Milwaukee Hosts America’s First National Veterans Theater Festival

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Photo Credit: Sara Stathas

And Comes Safe Home performance on Thursday September 29th, 2016 at the UWM Theater in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

And Comes Safe Home performance on Thursday September 29th, 2016 at the UWM Theater in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Feast of Crispian, currently theatre-in-residence at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater, is presenting America’s first National Veterans Theater Festival at The Rep’s Stiemke Studio.

Seven years ago, when Jim Tasse, Nancy Smith-Watson and Bill Watson founded the company—which uses William Shakespeare to enable military veterans with PTSD to express their experiences during and after deployment—they deemed this festival “a 10-year hope,” says Smith-Watson. “Because of The Rep, we’re able to do it three years early.” The festival includes works from North Carolina, Texas, Florida and New York. It opens with a new version of Feast of Crispian’s And Comes Safe Home, the staged stories of Milwaukee vets performed by men and women vets with live music and relevant bits of Shakespeare.

“The plays are not our main work,” Smith-Watson said. “Our main work is the therapeutically based three-day weekend intensives we do inside the Veterans’ Administration (VA) and sometimes outside it. In the VA, we’re mainly working with veterans in the residential program. At any given time, there may be anywhere from 70 to 180 folks living at the VA, going through a range of very intensive programs. We’re really lucky here to have one of the best VA’s in the country.”

Vietnam War veteran Charlie Walton makes his acting debut in And Comes Safe Home, playing himself. A PTSD victim, he’s worked with the VA staff and programs for years. He knew nothing of Shakespeare when he attended a Feast of Crispian “intervention,” he explains.

“They’d tell us about a scene in Shakespeare, then give us the words, and we’d say the words,” he says. “Then, they’d prompt us to say some things about how it made us feel. Then, we’d use Shakespeare’s words to act out our emotions. And as we do that, we bring out situations that are within us, that we may have covered up and tried to pretend that everything’s all right. They awakened in me the need to tell about my experience graduating from high school and going to Vietnam, my experience in Vietnam, in firefights, hand-to-hand combat, feeling the wind from bullets passing by my body, guys dropping dead beside me. And what my experience was coming back to the United States with the stigma that I was a killer.”

Walton continues, “They invited me to come along. Bill just asked me questions, and I told him my stories, and he wrote the play, so I’m acting out a part of what I told him. It was a release just to tell my story, and when I saw it put into words, I found myself able to talk about it a little more. I’ll be 70 years old in September. I hadn’t told that story in all my years. In the play, I tell that story, I act it out; there it is. Back then, Vietnam vets didn’t express what they’d been through. Recently, in maybe the last 10 years, stories are being told about what really happened to us—as individuals, as people, as citizens of this country.”

Treating PTSD; Shattering Stereotypes

Tasse is a well-known Milwaukee actor and a Vietnam War veteran. He teaches in UW-Milwaukee’s theatre program where Watson, a director, is an associate professor and husband to Smith-Watson, an actress and body worker. The trio tried unsuccessfully to create a theatre program for kids caught in the juvenile justice system. Then in 2012, as the country was learning of the struggles of the overtaxed VA system to provide mental health services to PTSD victims, they shifted direction.

“We’re in the longest wars ever in American history,” Smith-Watson says, “and war is a lot more survivable. So people who would have died, who are incredibly traumatized but are living, are coming home with deeper layers of PTSD than we’ve ever seen. The vets from Afghanistan talk about dealing with people who don’t wear uniforms, so they don’t know who to trust. Their trust is broken all the time, and then they come home, and nobody here has a clue. It’s easy to go through American society now and not even know we’re in a war. Plus, people have stereotypes about military veterans, and they’re probably wrong. Veterans are individuals like anybody else across the board. They and our audiences get the chance to have real conversations at the shows that can turn things around in big ways.”

Color of Courage, a history lesson about the 180,000 African American Union soldiers in the Civil War, performs Friday. The Telling Project’s She Went To War, an autobiographical performance by women combat vets, happens Saturday afternoon. Saturday evening brings Amal (Hope), a spoken word-and-music piece by The Combat Hippies—Puerto Rican Iraq War veterans. Sunday afternoon is De-Cruit: Cry Havoc by Stephan Wolfert, a professional New York City actor and former U.S. Army medic whose best friend died in his arms.

Feast of Crispian runs May 23-26 in the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s Stiemke Studio, 108 E. Wells St. For tickets, call 414-224-9490 or visit milwaukeerep.com or feastofcrispian.org.