Actor shares veterans’ struggles in ‘The American Soldier’ - Review from Iowa
Actor shares veterans’ struggles in
‘The American Soldier’
Wednesday, March 11, 2020
By DANA LARSEN Pilot-Tribune Editor, Acutal Review Link, Need to be a subsriber
When the war’s over, the battle may be just beginning.
New York actor Douglas Taurel brought his unique drama “The American Soldier” to Buena Vista University Friday night, driving the message home in an intense one-man performance. Taurel has never experienced war. Blindness in one eye disqualified him from hopes of serving in the Marine Corps. His characters are drawn from letters written by soldiers, from Valley Forge to Afghanistan.
Though he is not one of them, veterans across the country are saluting him for being a “voice” for them, embodying what military people go through in times of war - and the internal warfare they face at home afterward.
The powerful play he wrote and performs has taken on a life of its own.
The original version he expected would be a one-time event. It was so well received, especially by veterans and their families, that he fleshed it out and took it on the road. After nearly a decade, every year he thinks will be his last with “The American Soldier,” but requests keep coming in, like the most recent one from the BVU School of Liberal Arts.
Taurel has performed the play at The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Library of Congress, and for members of the U.S. Congress.
When he set out to write it, he said he had been dismayed with “the way people were coming home” from Iraq and Afghanistan. The struggles such as veteran suicides and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder were just beginning to touch the public consciousness.
“This was going to be a small project to illuminate the struggles some of the guys were going through,” he said in a conversation with the audience after his Storm Lake performance. “I was never trying to say that war is bad, or war is good - I was trying to show what war is.”
The son of South American immigrants, the actor has a deep appreciation for those who served the country. In his research, he pored through thousands of letters from the different war eras, haunting libraries. “I was drawn to the material,” he says. “I became so immersed - it was a very different piece of muse.”
After seeing him portray soldiers and veterans in such a gut-wrenching way, many vets including about 20 in the Storm Lake crowd seem surprised to find that he had not lived the war experience.
Taurel connects with many veterans as he performs around the county. Often they send him their own stories. “It’s been a blessing. The play has given back more than I ever could have imagined.”
In one scene he portrays a father who lost his son to suicide after the son returned from Middle East service and was unable to fit back into society. By pure chance, he said, he once met the father whose story inspired the character.
Before his show, he performed for 300 Storm Lake students. “They were so receptive and respectful,” he said. Speaking of one character he portrays sharing coping advice to an unseen buddy in Vietnam, he grinned, “They loved the guy smoking weed.”
“They are the ones who need to see this play,” he said of young people. “They don’t know what the Vietnam War was.”
He asked how many in the audience had served in Vietnam. “Welcome home, gentlemen,” he said.
The play, and the experiences of the soldiers, “is the American story, really,” Taurel said.
“Theatre is so important,” he added. Unlike movies, “We can share this together in a room. It’s like a church.”
The experience was a vivid, almost draining one for the audience as well as the actor.
The stage was starkly black and bare - with just a footlocker with a folded military green blanket, a tiny table with a chair, and a representation of a worn flag on the back wall illuminated with a spotlight.
The sounds of men chanting cadence during a march, the whipping of helicopter blades, and the startling blast of rifle fire burst from speakers, pulling the audience into the story.
Taurel moved effortlessly from character to character - trying on dialects and ethnicities as easily as his khaki uniform shirt slipped on and off. One moment he was a WWI trooper in a steel helmet desperately trying to convince a comrade to keep moving forward as they charged a hill, the next a broken veteran finding solace in a bottle of Jack Daniels in hopes of holding bloody memories back.
At times he even played a wife of a deployed soldier, struggling with loneliness; and the small child of a serviceman, playing with toys on the floor while wishing his daddy never had to go away.
At the back of the stage was a pile of papers - actual letters written home by soldiers in Korea and Vietnam that had been found on eBay.
He seeks to portray his military characters with dignity and honor. He says,
“Less than 1 percent of the population is carrying the load for all of us,” he says. “To our veterans, we can’t say thank you enough.”
After his performance, the actor posted a message thanking the university and Storm Lake. “You’ve treated me with the upmost generosity, love, and respect. Tonight is my last show and Iowa has pierced my soul.”
Learn more about Douglas at www.TheAmericanSoldierSoloShow.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/douglastaurel
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DouglasTaurel/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/douglastaurel/
