A First World War officer leads his men into battle, symbolically throwing bits of raw meat at a wall. A nurse gathers them up and performs triage, discarding the ‘dead’ and returning the others as fit for duty. This scene, repeated a dozen times in the course of the play, is a powerful metaphor for the insanity and human cost of war, and plays movingly against another repeated trope, a woman back home describing a recurring dream of Death, whom she fights off with the power of will and love, keeping her beloved alive one more day.

Badac, a company known for addressing hard subjects through unrelenting, even cruel attacks on the audience, are relatively mild here, relying on the psychological power of the repetition of these two painful images and the growing sense of despair and doom they generate to produce its effect. A script built on the stammering fragments and repetitions of high passion contributes to the play’s power, and producer/director/writer/actor Steve Lambert and actress Susanne Gschwendtner movingly embody the emotional costs of war, the play’s only weakness lying in the hint of going on too long generated by its cyclical structure.