Playwright Takes LBJ to the Next Stage

By JOHN HARLOW | Editor-in-Chief

Since he stepped back from Palisades Charter High School, teacher Dennis Danziger has become a full-time playwright, exploring recent American history in a series of plays covering the presidents and the wars from Vietnam to (nearly) today.

Today itself will probably have to wait until tomorrow before Danziger dares address such a tangled and riven era.

Now his single-act play “Shalom Vietnam,” extracted from his full-length satire “The Richard Nixon Sex Tapes,” has been selected for reading at the 37th William Inge Festival’s National Play Lab to be performed in Inge’s native Kansas in May.

(Inge’s “Picnic” was a hit at Theatre Palisades last season).

The newly revamped work follows a 21-year-old Jewish atheist who seeks to avoid the Vietnam War by landing the last seat in a Brooklyn rabbinical school established as a haven for draft dodger.

It’s partially based, Danziger told the Palisadian-Post, on the misadventures of his own brother.

It was a dilemma faced by many young otherwise-patriotic men who, in the waning years of the conflict, saw no purpose in putting lives and limbs at risk in a futile cause—one, which, according to the leaked Pentagon Papers, the government itself knew was a lost and wasteful bloodbath.

Despite its origins, this playlet features President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

The play was originally put on at the Stella Adler Theater in Los Angeles, but the latest selection shows that works by Westside writers can travel into the American heartland.