Imagine having a loved one halfway across the world and the only way to communicate with them is through a spotty satellite phone. This is the experience many of the characters face in SNAFU Dance Theatre’s production of Calling Home: Stories from Military Families.
The play is inspired by the real-life stories of military families and is put together by playwright Kristin Atwood and SNAFU dance theatre co-artistic director Kathleen Greenfield. Atwood, who was working toward her PhD at the time, approached Greenfield with the idea of turning her PhD research into a play. The two began sifting through interview transcripts and discovered the rich stories of military families.
“That was the big inspiration,” says Greenfield, “just taking actual documentary pieces of interviews and turning it into something performable.”
Greenfield didn’t just use these interviews as inspiration; she also uses word-for-word live projections of the interviews during the play.
“The projections really help with the documentary kind of aspect, to create a mood, and to also bring everybody back to earth and remember that these are interviews,” she says.
On top of the projections, the play uses music and movement to help these stories come to life. “We have movement sequences where we discuss PTSD, or mourning a loved one,” says Greenfield. “Sometimes words don’t cut it, so the added elements of movement try to represent those moments that can’t be spoken.”
In traditional SNAFU style, the production also has an “interactive coffee-shop style talkback” after every production of the show.
“People who come and see the show will have a chance to talk directly with the actors and the writer and myself to share their stories and experiences,” says Greenfield, who stresses that it’s “not really a feedback for the writing and stuff like that, but more of people’s actual experience and stories.”
The play itself tells the story of five military families, all represented by five female actors and one male actor. The male actor and one of the female actors play soldiers who are deployed in Afghanistan. The male actor plays the role of the husband to the different wives at home, while the female soldier addresses the issue of a mother leaving her family behind. The rest of the wives follow in the social hierarchy of a military community.
“There’s the CO’s wife, who is kind of at the top and everyone goes to her for advice,” says Greenfield. “Then there’s the last wife, whose husband has PTSD, and she’s addressing that and she has a newborn child. Then there’s the typical wife who is kind of funny and quirky, and then we have one wife called The Other Wife that the rest of the wives kind of push away and reject because she’s just a hopeless romantic.”
The play being set in Afghanistan also adds an interesting touch.
“We don’t talk about Afghanistan as much as we should,” says Greenfield. “It’s a war we don’t spend as much time focusing on and we don’t really acknowledge the people we lost in Afghanistan. I think that’s something that can be taken away from [the play]… audiences will have a chance to understand the dynamic of people who were deployed in Afghanistan.”
Calling Home: Stories from Military Families addresses the similarities between a working-class family and a military family.
“The writing and arranging that Kris has done,” says Greenfield, “has really opened up that these military families, besides that fact that they’re separated from a loved one by long distance, are just working-class families getting through and figuring out how to take everything day by day when they’re missing someone.”
Calling Home: Stories from Military Families
Various times, Thursday April 11 to Sunday, April 14
$15-$20, Metro Theatre
snafudance.com