Less than 10 percent of the U.S. population serves in the military in the U.S. So you’re not alone if, like playwright Michelle Kholos Brooks, you have no personal connection to our service members. You’re also not alone if, like her, you have preconceived notions about those who choose to serve.
“Looking back, it’s hard to believe I ever felt this way, but for most of my life I assumed that people in the military liked fighting, or must be poor, or have no other option to pursue an education—that their only other option was prison,” admits the L.A. native, a former public radio journalist.
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But as her husband, a writer and fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point, started telling her stories about some of the service people he met through his work, Kholos Brooks’ perception started to shift.
“After one particular story, we were standing around the kitchen and I said, Somebody ought to go out and interview these people and put a play together, like The Vagina Monologues but for the military. He just kind of looked at me, like, Ahem, that’s what you do.”
“One of the great things about doing this project and the attention it’s getting is that it’s proving our service members wrong: We do give a shit,” says Kholos Brooks. “It’s a very delicate thing to hold somebody’s story, to be entrusted with it. And I felt a deep, deep sense of responsibility.”
And so, that’s what she did: Kholos Brooks spent a year interviewing more than two-dozen service members from The Long War—the 20-plus years U.S. troops were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. She ultimately whittled down the interviews to three- and four-minute scripts, piecing them together to create War Words, her Pulitzer-nominated show that debuted on Veterans Day in 2019 and will return today to seven U.S. stages, including Philly’s InterAct Theatre Company in Old City.
“I would interview anybody who would talk to me, and I loved every second of it,” she says. She’d start each interview acknowledging that she didn’t know anybody in the military, and that her goal was to hear the stories that define them as a human, not just a military person.
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She’d kick off each series of questions with the same query: Why did you join? “At the end of almost every single interview, the people would thank me profusely, and I was shocked because they had just given me so much time—I wasn’t paying them, I wasn’t offering them anything,” she says. “But they thanked me, and they said: You know, nobody really gives a shit.”
Each interview lasted close to two hours; each opened her eyes to a new facet of military life she hadn’t considered.
“One of the great things about doing this project and the attention it’s getting is that it’s proving our service members wrong: We do give a shit,” says Kholos Brooks. “It’s a very delicate thing to hold somebody’s story, to be entrusted with it. And I felt a deep, deep sense of responsibility.”
Thoughts from the War Words director
That sense of both duty and compassion drew Kathryn “KC” MacMillan back to InterAct to direct the Philly performance. An artist and founder of Philly’s Tiny Dynamite, she also happens to have grown up in a military family: Her mother spent 30 years in the Navy, including time in active duty during the first Gulf War, when KC was in middle school.
“I grew up steeped in the military culture, as my mother fought for a long career. And I watched my mother in the military at a time when it was not always as accessible or as welcoming to women or as healthy for women as it could’ve been. And in so many ways, that shaped my feminism and my life goals as a whole,” MacMillan says. And so she was particularly moved by the multidimensionality Kholos Brooks brought to the script.
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“One of the things that Michelle’s play does so beautifully is show the very human stories of people who are in the military and why they chose that path and what it’s been like for them. So seldom in our experience of the news or in our experience of civilian life do we hear the way that sometimes American life as a whole fails our soldiers, and our veterans in particular. And how the very structure of the military itself fails the individuals who sign up to protect our country,” she says. “That was definitely my mother’s experience in myriad ways, those institutional failures that sometimes made the sacrifice feel that much harder.”
Under MacMillan’s direction, the Philly performance will be a staged reading, with 11 actors playing 17 roles, binder-encased scripts in front of them on their music stands. “Even though there’s not a set or extensive lighting or props, we are preparing the deepest expression of this play,” she explains.
A War Words cast member’s perspective
Makoto Hirano, founder of Philly’s Team Sunshine Performance Corporation, is a cast member and a former Marine. And on the surface, it would seem he joined the military for the exact kinds of stereotypes Kholos Brooks used to hold: Growing up in a tough Chicago neighborhood, he wasn’t a good student, and didn’t have the best influences around him, either.
“I was a dancer, a b-boy, and that culture was heavily influenced by music and partying and a lot of criminal activity. A lot of my friends were going to jail. Some were selling weed to pay for their babies’ diapers. Sure, others were going to community college or four-year colleges, but none of those seemed like great options for me,” he says.
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But there was also a deeper narrative underlying Hirano’s decision to enlist. “I’m of Japanese descent, and growing up with a significant amount of discrimination meant that I had to shape my identity as an adolescent in a certain way, and I longed for something fucking awesome, something that couldn’t be taken away, something that could be respected no matter what. I can remember my desire to be seen, particularly by White America, as having value.”
“War Words really gives these peoples’ stories and lives dimension, which is exactly what I think we need more of on the planet—to see 15 different sides, and allow people to experience the multifaceted nature of anything,” Hirano says.
He had a friend, a year older than him, a “super badass dude” who’d joined the Marines. “He showed up on my high school campus my senior year in his green uniform, and I thought holy shit, if this person I look up to joined the Marines, I guess that might be a path for me.” He met with recruiters from all of the military’s branches, but was sold on the Marine Corps because he perceived it as being the most rigorous training, the most respected of the branches.
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And so Hirano appreciates War Words not only for its artistry but for its understanding of the nuanced mindset that so many service men and women bring to the military, and how it and they evolve. In his work at both Team Sunshine and on War Words, he strives to bring that layered perspective to issues.
“War Words really gives these peoples’ stories and lives dimension, which is exactly what I think we need more of on the planet—to see 15 different sides, and allow people to experience the multifaceted nature of anything,” he says.
War Words, Thursday, November 11, 2021 at 7:30pm at FringeArts, 140 N. Columbus Boulevard; free. Reserve your tickets here.
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Header photo by Jessica Radanavong / Unsplash