Coming Home: A Soldiers’ Project

Coming Home: A Soldiers’ Project

by Kathleen Jeffs

Gonzaga University
Magnuson Theatre
February 2018

Written by Kathleen Jeffs, Coming Home: A Soldiers’ Project was a premiere work of documentary theatre devised by the ensemble. The show explored the experiences of what it is like to return from war to study at Gonzaga. It is the story of transitions, of place and perception: from service to civilian, how our senses take in and process the new sights and sounds of the university environment. Small moves make big waves – connections are made and unmade. Our construction of the meaning of events, past and present, is made in moments of transition.

View an video excerpt of the production here.

Production Team:
Director – Charles M Pepiton
Scenic, Lighting & Projection Design – Courtney Smith
Costume Design – Colin Wintz
Sound Design & Projection Engineering – Keely Wright-Ogren
Technical Director – Abbey Plankey
Stage Manager – Emily Davis
Photographer – Gavin Doremus

Cast:
Brett Bean
Clint Bull
Patrick Driscoll
Madeline Keckler
Kelly Kern
Cooper McCoy
John Murphy
Bridget Pretz

Coming Home: A Soldiers’ Project – Gonzaga Univ. (2018)

Program Notes:
“There’s a prevailing, predictable theatre that’s risk averse and wary of failure, and there’s a dark-horse theatre that’s predicated on risk and failure as preconditions of a transformative live event. And it is the latter of these two theatres that will keep the art form vital in the twenty-first century, in a mediated age where the merits of liveness will be questioned as never before.” This provocative line comes from Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill in his book Theatre of the Unimpressed. It’s a line that simultaneously haunts and drives my work as a director. What’s the point of live theatre, given the incalculable other, more readily accessible, contemporary forms? Surely not simply more diversion. So why theatre?

Coming Home: A Soldiers’ Project is one answer to that question. This is a show that reflects to our community voices from our community – voices that come from only 1% of us. As a country, we’re entering the 16th year of continuous warfare in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, depending on how you count. For the moment, set aside questions of why this is or should be so. For every year we continue our wars, we create more veterans. Every year more veterans return home and reengage in our community. They’ve seen things you and I will never see. Their perception is wider. The wars, for them, are more than passing headlines, and as the line goes, “You can’t hear war without telling it.” (For veterans in the audience, we’re especially grateful you’re here. I urge you check out the event listings from Telling War, whose purpose is to engage and support the veteran voice through a variety of story forms.) If we can’t hear war, we’ll go on making it. This show takes a knowing risk and wagers that a live encounter with the lived experiences of our community’s veterans is itself a transformative endeavor, and one reveling in the vitality and liveness of theatre.