Watch the Comic, Bitter, Satire on the Trial of Nashua Chantal for Scaling the Fort Benning Fence
VFP Chapter 135, Pensacola and NW Florida, will produce a play called, Trial of Nashua Chantal. The play centers around the 2013 trial of Nashua Chantal who scaled the Fort Benning fence wearing a clown costume during the 2012 vigil. The play will include Nashua, four conscience prisoners and six VFP members.
When: Saturday, Nov 22, 2014
Time: 4:30pm
Where: Columbus Convention Center, Room 210
The play is a courtroom scene. VFP members interested in being a part of the play, email Bill Sloan @ wmsloan35@gmail.com
Producer, Bill Sloan, Veterans for Peace, Chapter 135 comments about the play below:
I was in the courtroom in the Columbus federal courthouse on April 9, 2013. Robert "Nashua" Chantal had climbed the chainlink in November 2012 and jumped down into Ft Benning to be arrested.
Words like outrage and sadness don't describe that "trial." Only mocking ridicule could give the arid self-righteousness its own due verdict. The result was a satire titledColumbus Circus. You will laugh; you'll wonder why; and you'll come away with a sense of victory.
VFP Chapter 135, Pensacola and NW Florida, is producing the play. The cast includes Nashua himself, four other Prisoners of Conscience, and six VFP members and friends.
The play is a courtroom scene. On the prosecution side are Judge Roy Bean (the Law West of the Pecos); Police Chief Wyatt Earp; WHINSEC/SOA Commander George A. Custer; and Prosecutor Hamiltonia Burger. For the defense are Counsel Clarence Darrow and appropriate witnesses. You will have to see the show to find out who. Nashua's defense is the same as he made in April. Nashua, as you recall, dressed as a Clown to jump the fence. So I set the trial in a circus. That gave me a Kangaroo (figure it out) and a Ringmaster and Clowns and Lions. Sound a little goofy? It's a lampoon. A NY theater professional liked it enough to prod me into staging it in Columbus.
In the courtroom I recalled Stephen Vincent Benét's lines on the trial of John Brown [from his epic John Brown's Body.
No one can say that the trial was not fair. The trial was painfully fair by every rule of law. And that it was fair made not the slightest difference.
The law's our yardstick, and it measures well when there are yards to measure . . . You can weigh John Brown's Body well enough, But in what balance weigh John Brown?