The human face of war

In "Live From the Front," Jerry Quickley wants to make sure the stories of "regular Iraqi folk" are told Ñ and heard.

By Hugh Hart
Special to The Times

May 10, 2006

At 6 feet 5 inches and 360 pounds, Jerry Quickley would stand out in a crowd — even without the finger-in-the-socket Afro. Gripping a tall iced coffee in one hand, cellphone in the other, this Wall Street executive-turned-poetry-slam-performer-turned-war correspondent carries himself with the affable panache of a guy who can talk his way into and out of pretty much anything.

As evidenced in his one-man show "Live From the Front," opening Friday at the Kirk Douglas Theatre as part of the "Solomania" festival, Quickley's street-smart flair served him well when he arrived in Baghdad in early 2003 to serve as a reporter for the Pacifica Radio Network.

"Many folks in Baghdad thought I was an Arab who went to America, lost his mind, gained some weight, grew an Afro and then came back to the Middle East," says Quickley, settling into a sofa at the Bourgeois Pig coffeehouse in Hollywood. "Wherever I went, there were like huge numbers of kids that would follow me around and want to hang out, who I guess were impressed or distracted or amazed by my hair."

In Baghdad, Quickley eluded his government-appointed "minders" frequently enough to get what he went for: uncensored contact with ordinary Iraqis. "For all intents and purposes, regular Iraqi folk have been shut out — and I'm talking about cabdrivers, housewives, whoever," Quickley says in a raspy radio-deep voice. "One reason I wrote 'Live From the Front' is because there's a complete absence of these voices from U.S. media."

As Quickley recounts in the "Live" monologue, his man-on-the-street interviews gave way to more urgent reportage when, from the shaky sanctuary of the city's Palestine Hotel, he witnessed the bombing of Baghdad. "There's an ill math when a bombs explodes," he notes dryly. "You see it, then you feel the concussion, and then you hear it. Freshman physics, right? But all that intellectual knowledge falls away when it's actually happening. You start slicing your life into five- or 10-second segments: 'OK, I'm going to make it for the next five seconds; now I'm good for the next half minute.' Your life gets very small very quick."

A few days after the war began, Quickley was deported by the Iraqi government to Jordan. In Amman, Tom Brokaw interviewed him on the "NBC Nightly News." Brian Freeman, then-director of the Blacksmyths Theatre Lab at the Mark Taper Forum, saw Quickley on television and invited him to develop a piece for the theater.

All of this was a far cry from Quickley's modest early years. Quickley, raised in Queens, performed hip-hop rhymes in his teen years, studied aviation at college, then went to work on Wall Street as a clerk, rising through the ranks to become a globe-trotting vice president for an international brokerage firm. In 1997, three years after relocating to Los Angeles, Quickley lost his job. "I went from making this six-figure salary to one year when I grossed like $8,000," Quickley says.

"I liked the action on Wall Street, but you're paid entirely too much money for your contributions to the universe," he says. "When I got fired, I couldn't get another gig on Wall Street. I eventually realized that was probably a good thing because I started to make a living from this art that I had never stopped doing, even when I had a square day job."

In 2002, North Hollywood-based public radio station KPFK hired Quickley as a host of its "Beneath the Surface" show. A year later, despite having scant hard news experience, Quickley decided he needed to be in Iraq. "This was my first international assignment from the network and it was one that I fought for. Something just told me internally, 'This is important.' "

Returning to California after his monthlong trip, Quickley tried to decompress. He ignored war coverage because, he says, "every time I turned on the television, they were reporting the complete opposite of what my experience on the ground had been — all the success, only the bad guys were being killed. It was offensive to me."

Early versions of "Live From the Front" concluded with a vignette describing one of Quickley's officious government minders, Adnan, as he shed a tear listening to Celine Dion sing "My Heart Will Go On" on the car radio.

It took Quickley nearly a year before he could talk about, much less write about, the harrowing road trip that now forms the show's finale: Driving with three Iraqi escorts nearly 375 miles across the desert from Baghdad to the Jordanian border, Quickley watched a shepherd step on a land mine, passed a bus filled with still-smoking corpses and felt the ground shake with such force that a dog bounced up from the ground onto the hood of his car.

Quickley and his crew drove past fields littered with cluster bombs and camel corpses. Highway bandits fired rocket-propelled grenades at the car, wounding Adnan. Before making it to the border crossing, Quickley's group had to hitch a ride when they drove over a land mine that punctured the gas tank of their Suburban GMC.

"I can't speak for anyone else who's gone through this kind of experience, be they an aid worker or soldier or another reporter or a civilian, but my take is that war is such a uniquely [messed] up event that anything you do in advance will fall grossly short in preparing you for the sensory overload that modern warfare represents. You kind of have to deal with it after the fact.

"The weirdest part of being back in the States was how safe everyone else seemed to feel," Quickley says. "I didn't feel very safe at all. I had a foreboding sense that it's all going to fall apart at any moment."

Last May in San Francisco's Hip-Hop Theater Festival, Quickley read his work-in-progress for writer-director Reg E. Gaines. Tony-nominated for writing "Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk" book and lyrics, Gaines agreed to direct a new staging of "Live" that incorporates Quickley's photographs and video footage.

"A lot of my work in 'Live From the Front' is to let Jerry realize that this is a flagrantly autobiographical memory play," says Gaines, who first met Quickley as part of New York's Nuyorican Poets Cafe scene in the early '90s.

"As an audience, we need to see him struggle with that, every time he relives this experience on stage. It doesn't have to be slick and perfect, which I think is the problem with most solo theater, as opposed to the feeling we're going for here, which is that 'Every time I tell the story, I'm fighting with the pain or joy or adrenaline rush.'"

Quickley sounds as if he has braced for the next three weeks to re-animate his scenes from a war zone. "In a sense," he says, "I'm bearing witness to things that everyone could see and hear if they were actually in Iraq, but we can't all go there — nor would all of us want to. These people were so hospitable to me. It's important to kind of pay down that debt by making sure their stories, their humor, their jokes and anger, the full scope of their humanity, comes into the room."

Six months after his first visit, Quickley returned to Iraq and encountered a new set of obstacles. But, as he says at the end of "Live From the Front," that's another story.

'Solomania'

What: Jerry Quickley in "Live From the Front"; Dan Guerrero in "¡Gaytino!"; Adriana Sevan in "Taking Flight"; Roger Guenveur Smith in "The Watts Towers Project."

Where: Kirk Douglas Theatre, 9820 Washington Blvd., Culver City

When: See www.centertheatregroup.org for festival schedule

Ends: June 11

Price: $20 to $40

Contact: (213) 628-2772