Two weeks before the January opening of Someone Will Remember Us at Trinity Repertory Company, the cast and crew gathered for a designer run in the theatre’s Nelson rehearsal room. Stage manager Polly Feliciano asked director Christopher Windom if he had any words to share with the cast ahead of that evening’s run.
“Go with God,” Windom said simply.
In undertaking the next leg of their work, the company of Someone Will Remember Us was carrying forward a sacred tradition, as artists have done for centuries going back to the Greeks (the show’s title is taken from Sappho’s Fragment 147), and indeed, as artists at Trinity Rep did nearly 20 years ago with the piece Boots on the Ground. Both shows recorded the experience of Iraq War veterans in their own words, though the new one added the voices of Iraqi refugees who had lived through the same terrible war. The theatre is not a warzone, but a play can reveal the truths of the people who live through conflict.
On that bitterly cold Rhode Island afternoon, the designer run’s attendees met to assess the cast’s progress, with a freshly devised script by Deborah Salem Smith, playwright in residence, and Charlie Thurston, Trinity Rep resident acting company member. The actors wore street clothes, the sound design was piped through Bluetooth speakers from a laptop, and gaffer’s tape marked the wings and the audience’s location on the floor. The windowless room with concrete walls was crowded with crew, Trinity Rep staff, and invited guests who exhaled hope and anticipation with each breath.
Feliciano quietly released Windom’s sage words to the room and the cast took their places. With a buzz from the speakers and a brief pause, the designer run began.
The journey to that afternoon began more than 20 years before, in 2004, just a year after the Iraq War began, when Boots on the Ground writers Smith and Laura Kepley were interviewing Rhode Island soldiers who had just returned from tours of duty. Smith and Kepley’s interviews with 60-plus soldiers and their families, medical workers, journalists, ministers, and other witnesses of the war formed the material of the 2006 show Boots on the Ground, a 90-minute docudrama that told the true stories of Rhode Islanders deployed in Iraq and offered a community talkback as its second act.
Boots on the Ground was a critical success. In The Boston Globe, Louise Kennedy called the play “a real work of art,” and The Providence Journal lauded it as “wonderful theatre doing a very good thing for the place it calls home.” BroadwayWorld critic Randy Rice called it “wonderfully conceived and honestly acted…The material that Boots is drawn from, and the people who provided it, are treated with enormous respect and appreciation.”
But life goes on; theatre seasons roll forward. Trinity Rep continued its work with Rhode Island’s veterans, most recently with the Green Light Ghost Light Project. The GLGLP—whose name combines the national “Greenlight a Vet” initiative, in which communities display a green light to show support for veterans, and the Ghost Light Project, in which theatres leave a light on to signal that a theatre is an inclusive space for all—culminates in an annual “Veteran Voices” event, an evening of performances, music, and readings from local veterans about their time during and after military service. Even now, two ghost lights, one with a green bulb and one without, light up the front window of the Trinity Rep foyer to promote the project to passersby.
The program was so successful, said Trinity Rep artistic director Curt Columbus, that participating vets started asking, “When are you going to do a follow-up to Boots on the Ground?”
So, 20 years after Boots, Smith was invited back to join Thurston and Michelle Cruz, the theatre’s former director of engagement, to create a new work which would partly examine the legacy of Boots on the Ground—and go a crucial step further. Chronicling U.S. involvement in the region from Saddam Hussein’s rise to power in 1979 to the U.S.’s recent departure from Syria, Someone Will Remember Us interlaces real-life testimonies of U.S. military veterans, a Gold Star family, Iraqi civilians, and refugees living in Rhode Island. Smith and Thurston began by interviewing some of the original subjects of Boots on the Ground. Then they expanded their interviews to include others in the Providence area and traced connections across the U.S.’s broader veteran community.
“Theatre does this so well: putting all of these bodies onstage together and letting their stories be shared.”
Someone Will Remember Us is told by eight players (Ashley Aldarondo, Jihan Haddad, Allison Jones, Josephine Moshiri Elwood, Dereks Thomas, Stephen Thorne, Rachael Warren, and Jade Ziane), with segmented, digressive monologues woven together like dialogue to relay the experiences of American soldiers, Iraqi refugees, and their allies. Three threads run through the play: American soldiers tell us about serving in Iraq and returning home; Iraqi citizens describe surviving war in their homeland and resettling in the U.S.; and allies of both perspectives share their experiences supporting their loved ones. While some threads never explicitly merge, together they show the audience the ways that American and Iraqi stories are intrinsically connected.
“Theatre does this so well: putting all of these bodies onstage together and letting their stories be shared,” Smith said.
The personal is political, of course, but Smith said she didn’t set out to make plays about politics. “We just wanted to listen to people,” she said of the original impulse behind both Boots on the Ground and Someone Will Remember Us. “We were really hearing how much this experience of war was rippling through an individual’s life and their family and community’s lives.”
“Deb mentioned the ripple effects and how that affected families,” Thurston continued. “When we were returning to this material and dealing with this conflict many years later, we were seeing how those ripples have developed over time and in all the different directions they’ve gone in.”
One ripple they followed led them to the Clemente Veterans’ Initiative, a college-level humanities course, run by Mark Santow, that invites veterans to renew their purpose by learning to express themselves. In Santow’s course, among other topics, veterans learn about the ancient ties between military service and Greek theatre.
“Veterans’ stories have always been a part of the theatre,” said Columbus. “Aeschylus was a foot soldier in the Athenian army.” Indeed, Aeschylus’s work as a 6th-century BCE playwright was directly tied to his military service. Remembered as the father of Greek tragedy, he also fought in the land battle of Marathon and the naval battle of Salamis. Knowing the historical ties between ancient Greek theatre and the military, Santow believes, gives veterans more avenues for expression and reflection.
Added Thurston, “I think it’s exciting and affirming for them to hear that they do have this legacy. It helps them to know that a playwright from thousands of years ago understood the experience of combat. It makes their explorations of violence, trauma, and retribution more immediate and authentic because Aeschylus had a similar experience.”
Theatre and military service may not be a natural association, Thurston conceded. But the theatre can provide “another way for them to feel a little bit more heard, a little bit more integrated, and a little bit more understood. That was a mission for the play in general.”
Plays about war—including those of Aeschylus—are typically told from one country’s point of view, Smith pointed out. Someone Will Remember Us wanted to do something different, expanding the interview pool beyond the veterans of Boots on the Ground. The writing team met with Iraqi immigrants living in Rhode Island and Massachusetts who had survived the Iraq war. They also heard from one Gambian refugee journalist who fled to the U.S. because his country’s authorities wanted to kill him for reporting about the war in Iraq. Many of the refugees traveled through multiple countries and learned multiple languages before settling in the U.S.
“One thing that was really compelling that we heard from all parties—from the refugees, from the American veterans—was an embracing of the complexity of the situation,” Thurston said, rather than a simple good-vs.-evil story. Added Smith, “I think, even in this current moment in our country, it is so important to be reminded that we can listen, and it’s an empowering gift to be able to listen to another human being.”
Veterans told Thurston how they had made friends with Iraqi translators and local teachers who traveled through U.S. checkpoints for work. They described Iraqi children who wanted to take photos with them in uniform, though they lived in an active warzone. Thurston said Iraqi citizens wrestled with how to define who was an enemy and who wasn’t, as did the American soldiers he interviewed. While U.S. politicians at home oversimplified the war and its stakes, said Thurston, “The human experience is not simple.”
As Cruz put it, American soldiers and Iraqi citizens were fighting the same war from different but similarly complicated perspectives. “Because of that situation, because of those relationships, because of those complexities,” she said, “I found that they could really, truly see each other.”
On Jan. 29, opening night of Somebody Will Remember Us, the foyer of Trinity Rep bustled with excited voices and warmly bundled bodies of audience members and theatre staff. It was press night after a week of previews, and some of the play’s interviewees attended to watch and celebrate after the 90-minute performance with sparkling cider, champagne, and cookies.
The mood was positive but understated. Very white New England. Audience members were ushered into Trinity Rep’s Dowling Theater by polite ushers. House lights dimmed and a hush came over the crowd. Columbus and Kate Liberman, the theatre’s executive director, took to the stage to welcome the audience and make announcements.
“It feels particularly poignant to be doing this play right now,” said Liberman from the robin’s-egg-and-navy-blue-striped stage designed by Tanya Orellana. Above Liberman hung square boxes painted as clouds by lighting designer Emma Deane, which lit up during the show to display the names of locations across New England and the world that the play references. Liberman alluded to, without naming, the changes occurring that week due to the executive orders President Trump issued after taking office on Jan. 20.
In particular, on Jan. 23, Trump signed an executive order suspending federal funding for DEI initiatives. Someone Will Remember Us’s community partners, Operation Stand Down Rhode Island and the Refugee Dream Center, depended upon federal DEI funding to support their communities. That very day, Jan. 29, Trump had signed an executive order suspending federal funding for refugee resettlement agencies. Said Liberman from the stage that night, “The Dream Center has lost its federal funding.”
Columbus and Liberman went on to inform the audience, as neutrally as possible, that Trinity Rep is supported by federal funds through the National Endowment for the Arts, and that without that support Someone Will Remember Us could not exist. While arts funding had not been directly targeted by the Trump administration at that point, Columbus and Liberman simply encouraged the opening night audience to consider what it would mean for Trinity Rep to lose its federal funding. (Funds for this show were fully reimbursed by the NEA before the administration’s recent mass cancellation of arts grants.) Then the performance began.
Sara (elegantly portrayed by Jihan Haddad), an Iraqi who migrated to New England, summarized the connection folks feel for their war-torn homes in one line: “No matter what your country makes you go through…there is always a place in your heart for it.”
Though Sara was referring to the pain of being forced to leave Iraq during the conflict, the truth of her words from 20 years ago resonated with the pain and uncertainty of current-day Americans who find themselves in the crosshairs of the Trump administration’s policies targeting our nation’s most vulnerable citizens, many of them represented, often intersectionally, in the Trinity Rep audience that evening: women, people of color, LGBTQ+ community members, the disabled community, and immigrants. We love our country even when it is not easy to do so.
The emotional and psychological toll of war is universal across eons, as is the longing for love and peace. Smith recounted to me an interview with Kamal, an Iraqi refugee, who told the show’s creators how he fled his home in Bashiqa, Iraq, with only his phone, his graduation documents (to prove his training), his master’s thesis about love in the ancient Greek poet Sappho’s works, and the clothes on his back.
“Charlie and I found this so moving: both what Kamal valued most to grab in this moment of crisis, but also what he studied and explored in his thesis,” Smith said. Indeed, the Sappho citation eventually led the creators to the show’s evocative title; Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho’s Fragment 147 reads, “Someone will remember us, I say, even in another time.” As Smith put it, “The line asks us: Who will remember these soldiers and refugees?”
Fragment 147 is an invitation to the reader. It declares devotion. With this title, creators Cruz, Smith, and Thurston proclaimed their work as a living memory of its subjects. They began the project of remembering both the soldiers and civilians in a disastrous war which claimed the lives of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Watching in community with the creators, we became stewards of that memory.
Kitty Drexel (she/her) is the disabled, queer editor-in-chief of The New England Theatre Geek and a performing artist in the Boston area.
