Vietnam veteran Jimmy lives an okay enough life, poking around his garage in rustbelt Michigan, enjoying the gruff banter between friends and customers. He tells us a little bit about how he came to be here, his relationships, the people he meets. He seems an all right kind of a guy. A little on the crusty side, but basically sound.
A compelling and reflective piece of layered meaning and morality
We then delve back a little further: into Jimmy's service with the Marines in the Vietnam war. A war which then, and since, has become a byword for interventional futility. A war which awoke the sleeping giant of collective social activism and noisy dissent. A war which saw nearly sixty thousand American soldiers and an estimated three million Vietnamese civilians and fighters lose their lives.
And a war which has left indelible scars on Jimmy's consciousness.
Writer/director Richard Vergette paints the horrific pictures of Jimmy's tour with a casual brusqueness which belies the pain he has lugged with him for decades. And a guilt omnipresent by its absence. He embodies Jimmy with the weary physicality of a life that has been lived. This is a man who has seen. Who has heard. And it has shaped who he is and what he thinks.
The narrative is a clever piece of storytelling which resists the temptation to lead the audience towards one-dimensional empathy or opprobrium for Jimmy. He is what he is: and is not seeking our - or anyone else's - approval. But there is something that still can shock us: and seeing him reach for that infamous red baseball cap and grip it like a talisman gives us that sinking feeling of disappointment so familiar across politics in recent years.
Vergette has brought his previously acclaimed show back to the Fringe at a time when our interest in the soap opera of American politics is sky high. The reasons that Jimmy picks up that MAGA cap are complex and - crucially - unjudged; and the audience is invited to consider what might drive someone towards extremism rather than leap to reductive conclusions.
This is a compelling and reflective piece of layered meaning and morality. At its close, we are left with hope that Jimmy - or rather this family's love for him - will not only redeem and heal him, but their own little piece of America.
