GREENE – Set in 1999, Steven Dietz’s “Last of the Boys” is a moving, sometimes funny, and always incendiary play about a life long friendship, about how a girl honors her missing father, about how a man deals with the loss of his own, about a hidden conversation that won’t go away. Two vets, sharing beer, whiskey and a secret neither wants to discuss. The play debuts tonight on the Chenango River Theatre stage in Greene.

Remember America, the mid-late 60s? A war that was unpopular. And unwinnable. A lesson we would always remember.  485,000 troops deployed. 59,000 never came home. For many who did, the war, and the public reaction to those returning veterans here at home, took its toll. It’s a story with stunning resonance today. Pick up a Time Magazine from the late 60s and read the debate between “stay the course” or “cut and run.” That debate still rages. But that debate too often overlooks the real people involved and how their experiences shaped their lives, and ours.  “Last of the Boys” is Ben and Jeeter’s story, first and foremost, but it’s also our story. 

Ben and Jeeter meet every summer at the beat up mobile home where Ben lives in the middle of a toxic dump in (where else?) California.  Jeeter, still using memories of meeting Bob Dylan to pick up chicks, now teaches a college course on the 60s. Ben, whose father was once an aide to Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the buildup in Vietnam, is now a carpenter, still trying to rebuild his own life. 

“Last of the Boys” is a story “about two Vietnam vets and their friendship and the strands of their life, who they affect and who they are affected by” (Steven Dietz, author). There are thousands of similar stories still out there, buried deep that will never come to light.