Vietnam

Maya Lin was still a college student when her design was selected out of more than 1400 entries for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C., ...

This includes the continuing ambivalence of Americans towards the Vietnam War, and the place of public art in American society, which is especially relevant given the recent controversies involving monuments to the Confederacy. They saw it as (actual quotes cited in the play) a “black gash of shame,” and “a wailing wall for the draft dodgers and a monument to defeat.” James tries to convince Maya to change her design in basic ways. We ultimately see James crouching in front of the memorial, looking for the name of a friend, and etching it on a napkin; we understand that he has come around – as has the public: Millions visit the memorial annually, and a 2007 survey by the American Institute of Architects listed it as the public’s tenth favorite piece of American architecture, right after the Chrysler Building and right before St. The key to this contradictory characterization can be found in the program: James, we’re told, is “an amalgamation of real-life veterans.” He is created to represent a category more than to embody a credible individual character, which is problematic for more than just dramaturgical reasons. It’s only in the final scene in “Memorial” that this modest production renders a visual sense of the monument’s power , largely through Gregory Casparian’s projections. The play is opening today on the Chinese New Year, the day after news of ten people being killed at a ballroom dance studio in Monterey Park, California “amid Lunar New Year celebrations.” This is my project too.”But soon he is working to undermine her; he shows Hideo a blueprint from 1946 for a memorial for Japanese-Americans that was never built, trying to entice him to work on it; this seems to be a stealthy maneuver to get him to quit working on (and supporting) the Vietnam memorial. Even when he winds up questioning some of the choices (that the monument is black while the other ones on the National Mall are white; that it’s largely below ground), he tells Maya: “I’m just trying to help. Both were involved but neither were central to the development of the memorial; their prominence in the play suggests that the playwright wants us to see Maya Lin’s design the way these survivors might have seen it — as healing in the aftermath of yet another collective trauma. Is she also weighing in on the Vietnam War, seeing it as equivalent to these two dark moments in history? We hear from Julia of Aunt Hui Yin, a famous architect in China, who designed the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. [Washington Post](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Post), who as a Jew had fled Germany in 1936; Hideo Sasaki (Glenn Kubota), a Japanese-American landscape architect who was a juror in the Vietnam memorial design competition, and had been imprisoned in an American internment camp during World War II.