"TRY TO REMEMBER"

05.05.2026

As I direct Vanities, a play by Jack Heifner, set across the years 1963, 1968, and 1975, I’m reminded daily that what I experienced as breaking news, my cast knows only as history.

History, as laid out in this play, generates curiosity. Suddenly, in mid-rehearsal, I'm confronted with this question: “Why didn’t you stop the war in Vietnam sooner?”

The ask comes from one of my actors—earnest, direct, and impossible to answer in any way that feels even remotely adequate. It takes the air out of the room. Because the truth is, any explanation I offer feels like an excuse. I can only tell them that we did what we could. It didn’t feel like enough then, and it doesn’t feel like enough now.

I was 11, 16, and 23 in those years—the same years my actors now study as history.

For me, they weren’t chapters in a textbook; they were the years that shaped me, years that still echo and reverberate through my choices and memories.

In 1963, my world was small and innocent, revolving almost entirely around The Beatles and the excitement of a new era generated by a young family in the White House—the Kennedys.

But by 1975, that innocence was replaced by a much harder reality. At 23, I was in my second year of graduate school, sitting across from a department chair who looked me in the eye and insisted, “In the theatre, there are no women directors.” I remember gripping the arms of the chair and asking myself: Then what in the world am I doing here?

Meanwhile, the oldest member of my cast won’t be born until fifteen years after that conversation.

That distance—between my experience and their history—is the space we are trying to bridge. Together with my assistant director, Michelle, and my dramaturg, Margo, we find ourselves translating not just facts, but experiences.

We talk about avocado and harvest gold appliances, orange countertops, and shag carpeting in bathrooms. We discuss school supplies that boiled down to number 2 pencils and Bic pens. And we explain the complexities of women’s undergarments—bras, slips, girdles, garter belts, and stockings that ran at the slightest provocation—runs we tried to stop with clear nail polish that sealed the nylon to our skin.

These details sound quaint, even amusing. But they are also evidence of a world that entertained the idea of sunken living rooms, but still didn't see the value of women outside of traditional roles.

Trying to explain the women’s movement to this cast has proven harder than I expected. The idea that some women went to college primarily to find a husband—a so-called “MRS degree”—doesn’t sit with them. Nor should it. The choices available to them now—whether to marry or not, to pursue careers, to define their own lives—were narrower and more prescribed then. Even as slogans like “You’ve come a long way, baby” circulated in the airwaves and magazines, we knew how far we still had to go.

Progress, as I remember it, was uneven. A series of hard-won steps—sometimes forward, often back. The idea that a woman could own her ambition, let alone her body, was not assumed; it was argued for. Negotiated. Defended.

We were also watching the world fracture and reform around us. The civil rights movement and the women’s movement unfolded in real time, while the rights of the LGBTQ community went largely unspoken by many Americans. And always—always—there was the war in Vietnam.

How do I explain to my cast that at the time, America wasn't a single organism, but a country divided by politics, by protest, by silence, and by fear, not unlike what we're experiencing today. Some marched. Some supported the war. Some said nothing at all.

But inside that division, there were also families like mine. Extended families with a chair that sat empty at the table, a loss that never found closure, a community that never recovered. Every family who was given a folded flag “as a symbol of our appreciation for your loved one’s service to Country and Corps” carried that same unfathomable grief then - and now.

When you’re living inside that kind of helplessness, “stopping the war” didn’t feel like a political choice—it felt like trying to hold back the ocean with your bare hands.

We didn’t understand it all at once. News came once a day, for thirty minutes, delivered by Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America.” We weren’t inundated with information; we were limited by it. It took time for the reality of the horror to break through—for the images, the protests, the mounting loss to force us to watch the unwatchable.

And when we saw it, we tried. We spoke out. We pushed back. But it never felt like enough.

My teens and early twenties were shaped by that war—the draft, the protests, the endless dread of knowing young men who went and didn’t return. How do you explain that kind of fear? That kind of helplessness?

These are the questions that linger in our rehearsal room long after practice ends and the lights are turned off.

It’s tempting to believe that progress is linear—that once something is gained, the battle is won. That rights, once secured, are permanent.

But life has taught me otherwise.

Progress is fragile. It can feel solid until you find yourself revisiting the same arguments, defending the same ground, and fighting the same battles you thought had already been won.

That illusion—that we are always moving forward—is comforting, but it is also dangerous.

Introducing this reality to our cast isn’t just about helping them understand lines like “Let Lyndon Johnson do something about the war” or “I gave up hope the night McGovern lost.” It’s about helping them understand what it means to live inside history while it is still unfolding around you.

I know Michelle, Margo, and I feel a sense of responsibility standing as witnesses—and reference points—not because we got everything right, but because we tried. Because we kept trying, even when the outcomes were unclear, when progress was slow, and when we slid backwards.

I don't judge my generation with either pride or shame. Only by our efforts.

As I work with this cast—three women of a different era who are unafraid to ask questions—I’m struck by how different the world is now, and how it's still very much the same.

Someday, if someone looks at them and ask why they didn’t change their world sooner, I hope they can say something more than "we tried."

I hope they can say, "we did."

Renat1o Martin Bevilacqua December 10, 1948 -June 8, 1968

Private First Class Renato Martin Bevilacqua, USMC National Defense Service Medal , Vietnam Campaign Medal Vietnam Service Medal, Purple Heart Name inscribed at VVM Wall, Panel 58w, Line 2.