In mid-October, two days after Stephen Ambrose’s death, a group of American Theatre Company artists sit at a table bringing his favorite war back to life. Actor John Sterchi reads aloud, imitating the cruelly teasing Teutonic voice of Axis Sally, the Third Reich counterpart to Tokyo Rose. “‘So you fliers in Jeemy Stewart’s Liberator group got in trouble over Kassel today. You didn’t liberate anyone. How many Liberators did vee shoot down–30?’” Sterchi shifts his voice again. “I raged at the radio, ‘Twenty-seven, you Nazi bitch, and we got 25 Focke-Wulfs, including my kill from the nose turret! Hope it was your husband or brother.’”
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One of the lucky ones that day was navigator Art Shay, flying in one of the four planes that survived the Kassel raid. Now 80, Shay went on to become one of Chicago’s best-known photojournalists. He has more than 1,000 covers to his name for publications such as Look, Life, and Time, and his photos of Hugh Hefner and Leo Durocher hang in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Shay’s celebrated 1988 book of photographs, Nelson Algren’s Chicago, includes not only shots of his longtime friend in his favorite haunts but sharp, poignant images of Chicago’s down-and-out. Shay had many encounters with the famous and infamous, from Marlon Brando to Judy Garland to Jimmy Hoffa, and recounts them in his photographic memoir, Album for an Age, published in 2000. He also describes his experiences in the war and the disappearance of his “genius hippie son,” Harmon, in 1972 when the boy was 20. Those memories are the basis of Shay’s new one-man play, Where Have You Gone, Jimmy Stewart?, directed by his friend Mike Nussbaum and performed by Sterchi. The piece opens at American Theatre Company on Veterans Day–November 11–and runs through December 8.
Shay says that his memoir “really began some years ago with my grandson Carter, who was then about 13. He said to me, ‘I have to do a report. What’s the worst thing that happened to you in the war?’” Earlier this year, under Nussbaum’s tutelage, Shay’s chronicle of “competing nightmares” received its first reading at ATC. (The last play Shay had produced was A Clock for Nikita, which ran at Chicago’s Stagelight Theatre in 1964, and he’s currently working on a solo piece about Simone de Beauvoir.)
Shay’s anger at the Nazis is still palpable–and Nussbaum urged him to include his defense of the U.S. attack on Dresden in February 1945. (“Revenge is part of war,” the director says.) Though many have argued that the Dresden attack came as the war was almost over, Shay notes that in the 86 days still remaining the Germans continued to lob V-2 rocket bombs at civilian targets–including a movie house in Antwerp where 700 people, many of them children, died while taking in a screening of Fantasia. He adds that some have inflated the death count: “This English Holocaust denier, David Irving, estimated 150,000 to 250,000 killed in Dresden. The official German count is around 36,000. Which brings to mind that the [German] generals complained that killing 33,771 Russian Jews at Babi Yar in two days took too many bullets and too much time.”
Shay’s play was begun before September 11, but resonance with that event is inevitable. Says Nussbaum, “I think that the play has a positive effect, given 9/11, to have the audience recognize that these kinds of crises are not unique. We’ve gone through periods that were even worse, and we’ve come out through the other end. We’ll get through this, too.”
