, Anthony Chisholm, Josh Cruze, Brian Delate and Jim Tracy.TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers.This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. Tracers book. It was directed by Gary Sinise ... the play took another year to get to New York, where it ran produced by Joseph PAPP for six months! Dramatists Play Service Inc, 2000 - Drama- 75 pages 0Reviews THE STORY: A composite or collage of interrelated scenes, the play follows the lives of a … next I copy a description: ''Developed over several years by an ensemble of men, led by who had served in Vietnam, Tracers explores military training and combat, but is primarily concerned with the rigors of companionship and loyalty within a squad …
In general, the concerns in ''Tracers'' are more primal than polemical. When the soldiers describe their adventures in the jungle or in Saigon bordellos, they do so in a jivey, at times funny, language that combines timeless military lingo with rock-and-roll cadences, drug jargon, pidgin Vietnamese and English and an almost surreal litany of profanity.

''How does it feel to kill somebody?'' Dealing with the grim realities of the battlefield—free-fire zones, trip wires, … Mr. Caristi, as a scrawny recruit from Brooklyn, starts off as a naive figure of fun, then is transfigured by battle into a survivor who rationalizes his absurd wartime experience as ''a party.'' Sign up for a FANALERT® and be the first to know when tickets and other exclusives are available in your area.After he crashes his bike into a super-sexy stranger named Nikki (Marie Avgeropoulos), Cam (Taylor Lautner) is introduced to her crew -- a team that uses parkour to pull off heists. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. AT the beginning of ''Tracers,'' the new arrival at the Public Theater, a snaking line of Vietnam veterans gyrates about the stage to a driving rock beat. Its authors are the eight veterans who initially appeared in it - two of whom, Richard Chaves and Vincent Caristi, are still with the show at the Public.

The few explicit political statements flow naturally from the action - as when one veteran, now an Army lifer, sardonically describes recent American casualties in Lebanon as another example of ''the unwilling'' being ''led by the uneducated to do the impossible for the ungrateful.'' ''Tracers'' is a play about a grim war, written and performed by men who were there, and yet this opening sequence provides the electric lift of the Jets' song in ''West Side Story.'' Hoping to alleviate his deepening debt to a violent crime gang, Cam quickly joins the group. THE STORY: A composite or collage of interrelated scenes, the play follows the lives of a group of “grunts” as they move from basic training, on to combat in Vietnam, and finally to the shattering realization that their lives will be forever affected by the horrors that they have witnessed—and been a part of. There is, one could say, nothing new in ''Tracers.'' Read More In one scene, the actors mime a ''blanket detail'' - in which they try to solve the macabre ''jigsaw puzzle'' of reuniting their dead comrades' torsos with their severed fingers and arms. Joseph Papp presents the Vietnam Veterans Ensemble Theater Company, Thomas Bird, artistic director. Even the accompanying period rock songs (''Sympathy for the Devil,'' ''Higher,'' ''Fixin' to Die Rag'') are exactly the ones we would expect. movie theaters are playing Tracers near you.
But it's a party, Mr. Caristi's increasingly glassy eyes tell us, whose revelers are mostly ghosts.