HCT – Time Stands Still

The Hickory Community Theater presented “Time Stands Still” in its caberet, the Firemen’s Kitchen.  The play showed some of the problems that journalists and photojournalists who cover combat operations bring away with them from those encounters and it clearly references current American operations in the Middle East.  

One of the strongest points in the play was the depiction of emotional problems sometimes experienced by those  who alternate living in two totally different worlds.  One part of their being is looking forward to returning to a “normal” existence while a deeper feeling rises to the point of irrationality because of the conflict between the work they do and the apparent indifference to that work from American “normalism”.  

The act of being a witness to destruction and at the same time recording it for – well, is it really for the purpose of history, or education or news or reporting, or is it more an act of voyeurism? This is an old question, and a pertinent one.  The play discusses this issue and really leaves it, perhaps to haunt the audience.  Meanwhile we see the dedicated compulsion of these people who snap the horror they see in war and develop the agony of innocent humans into a different kind of "beauty".

The play tells how incredible photographs and stories of burning women, dying themselves, crying and carrying the dead bodies of their recently killed children, and the stories that describe these events have to compete with space in American magazines and newspapers with house-ware sales, bridal showers, new automobiles, movies, and restaurants, and how those other events crowd out the stories and pictures of war because the combat depictions are not deemed "economically productive".   It is pointed out that people who see those pictures of horror often quickly turn the page to get on to something more enjoyable, like perhaps a sale at a department store.

The play is powerfully presented and skillfully explores these questions for people who have never experienced the ripping and tearing effect of desperately wanting time to relax and rest at home with family, while at the same time realizing that very wish makes them vulnerable to mental and emotional dismemberment.  

According to the play it seems that once you cross a certain threshold in events of this nature that the only way out is to go back again.

The cast:  Sarah, the photojournalist: Christy Rhianna Branch, James, the journalist: Mark Alton Rose, Richard, the publisher: Ted Eltzroth, Mandy, the normal person: Kelly Abernethy