The official blog of the Dramaturgy Department at Baltimore's CENTERSTAGE. For posts related to our current and upcoming shows, click the links to the right. Alternatively, you could begin at the beginning, and explore our posts in chronological order.
from the NYTimes Opinionator series on the Civil War
Twitter feed for the intriguing “Disunion” series.
For the latest on ReEntry and its tour of US Army Europe, and other current and pending projects.
From the NYTimes. Heartbreaking, and far too common. As it happens, a company of actors is currently touring US Army facilities in Europe with performances of ReENTRY, a documentary play that shines a light on stories just like these—one of numerous productions of the piece playing around the States and now internationally (following a powerful run here in Baltimore last fall), produced by American Records Theater.
There’s some video of the piece here.
A LIFE photo gallery of Civil War faces, from the famous to the forgotten.
Some recent updates from the ReEntry crew on their tour of military facilities in Europe, including selected responses from recent conversations in response to the piece (which is primarily compiled from interviews with returning USMC vets of Afghanistan and Iraq, and their families):
· An update from ReEntry at US Army Europe
Our post-show discussions have been eye-opening. We begin with four panelists: A Chaplain, an NCO combat veteran, a spouse and a mental health provider. Each speaks candidly about the issues in the play and then I open the discussion to the audience at large. The discussions focus on suicide prevention and intervention, but within the framework of deployment health. Here are few sound-bites from those discussions:
A spouse described the notion of a soldier needing to “suck it up” and be strong and not need help as a myth. She said, “When you talk about what you’re going through, the power of those lies are broken.”
A single female soldier talked about coming home when you have no family: “Those cargo doors open, and all the wives and kids rush in and everyone’s hugging and you’re standing there, completely alone. You go from great pride to great loneliness in like two seconds.”
A Staff Sergeant said “I was one of the first to get wounded, way back in the invasion, and everyone wanted to shake my hand, everyone wanted to know about my wounds, how I got hit. Now, that doesn’t happen. Now all they want to know is, ‘did I kill someone.’”
A Commander told me, “I can lead men in battle, I can do all these things in theater, then I get home and the running joke is: ‘Daddy can’t find the forks’” He laughed, “I’m so disoriented at home, I just can’t remember where anything is.”
A female soldier, who’s married to another soldier talked about dual duty: “You both get deployed, and what do you do with your kids? Now after so many deployments, our families’ they’re burnt out, they can’t take our kids anymore. Then what do you do?”
Nine performances completed. It’s Sunday and we’re heading to Grafenwoer, then Vilseck and we’ll wrap up in Italy. Stay tuned.
Troops from the 442nd RCT slog through the Vosges Mountains during operations on the Western Front, during WW2. (Kabuo Miyamoto volunteers for this unit in Snow Falling on Cedars.)
Front line infantrymen of the “Lost Battalion,” 141st Infantry Regiment, relax around a camp fire after being rescued by Japanese American soldiers from the 442nd RCT in France. October 31, 1944.
from the European Center of Military History
1944. Members of the famed 442nd Japanese American military unit spend Christmas in an Italian bunker.
Photo Credit: Bellevue Historical Society.
Joseph Ichiuji, a Nisei veteran of WW2 (522nd Field Artillery Batallion), recalls helping to liberate a sub-camp of Dachau—ironic, given that his family back in the States were themselves interned under guard in a camp.
Ichiuji was born on Feb.14, 1919 in Salinas, CA. His father was a shoe repair owner and his mother a housewife. Ichiuji attended Pacific Grove High School and worked in a fish cannery for supplemental income.
He served in the 522nd A Battery from 1943-1946 as an artillery mechanic. Although he was drafted from the military in September 1941, Ichiuji’s duties didn’t begin until 1943 because the United States had classified all Japanese Americans as 4-C enemy aliens.
link to full-length Hollywood feature about the 442nd Regiment and their service in World War 2.
Marine reservists from Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines react after being released from formation during a homecoming celebration at the unit’s reserve center October 7, 2005 in Columbus, Ohio. Lima 3/25 was returning from a seven-month deployment in Iraq where one in three of the company’s 140 men were killed or injured.
