When University student Lemuel Charley joined the U.S. Army, he’d already been the target of several gunshots.
He grew up on a Native American reservation in Arizona amid Hopi and Navajo tribe clashes. At night, when he and his father crossed the Hopi reservation, he often had to duck while his father held back gunshot attacks with a gun of his own.
“People talk about young men ‘going to war’ when they join the military,” Charley said. “I was already at war.”
This afternoon in Washington, D.C., Charley will talk about his childhood, as much surrounded by war as his young adult years in the Army, on stage for Michelle Obama, Jill Biden and a handful of big political names. His performance, part of a Eugene-founded production called
“Telling,” shows that not all war veterans have to keep their life-changing experiences to themselves when they return home.
“I’m opening up a dialog in the community,” Charley said. “I don’t want to be isolated.”
The production for Telling began in 2008 with Charley, University Veterans and Family Association Co-Director Shane Addis and University theater arts major Shirley Cortez as performers. Then-VFSA staff member Jonathan Wei found the three students after interviewing several veterans at the University in 2007. Wei worked with the trio to sculpt a scripted story based on their real-life experiences and collaborated with University theater department head John Schmor to stage it.
Wei said he created Telling “in response to what a lot of veterans were experiencing upon returning to civilian life.”
“There weren’t a whole lot of people who knew how to ask them about their experiences,” he said. “They wanted to talk about what they’d been through, but they didn’t really know how to start that conversation themselves either.”
In the last two years, an ever-expanding group of “cast members” has told war stories for audiences in Portland, Eugene and Seattle. Today, on Veterans Day, the cast will perform at the U.S. Capitol.
Cortez was thrilled to learn about an opportunity to act and recount her U.S. Navy experiences at the same time.
Her story connects three distinct stories from her time in the Navy: the memory of an owl in the daytime, said to be superstitious, on the day the USS Cole was bombed; a memory of sexual harassment onboard; and the songs she used to sing during her free time on the ship.
Before the co-creators interviewed Cortez and turned her anecdotes into a story, Cortez said she had pushed the stories to the back burner in her mind.
“I never realized people wanted to hear these stories,” Cortez said.
Now that she’s shared her story with audience members in three cities and soon in a fourth, she feels “more like a part of my community.” Finally recounting her experiences “has been a cathartic experience,” she said.
Jonathan Wei said the production, though started to help veterans, has ended up helping more people than just those who have returned from war.
“What’s compelling about this stuff is, it’s not necessarily about working with veterans, it’s about working with communities,” Wei said. “There are a large number of young people who are going overseas and seeing some extraordinary things, and they’re able to bring the knowledge and skills they learned back to their communities.”
Communication between veterans and communities, Wei said, is the central reason he wants Telling to travel to other cities, where other locals have war stories they can share with their fellow citizens.
Wei said he is ecstatic to be traveling to Washington, but he is even more excited to get back to “the real work.” He’ll soon start another
production in Sacramento, Calif.
And Lemuel Charley? “I’m nervous, but it hasn’t really hit me yet. It probably will (today) when I’m up on that stage.”
[email protected]
Student veterans ‘tell’ wartime tales
Daily Emerald
November 10, 2009
0
More to Discover