Wayne Thiebaud once said, “If one lacks a sense of humor, one lacks a sense of perspective.” This certainly rang true after attending the Schwartz Center’s production of Neil Simon’s Biloxi Blues. It was heartwarming to discover that, even with bullets and grenades raining an ocean away and a drill sergeant breathing fire down everyone’s neck as he speaks, teenage locker-room humor will always be the same.

The triumphant Tony Award winning play by Neil Simon is a semi-autobiographical, The Catcher in the Rye-meets-Catch 22 tale of five young privates who go to Biloxi, Miss. to prepare for the war. Two Jewish privates, narrator Eugene Jerome (Ryan Stanisz ’10) and Arnold Epstein (Marc Hem Lee ’10) are accompanied by a band of three other young soldiers, each with his own imperfection — body odor akin to that of an expired tuna fish sandwich, a flat singing voice and a permanent erection. Like the cast, the theater was small and intimate. With the first row two feet away from the performers and literally a part of the stage, the audience becomes a cast member submerged in the production.

Dialogue in this comedy is, of course, hysterical, but never loses sight of the looming doom and inherent confusion and fear that the boys are too afraid to admit to feeling. Much of the humor comes from the awkwardness of growing up as Jerome attempts to lose his virginity, fall in love and prove to his comrades that he is in fact a competent writer.

Epstein was also memorable. An eloquent, overly well-read man overflowing with vocabulary and philosophical quips, Epstein is plagued with a nervous stomach and an incurable disregard for authority. Epstein lives in his own world, but once he arrives at Biloxi, fate falls out of his hands.

The small cast portraying how the closed environment of the training camp eventually boils away the young men’s youthful energy brings reality to the light and forces the audience to examine them with a magnifying glass. Simon’s play explicitly brings up many sensitive social issues (some of which are based on his own experiences) with no apologies — homosexuality, anti-semitism, racism. Rather than exploring each issue in depth, the play creates pressure by confining all these heavy issues into one small space.

The boys face a “68-percent chance of dying in battle” to fight the Nazis in Europe, yet their very own training camp is flooded with hatred for Jews. While World War II did not have much to do with race relations, Biloxi is a training camp in the south, and the platoon of northeastern soldiers is forced to deal with the residual tension from the Civil War as well as a new war on foreign soil that is threatening to take their lives.

Perhaps the most striking scene of the play is when Eugene’s diary is read out loud. The play slows down as Eugene’s thoughts on each of his peers — some more direct and honest than others — are shared, and for the first time in two hours of the play, the characters looked inwards to define themselves in this frenzy of death, deceit, desire, homosexuality and everything else that is wrong with the world, before they’ve even entered the real war.

Epstein says, “Once you start compromising your thoughts, you are a candidate for mediocrity.” That is true, but is there really reason to hold on to your beliefs during a time when all that matters is the collective survival of one’s nation? The events of the play are not orchestrated by the characters, but rather by larger social forces. No one, not even the sergeant himself, matters much as an individual. Because of the war, friendships are disrupted, lives are lost and romances are abbreviated, but Eugene and the boys still must join the war because they have no choice. The play ends rather abruptly with everyone’s personal agenda put on hold when the privates finish basic training.