 so we could get an idea of who's in the room. And after we ask you these questions, then we will introduce ourselves and tell you very briefly what we do and then open it up for a full conversation. So, raise your hand if you run a company. Raise your hand if you are an independent artist. Raise your hand if you are both. Raise your hand if you hire veterans. Raise your hand if you would like to hire veterans. Raise your hand if you fund veteran programs. Raise your hand if you know veterans attend your theater. Raise your hand if you feel comfortable walking up to someone in uniform and starting a conversation. Raise your hand if you would like to feel comfortable walking up to someone in uniform and starting a conversation. Raise your hand if you work with veterans. Raise your hand if you produce work by veterans. Have, have this legit. Raise your hand if you would like to produce work by veterans. And raise your hand if you know of a creative program for veterans. Raise your hand if you know a veteran directly. Great. Raise your hand if you're married or a spouse of a veteran. Raise your hand if you're a family member of a veteran. And raise your hand if you are a veteran. OK? There you go. Because normally, if there's a veteran, I give a mini, mini class without it being obvious of one way to approach. It's not a formula, but your name, what branch do you serve in? We only have four. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and what was your job? Please avoid, were you in combat, and did you ever kill anyone? Because we might start at that moment. So we'll, we'll, we'll briefly introduce ourselves and then open up the conversation. I'm KJ Sanchez, and I'm the founder and CEO of American Records. American Records mission is to make work that chronicles our time, work that serves as a bridge between people. I am the sister of veterans. I have five brothers who served during the Vietnam War, but never planned on working with veterans. I fell into this accidentally by creating a play called Reentry, which is based on interviews with Marines returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. And that snowballed into a lot of productions at various theaters, but for the last five years, I have contracted with the Department of Defense. And we do the play on military bases as post-deployment and resiliency training. And here's what happens at a typical presentation on a base. Command makes it mandatory for particular units to attend the session. Units that are either preparing for deployment or returning from deployment. Navy and Army bases, it's usually a group of about 100. Marine Corps at the big bases, it's something to watch, five actors stand on stage and play Marines for 600 Marines in uniform who've just got back from deployment. We first have usually the base commander introduce the event and I ask that person to say something personal about their own challenges they face when returning from deployment, to do what we can to counteract the chill of command. Then immediately after the presentation, before the actors perform, I say to the group, we don't pull any punches, so this might trigger some things. You might start finding yourself feeling things. And I ask, we have chaplains and mental health workers at all of the doors. I point them out and say at any time during the performance, if you wanna walk away, go have a chat, you're more than welcome to do that. The actors perform immediately after the performance, I lead a town hall like discussion with the group and ask them two questions. Based on what characters in the play did you identify with and based on your own experiences, can you talk about that? And then the second question, which is where the real me is, is if I were to write reentry 2.0 based on your experiences, what else should we put in the play? After this large group conversation, we break out into smaller groups and in each breakout group, there's a chaplain, mental health worker and the actors. They continue the conversation. Then after that, I let them know that we will stick around because there's very often individuals who want to tell us their stories, they don't feel comfortable telling the group. And then by the end of the day, it's a full day, we make sure that those conversations continue with command, with chaplaincy and with the mental health workers. Recently, I was commissioned by the Navy to make a play specifically about challenges facing sailors because the first version of reentry was very much boots on the ground, people downrange, coming back and re-interpreting into your community. And those conversations have gone a long way from when I first made this play eight years ago. I've seen a lot of change regarding the relationship between civilians and veterans. But this last year of working on this new play for the sailors has opened my eyes to a particular thing. Obviously, any issue dealing with our veterans in this country for me is an issue of public health that everybody should be invested in. One aspect of that, my general assumption was it was about combat stress. Then I learned that there's also this thing called operational stress, whether you pull the trigger or not, there's operational stress. And then the thing that I have recently woken up to is wherever there's a natural disaster, we are sending our military to provide first response. So it is not uncommon to meet a CB who served, who was there immediately, first responder to Katrina, to Haiti and to the tsunami and nuclear reactor crisis in Japan. All within the same career, all given that they also served in combat. So I think there's this silent second wave of dealing with veterans, which is about all of the disaster relief. And the up ten, every time we send an aircraft carrier out there, there are longer hours, there are more months that the nuclear engineer, that the jet fuel operator are serving. So those are the things that I'm understanding now when we talk about how do we engage with our veteran communities. It's not just about being downrange. That's amazing. Right. My name is Paula Vogel. I'm a playwright. And I was a civilian secretary in the Navy during the Vietnam War. I grew up in Washington, D.C. My fiance was in the military. My classmates, a lot of classmates were drafted during the Vietnam War. And just for me, I had been for the last 10 years, ever since we got rid of the draft, feeling this kind of separation in civilian interaction and understanding with active military and veterans. And so I wanted to figure out how, I think actually my true talent is conducting playwriting workshops. And it's really what kind of fuels me. So I went to KJ and asked for some help. I went to warrior writers in Philadelphia and I asked the Wilma Theater if they would go forward and we wrote grant proposals for the Metropolitan Life, the Independence Foundation and the Pew Foundation that actually gave underwrote support for, and you know, I basically wrote a play so I could do the workshop. I wrote to play Don Wong, comes home from Iraq and spent three years talking and interviewing veterans. And very specifically, we wanted a workshop that was a kind of multi-generational workshop. And we, over the course of a year, I did, and we were just, I was just talking with everyone, I facetiously started calling these boot camps 30 years ago because I thought, you know, K&E asked civilians, I'm sitting in a chair for 12 hours, this is really a hardship. We should probably name something else at this period in time. But we got funding to bring veterans to give them housing and travel and we picked up the phone and we got places like beautiful canvases, Swarthmore, and Haverford. We're like, hey guys, why don't you turn over this beautiful, eucalyptic place. And we spent, you know, the weekend and did these intents and technique called the Bake Off. We did one weekend where we wrote plays about the bushes at war, about Prescott, George Bush and George Debbie Bush. They were phenomenal. They were incredible and hysteric. I was like on the floor and, you know, people brought to the table what they wanted to write but we tried to do a kind of spur. The thing that really kind of broke everybody who's maybe now one of my favorite bake offs. We did a St. Joe Bake Off. And in this group, we range from eight to there were eight to 14 writers, veteran writers in the room and one active military writer in the room. But there were three women. And the St. Joan play has to be now one of my favorite, my favorite, Jenny Paganowski, Suzanne Rosinal, and Madison Kerrio. The ingredients, a bake off by the ways where we throw out like things we're gonna play with and everybody has, we actually gave everybody a day to write it because we did these intents. So everyone had to write a play with a match, a philosophical defense, cross dressing. And they're all being visited by angels in the field and convincing higher authority. And just, you know, this, these short plays that came out was such a privilege to kind of really feel what it is right now in terms of women in the military. And the guys were great too. So went through the whole year and then I, these people, these artists, these writers actually came into rehearsal, actually started working with the acting company. The acting company started coming into workshop and performing the short veteran buttons. But there was this incredible generosity where, you know, some of the writers would come and say, you've got this completely wrong. We don't say it that way. Everything from teaching us, you know, cadences in the room. And, you know, just amazing generosity. And we presented the play, but what was really phenomenal is we presented the work. The acting company actually could work with the veterans. And one of the things that I'm here for is just to sort of ask questions. I mean, it would be wonderful if in all theater companies, and I know a lot of theater companies do do this, that there are community workshops that are being coming out of that theater community. Two things that I've been thinking about is there any way that I can help in terms of kind of localizing a retreat response center for veterans in theater? It seems to me like, because to sustain the work in veteran theater companies is so, you know, 20 hours a day that is there another way that a not-for-profit can pick that up? And TCG and Sundance actually have both been sort of speaking about how this happened. And then, individually, how can I find a way to have artist workshops on a more regular sustained basis because, you know, I really, I want to do this. I thought that the work in Philadelphia was just, for me, life changing. And once upon a time, if you look at the list of American playwrights and writers, I mean, it's veteran. It's veteran. It's all veteran work. So I know that there's extraordinary work that warrior writers introduced me to in terms of combat paper and the poetry and the fiction and the non-fiction is really extraordinary. You know, it's a different problem for us to organize a production. I know I'm talking here. And what that takes in terms of time and communities. But I think it's so important. There are amazing writers out there. How do we connect it? My name is Edward Cox. I enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1966. I went to Vietnam in 1969 and was discharged. Most of the time, I say I'm not a veteran. I am becoming a veteran. For more than 40 years, I never spoke about my experience with Vietnam. Then five years ago, I went to a retreat for veterans. I had an opportunity to speak privately with a retreat leader, a Vietnam veteran. And he asked me why I was there. And I said, I don't know. I don't think of myself as a veteran. I don't associate veterans. And he said, well, that's not in the common. Many veterans tell me that. Then I said, but I have some terrible memories from Vietnam that are killing me. And he said, if you want to tell me, welcome to do that. And I did and it changed my life. And I started to become a veteran. Later that year, I went to the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts in Boston for their annual writer's workshop. And I began to write about my military experience. And in that process, I discovered what I believe to be three characteristics of veterans. They tend to be silent. They tend to be invisible. They are often lost in time. As time went on, I joined Warrior Writers, an organization started for veterans founded in Philadelphia. I started going to a program called the Veterans Civilian Dialogue in New York City. And in these dialogues, which were usually anywhere from 69 people, and ideally, not always, but sometimes half veterans, I had conversations with civilians about my experience. And in each of these conversations, I could unload something that I had dragged around for decades. It was transformative. We had a group of Warrior Writers meeting in New York City at a studio called Lucid Body. Lucid Body was founded by a theater teacher and director named Faye Simpson. And Faye came to us and said that she wanted some volunteers to see if they were interested in creating a play. And I volunteered. Actually, the first time it was offered, I did not, one year later, somehow found enough courage to try it. The Lucid Body is, I'll just read from my note, a training process used by the Impact Theater. Now, the Impact Theater is a social change theater also started by Faye Simpson. Lucid Body is a training process used by Impact created to integrate Eastern philosophies of energy control with Western dance and acting techniques. Going back to the Impact Theater, it's a non-for-profit theater started in 1990, co-founded by Faye Simpson. I'm the belief that theater has the power and responsibility to stimulate change and encourage growth in the community. The day I went to start this retro theater, I was introduced to a man from Africa. I'll just say his first name, but his whole name was quite long. Actually, un-reunounceable. Ngunda, he's from Tanzania. No, Darce, it's Tanzania. And he started something called the behavior change process, which is based on Boao. And so we went into small groups, actually tubes, one veteran and one civilian. The civilian was a professional actor. And we went to different corners of the studio. And we talked about, one of each of us understood about the military and about war. And then we went back to the large group and each two-some explained what we had talked about. And then out of that, we decided on some core issues. And for us, the core issues were transitioning from war, coming home and PTSD. And then we created a play around that. And the group, I don't know where or how, but we took on the name of the Veteran Theater Project. And our performance is 20 minutes long. It starts on the battlefield. It ends as it approaches a suicide. And one of the actors says to stop the play turns to the audience and says, we all know what's about to happen here. At what point in this play would something have been different? Which will have an effect if it's different. At one point I played a bartender. And so someone will say, well that bartender just loaded her up with drinks. He could have done something about that. The audience member will say, please come up here and you be the bartender. Or we have a psychiatrist. And somebody says, well that psychiatrist could have been more empathetic. Please come up here and show us how to do that. And so different audience members will take different roles with the actors, all of us still in character. That will go on for an hour. And then if we can, if the situation is right, we will go into small groups and rewrite the story to understand what can make this transition from war to peace or war to civilian life more understanding. My feeling is most civilians today don't understand that when your country goes to war, you're not in this room. You're a United States citizen. You're in a war today. And if you don't understand that, thank you somebody who wishes to help. We are all at war today. And we don't even know how many wars, you know, too big ones. There's more than a hundred small ones. Veteran theater project had performed now for six times. Our first large performance was at the Manhattan Veterans Administration Hospital. We had performed ecologists. We had performed for the Veteran Mental Health Coalition of New York City for hundreds of veterans, hundreds of civilians. And what the veterans say is that it is the most accurate portrayal of their experience that I've ever seen. And that came about because the actors, the lucid body actors, insisted on understanding the military and war experience. They would ask again and again and again when I'm standing at attention, am I standing correctly? When I salute, do I salute correctly? So the military and the audience, the veterans see themselves literally. What the civilians have said to me is that they never got it until they saw it. This is not three veterans in the cast, civilian actors. I've had theater people saying to me, I did not know who was who. It's a very strong experience for all of us. Well, we're going to skip me for a moment because some of what I have to say has to do with Stephon's project and I want him to get the chance to speak about it first. Okay, thanks. So thank you, Everett. So I saw humbling and grounding when he speaks for me anyway. So let me try to shift gears. My name is Stephon Wolford. I'm a veteran, military veteran before I got out in 93. So I'm before Iraq and Afghanistan or the second time we went. I'm from the era when we did go as well as Panama, roughly in that realm. I was listed as a medic that became an officer. I got out as the story goes, contracting time a bit. In 91, after the first Gulf War, I was in training, I was in 92 if I forget now, but anyways, I was in training right after the first Gulf War, a friend of mine was killed from me to Alex away during training shot. And I lost it and was traveling around and saw Shakespeare's Richard III and I didn't offend you with Shakespeare play before. Had what I now understand to be a catharsis, left the military, took two years, but I left the military and went to graduate school for acting. And that's where I developed not only my hypothesis that Shakespeare was writing about veterans in every single play and I'm writing about that currently, but also that my hypothesis is that we veterans are all regardless of military. We are recruited at a psychologically malleable age. Then we are wired for war, but at the end of our service, we are not unwired from war. We are not rewired for society. And from that, I developed the Veterans Center for the Performing Arts as well as Shakespeare and veterans. Those have evolved into a program called D-Crew taken from my premise that when I went in, I had a recruiter that helped prepare me for life in the military, but when I got out, where was my D-Crewter? So I said, after a few years of pitching about it, while I need to create my own program, what did I do to get sober? What have I done to deal with my PTSD? What has been working with the other veterans that I've watched go from homeless to back to graduate school or music therapy or in one case law school? Couldn't memorize a whole line of Shakespeare text and four years later was in law school. So I've watched it work. Excuse me, moved to New York and we've formalized it now, D-Crew. It's a program synthesizing the human sciences, psychology, neuropsychology, immunology, et cetera, with classical actor training, along with the ancient practices, movement, yoga, and so on, including writing, writing their own narrative, rewriting their own narrative, including a deal with the Shakespeare text because Shakespeare simulates, can simulate our significant events or our trauma that helps us access our stuff more. At a heightened language, it puts us in those life and death circumstances without having the consequences, meaning we're not actually being shot at, can put us back to where our body remembers but it's in a safe, secure environment, as Jonathan Shea talks about, where we can communalize our trauma or as Shakespeare said, where we can speak what we feel but not what we ought, I mean speak what we feel but not what we ought to say. So we've created this program and it's been successful in different modalities, whether it be a 10 class session to go into a college or a full four week program or an eight week program to counter basic training. My dream is a four and a half month program modeled after Jonathan Shea's work in prisons where he reduced daily violence to zero and the recidivism rate to cut it by nearly 90% the return rate to prison on a very similar program. He's a psychiatrist and he was using the pedagogy of the founders of Shakespeare and comic company and so forth. So we brought all those together for deep truth and that's my work now is not only continuing to help myself but other veterans with this programming. I'm doing that currently with Bedlam out of New York City that have outreach and our outreach is solely veterans because Eric Tucker, the co-founder of Bedlam is also a veteran. We went to graduate school together. So that's me but in the interest of time I'll pass it so that if you have more questions, we're here. All right, my name is Alex Mallory. I'm a director in New York and I have been spent the last four years working with veterans and my objective is to enable veterans to tell their stories and that happens on the spectrum. It starts for me, it starts with Decrude and I've started working a little bit with Stefan and hope to do more in the future and that is about enabling veterans to have the tools to start from to tell their own stories, to take down the barriers that prevent them from doing so and giving them the tools for self-expression and just to have a conversation and the tools to eventually perform to stand on stage and offer their stories and it continues. I work before different organizations so just briefly that's the first one. It continues with the Telling Project and the Telling Project takes interviews with veterans in a particular location. They're currently in Lansing, Michigan and they do two hour interviews, individual interviews with each veteran and then Playwright puts those stories together into a usually 60 to 80 minute piece and then the veterans actually perform their own stories so I've been working with them as a director and that work is really about the process. It's really about offering the veterans the community of each other with which to share their stories and then the community of the place so they have had incredible success with giving voice to veterans in the community and I've been really honored to do that work as well. I've also until recently co-artistic director of poetic theater productions, I still do work with them and we just include veterans as artists in our community. We're a very community focused organization and we've just through Osmosis have invited veterans to be part of the work that we do as artists. We invite them to write poetry. Everett recently wrote a very beautiful piece for an event a couple of months ago and through doing so they can shed the veteran label and actually just be artists and they write incredible work and that actually came through Warrior Writers which several people had mentioned already. We started meeting people. I met Everett through that and the veterans' dialogue and just invited them in and I recently directed a full production of a play written by a Marine veteran, Maurice DeKal who sadly could not be here today but has also worked with Paula and he is at NYU MFA in poetry, just graduated and is headed to get his MFA in playwriting at Brown in the fall. It's just incredible story. So it's really that spectrum starting with having the tools to force up expression to full production and lastly the veteran artist program really exists to promote veterans on a professional level and try to put those works into the mainstream and they just launched a podcast with veteran artists which I highly recommend because there are some incredible veteran artists out there and I've been really lucky to produce with them and to give voice in that realm as well. So and I also just wanted to add sort of on what Paula was saying earlier of how do we get this work? There are so many organizations doing so many things and how can we put it in the theaters? How can we, for those of you who want to produce work by veterans who are interested in that, how can we partner with some of the work that's already happening? I think there is a tendency to say, well we need a theater program. Here we'll start one from the beginning and it's hard to get veteran participation in that because it's not, for lack of it, excuse the pun, but vetted. And how can we support the work that's already happening but really bring it into the communities that you guys are already working in? I just, we, Max from the Telling Project was in Mississippi and there are resources out there and we're doing the Telling Project in August at New State Theater Jack's Mississippi and what's wonderful about the Telling Project or at least the way we're doing it and because it's a long story but I'm in a fantasy football league with the executive director of the Mississippi Humanities Council so I mean so it's interesting how things happen and he's, the Standing Together Initiative of the National Humanities Council is about getting veteran stories understood in this year and so he wanted to marshal the money for the Telling Project so the Humanities Council executive director introduced me to the Telling Project and partnered with us. The Humanities Council without me having to write a grant is giving us money to do this project. He also went out and well we did it together but we got money from our energy utility to pay the veterans for their role because you know you just, to pay the, it's real important to pay the veterans even though the, so we're doing the performances for free. It's supported by the Bob Woodruff Foundation Telling Project is so the people come in and interview for hours and hours and hours and then whittle those oral interviews down to a script and there is what she says about 90 minutes of the sweet spot, Max is the sweet, Max Reinhardt says the sweet spot, the person who's writing, doing a lot of writing with Jonathan Way, and it is incredible. I've had four rehearsals so far with the veterans. They're not actors, they've never done this before except one is studying music therapy right now so he'll play the guitar in the performance but it's very powerful that they are willing to do this and they're gonna get up there and say their stories and they want to do it. It's not that they wanna be actors, they just want their stories told. So it's a really, I encourage anybody to do it. Hi everybody, I'm Lauren from TCG. I would like to thank our friends at HowlRound. This session is being live streamed. Francine, please introduce yourself and anybody else who speaks up, please do. I'm sorry, I'm Francine Reynolds on the Artistic Director of New Stage Theater in Jackson, Mississippi. We're doing the Telling Project August 7th, 8th and 9th in Jackson and then the following weekend we're taking it to a community theater in Meridian, Mississippi. The same group is going, so thank you. That's really wonderful endorsement. Are there other folks who have some projects? I'm outing Tom. Tom, do you want to say a little something about what you're doing? Sure, so my name's Tom Queens, K4 Regional Theater, which is in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in Fort Bragg, in the 2nd Airborne. And so TCG, we've received the audience revolution grant for the last 60 months to work on a project that is interviews with military spouses on the impact of deployments on the family. So it's really not from the soldier's perspective and really has become a spouse. And we also partnered with an organization that was an expert in going into ownership of communities and finding their stories and also playwright. So we had our stage reading of that production, of that script, which is called Downrange Voices from Homefront. And in May 1st and 2nd, we're producing the world premiere next year as part of our season. And the biggest challenges we've faced have been about, in terms of, particularly in terms of active duty, is getting active duty to engage in material that has to do with their lives. Jane Chu, when she was speaking and talking about military, what she said was, give them an opportunity to take a couple of hours away from the anxiety of their loved one being gone, or maybe just two hours of entertainment. And that's what we hear most from the communities. But this production and the engagement that we've done, everyone who has come has had a big experience. And we feel cautiously optimistic about our ability to reach an audience in Fayetteville, primarily because the material was generated largely from that community. So we have a bunch of ambassadors who are very heavily invested in the piece because they're part-creating. And we are trying to, right now, to focus on the development of play and then finding the right consultants going forward. Because I think that the challenge of having, particularly the men, having the men authentically play military is not one to be. But so we're focusing on that. But then going forward, we hope to put together in a way that is a repeatable, some things repeatable in different communities. General who's going down, taking over a base in San Antonio is interested in bringing the piece to that base. But so that's where we are right now in our project. Did you have, I mean, I know I'm a veteran to it. I'm a veteran of the piece movement. And I think we're connected. All my arrests, which started protesting the war in Vietnam and continue up through the war in Iraq, and much of my writing work. And I've worked with torture victims from Chile. I've worked with relatives of torture victims from China, from Kosovo. I've worked with survivors of the war in Bosnia. We have an Iraqi veteran, an Iraqi refugee who is in our play about the US torture program. So I think that the piece movement has understood for many years that the civilian population in the country turns away from the wars and from the veterans. And no more so than now, as you've all said. And I don't think that we are at odds in our work and in our concern about coming back to a civilian life after having been through the violence of armed combat. Nor do I think we're at in odds in our concern about the effect of the mission. A good mission is easier to come back from than a bad mission. And we are in a series, as Everett said eloquently, of so many wars we don't even know where we're fighting, how many military bases we have. We have some very bad missions going on. We've ruined the country of Iraq. We don't even know how many people we killed when we talked about post-traumatic stress. We have to include the Iraqis in our discussion of post-traumatic stress. And so I think just that veterans of the peace movement and veterans of the military have a lot in common and much of our work. I added a book called Acts of War, Iraq and Afghanistan, Seven Plays. David Hare has a play, Simon Stephens, they just both wantonies. I have a play in that there are Seven Plays, Naomi Wallace, Guantanamo is in it. These are plays written not by veterans but by peace movement authors who really have made the effort to understand what it's like in this moment. So I just wanted to say we're colleagues. And our work is together. And I see my work much more about talking to civilians who are not cognizant of when we don't have a draft, we don't have a peace movement. Yeah. Only people who want the civilian world. Just one other thing, I'm going to out George Bartania who was in the original production of the Brig written by a Marine veteran, which was about a day in the life of a Marine prison camp in 1963, and they were all arrested as well during the production was shut down by the government. But so there is this tradition of the two kinds of veterans. So thank you so much for doing this. Quick time check. So we have 20 minutes left. So if anybody doesn't mind or somebody else can take over this task, I'll just sort of keep us moving as fast as we can. Anybody, any other shout outs of programs, strategies you're using? This is just a resource. My son went to West Point, he's a lieutenant behind me right now. And I'm a playwright from Los Angeles. But because of my son, got very involved in a program with the Writers Guild which is called the Veteran Writing Program. It's free to veterans. We do, I've been teaching it for four years. Every spring we do a weekend workshop. It is, you can find out more about it, wga.org. It's really a great program that continues for those who are in Los Angeles throughout the year in a month of workshop. And it's not only in Los Angeles, they're doing them all over the country. I've participated too as has Paula as mentors, right? So you can help veterans find their voice or spouses. It's great, volunteer for it, be part of it in some way. It's a fantastic program. So the Writers Guild Veterans Writing Project. I think it's just the Veteran Writing Project. Veteran's Writing Project. If I didn't make it clear, the reason why I spoke first was to say that the Telling Project will come in without you paying them. They come in and do all that work. Your job is to put it up. Yeah. But they do all of that. Fantastic. Yeah, that is. I just mentioned the podcast. But you didn't mention the name of it. It's the Veteran Artist Program podcast. Are there other... I'm sorry to palpate. No, I was just going to say, sorry. I was just going to say that veteranartistprogram.org, there's a link right on the front page. There are other organizations that are friends of ours that aren't here today. There's Ryan Doherty's and Theater of War. There is The Zero Dark Thirty, which is a publication that publishes veteran, all veterans work. What other organizations should we shout out? Voices from war is also a New York-based writing workshop for veterans. Artists in the military, which is the Adam Drivers. Is this... I'll tell you why. A-I-T-A-F. Yeah, arts in the armed forces. Arts in the armed forces. That's right. Is there any way to get all of these somewhere... Wouldn't that be great? Yes! I want to thank these panelists because it has been really incredible to hear all of the work that's going on and quite moving. I'm Lori Baskin. I'm director of research, policy, and collective action at Theater Communications Group. First of all, this live stream is going to be posted on the Blue Star Theater's webpage on TCG's website. So if you go on to TCG.org and hold your cursor over that advocacy, link at the top of the page, you'll find several pages around Blue Star theaters. Blue Star theaters is now in its fourth year. We partner with Blue Star families. Our funder, our lead funder, is the Metropolitan Life Foundation, and MetLife Foundation were very grateful for them, to them for their leadership support. The initial impulse was to bring members of theaters together with military families in their communities to do many of the things that have been described here today, help with veterans returning to their communities and finding that connect to help theaters build new audiences and make connections with communities in their own vicinity that they have never connected with before. So we have a map on our website on the Blue Star Theater's page. There were about 125 participating theaters across the country. I was very grateful to James Chu for the shout out yesterday, that was great. To become a participating Blue Star Theater is so easy. You sign an agreement saying you'll create a webpage and the webpage simply says what you're offering and what you're offering could be $5 off your tickets or it could be free tickets, up to so to many. It could be whatever we've left it extremely flexible. We ask that people not ask for a military ID in order to pick up your tickets for two reasons. One is that people returning from more recent conflicts, if they haven't served a full military career, they probably wouldn't have a car. You have to actually be military retired unless I'm wrong to have some sort of ID card to show. So they have separation papers but you don't carry those around. The other thing is the Department of Defense, I don't believe yet, recognizes same sex partnerships, marriages, whatever, and we want to be as inclusive as possible at TCG, so find a code on your website that Blue Star Theater's code or something and make tickets available. Make your education program play writing programs for spouses and children of active duty or veterans. Who doesn't want Ms. Paula Mogul to come? Day writing workshop where you have her and veterans making a place. So this map is just on a state and you find all the theaters in that state that are offering a whole variety of programs. The idea is to have this map of the United States so that when active duty military are moving around, which they do, they get assigned to a different base and they have to start over in a new community and connect with the theater that they can still just go back to the Blue Star Theater's webpage and find a great program in their own community. So there's that. We are gonna be also, as part of the Blue Star Theater's program, publishing some works. Don Juan comes home from Iraq. We're actually gonna be, we rarely ever let anything go out of print, but there is a wonderful book called Coming to Terms, which is a collection of plays from the Vietnam War. And so those will both be published within, I believe, within the next 12 months. I have to get the all of the scripts together. Data's to be announced. We also wanna provide all kinds of resources on the TCG website by and for veterans, so we're looking for anything, description of what you're doing, how to get involved, how to talk to military people in uniform, how to get something going in your theater. We would like best practices and stuff that send me an essay or anything that you want and we will help finish it up with you and then post it on the website. And we've promised to make that as robust. So we're looking to add links to all of these kinds of places. So we want to help be that kind of a hub. Trying to think, we have certain events that we're planning in certain parts of the country each year to try and bring visibility. And we're looking to recruit more theaters. Like I say, completely up to you all, what you wanna include as part of your engagement with military families. So please join us in this effort. I don't know, I'm gonna go turn it back to you all. You're the experts in this work, but let us know if you have any questions and I have information about blister theaters. I just thought of something we could add to the list of information that we could share is, one, it's been helpful to all of us to share information of how to enter that community. Like what do I need to prove to tell someone they can trust me? And it's a different way of communicating. The marketing rules don't apply to this community. I learned a lot from other people that gave me advice that I think we can share. Also I think we could share funding strategies because every theater that presented reentry, like when we did it at Brown House, the Pentagon Credit Union gave a huge rant. When we did it at Baltimore Center Stage, Northrop Grumman, I found like there are a lot of contractors that need to deal with a lot of their personal guilt by funding arts. And I say why not? Great tool of guilt. It is, may I hop in on that? Yeah, please do. Be aware, we've run into this, I've been doing it in 20 years, and be aware that when you do take money, I agree with you, there's a lot of, you know, we're online though, as I'd say, military contractors, right? So they are making a lot of money, but try and be aware that when you accept money from that, there are veterans who will not come work with you as a result of that. I'm just, that's all I'm saying. Be aware that depending on who you're gonna sleep with, determines who's gonna come by for dinner later. That's good to hear. So is there another sector that one can turn to then? Can we just street? I'm so sad. Yeah, you know, we did, it's such an excellent question, I mean, never can hop in as well, but this is that, this fall starts to fall into that realm of how do we get more of insert the name of special population you wanna reach to our theater? And so that is the great question, right? Because as Everett said, I mean, I didn't wanna be a veteran. I actually had so much shame when the wars came off and I left early. So a lot of us don't want to identify, as self-identify is called as veterans. The VA estimates that 23 million veterans, the research that I've done and worked with and have found estimates as much as many as 27, 28 million living veterans. I always shoot the gap and say about 25 million living veterans. And then I love that you're working with family veterans because if we look at 25 million living veterans, most of which are not self-identifying, not joining veterans service organizations, not going through the VA, I shouldn't say most, but a good healthy number, not going through or not getting registered with the VA. Then on top of those 25 million, we have 3.14 family members per household in America. That means over 50 million family members. And then if you look at the sociological review of each American has on average two close intimate friends, meaning something you'll share sequence with, that's another 50 million friends. So we're not getting at 41% of the population directly reached. So it should be, if you start even at least attacking there, you start to be able to find your veterans. It requires, if I hop on the soapbox even more, it requires an investment and to listen. I can't tell you the number of times I've been approached in the last 20 years of how do we access your magical pot of veterans to get them to come to our play, which was not produced by veterans, not written by veterans and there's no veterans in it. And I don't mean to sound bitter, I'm just being very honest and very open because we hear this a lot. I've worked with veteran service organizations around the nation. That's our secret little complaint that I've now outed. But we're kind of sick of it. But when people come and say like the talent with Jonathan's done with the Telling Project, which is we'll come to your community, we want to work with you and give you a voice. We want to give voice to the invisible. That word starts to spread. He started very humbly as we have, right? And it grew, it grew and it grew. So that's all. I just want to be aware that you'd be aware that it's great. Yes, get it funded, go to Northrop Grumman and all these other big ones. But then on the side, I'll be going for the veterans who don't want anything to do with that blood money if I may be so bold to say. Yeah, that's great. So there's two angles to what we're all doing, which is doing shows that we want to invite veterans to come see to be our audience and then there's producing the work of veterans, obviously two very different streams. I would like to go on that, which is I started doing this work because I was producing a play about a veteran that was not written by a veteran that did not feature any veterans. And I really wanted to connect the veteran community, not just his audience, but honestly, around the play. And I actually started showing up these veteran civilian dialogues, which is, you know, and just having one-on-one conversations as an independent artist, not as like, oh, I'm doing this play, come see it. But actually as like, I'm just being present, which also goes to what Stefan was just saying, being present. And then we invited veterans to read their own poetry on stage at the beginning of the show and therefore involving them directly in the conversation around the play. And it became an event. And the amazing thing that happened with that was that the veterans did start showing up. Just to support each other, they heard that there was an event that a few veterans were performing at. And people would just come and I had this incredible interaction with one young man. He came to see the show twice, the first time he didn't speak to anyone. And the second time I approached him and just said hello and, you know, asked sort of what had brought him there. He just said, I saw there was an event that just wanted to be around veterans because he was very isolated from his own life experiences in New York from Alaska. I just sort of, you know, didn't know where to go. And that was just a way to actually be, you know, supporting a community and inviting people in without it being, hi, come see my show. It's about your experience because that's really not what it was at all. And Everett was one of those poets. I still don't think such thing is a consultation firm. Like, can, my dream is like that half of the regional theaters hire Everett and Stefan to come as consultants to if we want to start engaging with these artists, with these audiences, what do they have to. Does that exist? We can start right now. I've got arms. I'm going to start with something like that. And TCG has applied for a grant and we're waiting to hear about it. And we've actually applied for it in partnership with Maurice de Calhuas mentioned earlier. And if that happens, we would pick four states or four communities around the country and do something along the lines of what Paula described with food camps and veterans and writing and so forth. So, yeah, I know we gotta get another thing. Don't call it food camps. Got it. This is last night's discussion. You guys are going to have to be my, we gotta throw up the new, TCG also has a grant program that's open to blue star theaters and we'll announce another round of that some time soon. And I'll out to Kitasola when we're sitting there and Nipah has expressed interest in the same conversation. So, yeah. I also, you know, these folks have taken such a deep dive. This is really incredible work and they're all interconnected. I put this panel together. They all most of them already knew each other when I worked together. There's a lot of different kinds of models of engagement with military communities across the country that you can tell if you click through on the Blue Star Theater's map. I mean, I'll just shout out Jiva Theater in Rochester does sort of coming home, I don't remember, coming home for the holidays. I think they call it and it's however many performances of a Christmas Carol and this year or I guess last holiday season, they had people calling from Afghanistan and Iraq saying they wanted to reserve their tickets because it was like the highlight of coming home and being with their families going to this production together. And, you know, there's such a range of stuff that can be done. You know, this is just something that, because I'm really now sort of an individual artist trying to link up institutionally. And so one of the questions is also how do we sustain these initiatives? Because no sooner had we put up the poetry warrior writers, presented the work, had the show, had the talk backs, people came forward and went, I'm a veteran of the Korean War. I fought World War II, you know? And I'm like, oh my God, we were, I was looking for you, but as a civilian, I didn't know how to find. And now it's like there's a whole other group of people like, here's my, so it's also trying to not get around a one-time event. Do you know what I mean? Okay, now the show is up and boom. So that it becomes something more that's like in the life blood. I love this idea of having the links because you talked about it from LA. I mean, we were there 10 years, Keith Jeffries at ASFA and AMVETS, right? So the community's fairly small, right? And when you go with artists and veteran, actually we can connect. And if I may, if I don't know if we have time, but I wouldn't use a metaphor. I heard a podcast Ted talk. There was a guy from Italy because Italy honors artists and peace as much as war. You can join the military or the Peace Corps. You just have to do country service, national service, rather. He joins the Peace Corps, goes to a country and he looks at these plush fields and he says, ah, they should be growing tomatoes where Italians were going to teach these natives, these ignorant natives how to grow tomatoes. Anyone heard this one? And they get these plush tomatoes and they harvest and they, I mean, they're getting them, they're beautiful and big and ready to be harvested. And all of these, would it be hippopotamists, hippopotamists, a bunch of hippopotamists came out of the river and ate them to the ground. And he said, ah, our beautiful tomatoes. And the local said, yeah, that's why we don't grow tomatoes. So the great being is, this is what I'm saying, north of Grumman, big single project, yeah, it's great. But invest in the community, come, ask us and listen. Rather than grow, bring your tomatoes to us, go, what do you need? Because Big Falls, Michigan, where I work with them up there, they don't have any funds. And you know what, I went from San Francisco to Big Falls within a week and I did my show, I'm not plugging, just saying Cryhavoc, which is the outreach that explains my story. So other veterans are less intimidated to come up and go, all right, that's, that's mine too, or it's not mine, let me get my story. We do the D crew program, but that's what we do. We go, well, what do you need here? And as they start locally creating their own community in San Francisco, they have one thing in Big Falls and we're talking from blue, blue, blue to red, red, red, right? Where there, where I saw, you know, the billboards, so I have some, sorry, billboards with President Obama with horns on his head, right? And yet we had the same conversation afterwards because it's about the people in the community. It wasn't about politics, it was, who's a veteran I am? Well, you know what, I'm aside. We have had this happen. Well, I'm a psychologist, I'll offer free psychological care for any veteran who can't get in the VA or just who needs it. Then there was a dental hygienist who said, I'll give free cleanings to veterans. And they've sustained that. Someone ran the rec center and said, I'll open it every Saturday. Morristown, New Jersey, same thing. They said, let's just open, think these are asking me, what do we do? What do we do? Open your church rectory when it's available and people wait and the word will spread. And sure enough, veterans start coming in going, you know what, I just need help with my mountain of paperwork. Great, I don't know how to do it either. Let's sit down and do it. Do you know what I mean? So make that investment. Listen and then it'll find its own path and then you do a sustained model rather than, oh look, Northrop Drummond produced this big play, maybe he could go to Broadway. Sorry, I'll hop off my soapbox. Thank you. Others, I'm in the Northrop Grummond. No, no, I'm not. I'm not in the Northrop Grummond. Well, I was in LA and I was doing that. We were going after, there's all of them right up in the Animal Valley and all that and we were after them but then I had veterans come up and say, dude, you'd go with them, I'm done with you, okay? Yes. I forgot one in the fort. Great. A lot of the work you all are talking about is with veterans. The Blue Star Theater is, that program is open to serving veterans as well as active duty, military and their families. And I will say 125 theaters so far, the universe of TCG member theaters right now is we have almost 500 member theaters. So I, like we've said, I can't imagine why every theater would want to engage in this in some level but I do hear, to a little pushback, some people, staff at member theaters participating theaters not knowing what the connect is on the military basis or with veterans. Not knowing how to make the connect, how to find the right people and get people to come and so I hear it is about programming, it's about engaging at a deeper level but starting the connect, how to get started and having, certainly it's about a deeper connect. Sometimes it's about hearing their voices, sometimes it is about getting away from their lives and inviting them to a Christmas carol with their families. It's both and but I'm looking for the conference 2.0 website there is a Bluster theaters group on there and I would love for that to be a place for people to ask questions and receive advice and for you all to be able to, in an ongoing way, show this kind of advice. This man was everyone, when I got to New York from LA I was like, who can I connect with and like ever talk to him, he knows everyone and if he doesn't know somebody that knows somebody or if he doesn't, I do, you know what I mean? That's all, that's what I mean by the community. Just ask, I love the community. But that's where it is, it's asking, but anyone in Illinois, yeah, I know. Say it, Lois. Any other questions before we have to close this down? Has this risen? No. For folks. Thank you. You're so great. I am. Great to talk. Do you know what I do? I just was like, I was like.