Music Credit: “NY” written and performed by Kosta T from the album, Soul Sand, used courtesy of the Free Music Archive

Stephan Wolfert: Well, I believe what happened to me, is what happened to all veterans in this country. We were recruited at a psychologically malleable age, then we were wired for war—but at the end of our military service, we were not unwired from war. We were not rewired for society—and then, to making matters worse, we’re severed, amputated from our community of comrades, our structure, our mission, our purpose, our support! And we’re put right back into communities that do not know how to deal with this, do not understand our experience, and we don’t know how to adjust—no training.

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Jo Reed: You just heard an excerpt from the one-man show, Cry Havoc, performed and written by actor and US Army veteran Stephan Wolfert—with an assist from William Shakespeare. And this is Art Works the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed.

After years in the military, Stephan Wolfert wanted something else, but he had a difficult time transitioning back into civilian life. But he found the theater—and particularly, the work of Shakespeare, who peopled so many of his plays with soldiers and veterans, who have faced bloody losses.  Stephan changed careers, became an actor, and immersed himself in Shakespeare.  Years later, he created the one-man show, Cry Havoc, which mixes Stephan’s own experiences in the military, his return to civilian life, and his observations about both, with pertinent monologues from Shakespeare’s plays. And believing that Shakespeare and theater could be as healing for others as it is for him, Stephan has worked for decades with veterans, eventually forming  the non-profit, DE-CRUIT.  DE-CRUIT combines classical theater training, mindfulness practice, personal narrative, and the plays of William Shakespeare to teach veterans how to use theater to process and share their experiences, so they can finally come home.  

Stephan Wolfert: In the military, we're recruited but we're never decruited. We have a recruiter that helps prepare us for every aspect of life in the military going from civilian life to military life. And in the military, as I talk about on the show, we're wired for war, and it doesn't matter what branch, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, or Coast Guard or what your job is, everybody learns to fire the rifle at human beings—and for a purpose, I'm not demonizing the military. They're very good at what they do. But essentially we know from history that part of what the military has to do to get us to kill regardless of what our job is, water purification specialist or infantrymen, we have to dehumanize the people we’re fighting, because statistically human beings do not want to kill others. It just won't. In that critical moment it's really difficult to actually get people to kill another human being. So they have to dehumanize, and, as I talked about, wire us for war. And there's weeks and weeks and months of this work—but when we get out of this, none of it’s undone. So what I've decided was to stop just talking about it and do what I've been doing for myself, for other veterans, which is using theater, specifically Shakespeare and classical actor training, interwoven with some modern psychology techniques to unwire from war, to rewire for society or to DE-CRUIT fellow veterans and myself.

Jo Reed: Okay. So let's unpack this a little bit. And let's begin with you. What's your background? You were in the military.

Stephan Wolfert: I was. I was in the Army. I joined in 1986. I joined at a time when the Navy was jam-packed because Top Gun had come out, but nobody was joining the army because it had movies like Stripes and Private Benjamin and it was post-Vietnam. I joined the army. I was a medic initially, then an infantry officer right after the first Gulf War and I spent most of my time training during the first Gulf War. I didn't actually deploy on that. But, right after, I was in desert training in Fort Irwin, California and there was a there was a chain of events. I had one of my soldiers committed suicide. And then a dear friend of mine was killed right in front of me in the live-fire exercise and I lost it. I mean now I know that, but at the time I didn't recognize what was going on with me. I had a Vietnam veteran, who is my platoon sergeant, he helped take care of me. He saw what was going on. I actually technically went AWOL, but they covered for me and I hopped on an Amtrak and I was traveling around. And in Montana, of all places, I saw Richard III, Shakespeare's Richard III. And there was a veteran on stage, Richard III, expressing he felt the way I felt about myself, saying that he's deformed. He was really good at the military—and now his military service is over. In his case, the war is over. In my cas,e military service was probably over and he's asking the audience directly, looking right at me, “Now, what? What do I do? How do I fit in? I was really good at this and I don't fit in here. So what do I do?” And this play had such a profound impact on me that I ended up leaving the army and going to graduate school for acting at Trinity Rep in Providence, Rhode Island.

Jo Reed: How long had you been in the military?

Stephan Wolfert: I'd been in about six years at that point. Now, it took me another year-and-a-half, two years to fully get out.

Jo Reed: Okay. And had you ever been involved in theater previously?

Stephan Wolfert: No, no.

Jo Reed: And had you ever read Shakespeare or loved Shakespeare?

Stephan Wolfert: No, absolutely not. I grew up in the north side of La Crosse, Wisconsin. It’s a very blue-collar town. My family, you know, my father was literally a farmer all the way through high school and up into college. So no I didn't grow up with theater. I didn't grow up with the arts really even in general, not in my community, and not really in my family. You know, they had to bust their hump just to get by. So theater and things like that were a nice hobby, but we didn't really have time for it. Nor did we have the resources, but, yeah, I look back now and I realize, “Oh my God, I was an actor my whole life!” <laughs> But didn’t know it. Didn't have the support around me to say, “No, you're an artist. Let's get you into this or into that.” So how I wound up in that theater in Montana, I have no idea, but I did. 

Jo Reed: Can you remember what made you think, “Oh, here’s theater, I’m gonna walk in.”

Stephan Wolfert: I think it’s the same thing that brings now, over the years, hundreds of veterans into the room with me, when I say, “I’m offering a DE-CRUIT course, and let me be clear, it’s treating trauma through Shakespeare.” And yet, veterans of every era, every age, every background, every military experience end up in that room. And the vast majority will say the same thing that I’m saying now, I have no idea, why or how. It’s just something drew me in there. As far as the play, I wish I could give you a really clever and clear story about it, but I was also in an absolute drunken stupor. I went off the deep-end, I’m sober seven years now, but at the time, I had a cooler of beer, Wonder Bread, and peanut butter. <laughter> I was on this train, and that was my nourishment. I stayed pretty drunk 24/7 for a few weeks to try and, I don’t know, reboot my system, I guess? I don’t know what I was after, but I ended up in the theater and that changed my life—what Ancient Greeks called “catharsis.”

Jo Reed: You've had some time to think about this. So why do you think Shakespeare spoke so powerfully to you?

Stephan Wolfert: Well, I write about this fair amount. We're writing a book, my partner in DE-CRUIT, Alicia Ali and I are writing about exactly this trying to break it down, if you will. There's so many reasons. One, he's so perfect—A. Shakespeare was surrounded by veterans. The same people were fighting then as today. The people who were dying and killing and being wounded and wounding others were the working class, the farmers the tradesmen, what have you. And that's the same today. Seventy percent of all draftees and enlistees come from working-class families. So, we parallel that way. In Shakespeare's day, when he was writing all these great plays in 1599, James Shapiro talks about in England, they were in two wars. They were preparing for the 2nd Spanish Armada. They had already survived one. They were in, essentially, a Cold War and then on again, off again, skirmish with Spain. And they were in a full-time nine-year war with Ireland, largely a guerrilla war—warfare. So the Vietnam veterans get this, the fighters who served in Afghanistan, in certain parts of Iraq get this. So Shakespeare was surrounded by veterans and he was writing our experience so perfectly. It's less about what it's like to be in combat. Sure, you can look at “Henry V”, you know, “once more into the breach” and what have you. But what I feel he wrote so bright, so perfectly, is the effects after. One need only look at Lady Percy’s speech to her husband, Hotspur, who's a combat veteran in “Henry IV” part one. He's just returned home from combat. He's about to leave the next morning, unbeknownst to her. She comes in and starts asking him a series of questions. It's the monologue that begins, “Oh my good Lord, why are you thus alone?”

LADY PERCY (HENRY IV, PART 1) : Tell me, sweet lord, what is ’t that takes from thee / Thy stomach, pleasure, and thy golden sleep? / Why dost thou bend thine eyes upon the earth / And start so often when thou sit’st alone? / In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watched, / And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars, / Cry “Courage! To the field!” And thou hast talk’d / Of prisoners' ransom and of soldiers slain / And all the currents of a heady fight. / Thy spirit within thee hath been so at war, / And thus hath so bestirred thee in thy sleep, / That beads of sweat have stood upon thy brow / Like bubbles in a late-disturbèd stream, / And in thy face strange motions have appeared, / Such as we see when men restrain their breath / On some great sudden hest. O, what portents are these?

Stephan Wolfert: That speech so perfectly describes post-traumatic stress disorder, 400 years ago, that Jonathan Shay in his book Achilles in Vietnam, takes that speech and next to each question Lady Percy asks her husband, he puts symptoms out of the diagnostic manual describing post-traumatic stress disorder. Much Ado About Nothing begins with the soldiers returning home from combat. His plays are infused with the veteran experience, and the family of vets, and the community being affected by those veterans returning.

Jo Reed: Now you’ve said that the fact that Shakespeare wrotes in iambic pentameter, is actually helpful for the veterans, who come to DE-CRUIT.

Stephan Wolfert: Oh, you should see this. When we work with the veterans, they'll try to share an experience that has them so buttoned up that I'll see them physically shut down. I'll hand them a Shakespeare speech. Not only does the speech, the Shakespeare poetry provide as Bessel van der Kolk describes, “a language for the muck of emotions.” Not only that, but he writes it in iambic pentameter, that is in perfect human rhythm that helps us regulate our emotions that we can continue to share them out loud. So with every line of verse we breathe in, express that line of verse, breathe in, for the next one and keep speaking--speaking and breathing. It keeps us present in the moment, and physically in our bodies which are the two things that tend to go first, when we remember traumatic experiences. We tend to dissociate, leave our body in the present moment, but he forces us to stay in there.

Jo Reed: I want you to give me a sense of the rhythm of iambic pentameter.

Stephan Wolfert: Hamlet comes out to the audience, asks a roomful of strangers, he looks them dead in the eye and say, “To be or not to be that is the question. Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them to die to sleep.” So by breathing in at each new rhythm “to be or not to be that is the question,” <breathes in> breathing in we can share this intense human emotion, again, as Bessel talks about the muck of human emotion, so, perfectly but then forced to be breathe in and go to the next series of emotions—the next description of what I'm feeling, thinking or expressing. And by breathing in and hitting that rhythm which we already speak in, which is already in the natural human heartbeat, it just comes naturally to the veterans. And I want to add this, that the military uses breath and heartbeat to wire us for war. When we learn to fire the weapon and again, everyone does this—it doesn't matter what your job is. Fire weapon at a human silhouette, only part of the breath control is for an accurate shot. The other part is to keep us from thinking about who or what we’re shooting. So the manual teaches us to breathe in, exhale. Sound familiar? Keep the breath out, squeeze the trigger between the heart beats, then take a breath in, and acquire the next target. So they use breath as part of the rhythm to firing. We use breath as the part of our rhythm for marching and singing in cadence. We use breath as part of our rhythm for nearly everything that we do. So it's a natural segue into Shakespeare to say, all right, let's use breath and rhythm and our heartbeat to try and unpack all this stuff that's going on inside our heads and inside of our bodies. And look here happens to be some brilliant poetry that expresses exactly what we're going through.

Jo Reed:  Let’s speak briefly about Cry Havoc, because it’s a model for DE-CRUIT in some ways—or its public face.

Stephan Wolfert: Yeah. if I can put it this way, it serves as the mouthpiece for DE-CRUIT, because it helped me articulate what I had been working on since about ’96, up to the time I wrote it and I wrote it about seven years ago.

Jo Reed: Okay, describe the play.

Stephan Wolfert: The play is--it's about an hour-and-a-quarter of my journey from that moment of being in Montana, seeing Richard III having just come from my friend being shot and seeing Shakespeare's Richard III and his language perfectly articulating what I was going through. Everything, Shakespeare just somehow got it, and then my journey of not only leaving the army and going to grad school but realizing that this work was-- it was helping me heal. Nolan my friend and brilliant Algonquin artist up in Canada describes, “the medicine of theater”. It was really working as medicine for me. It wasn't just what we're taught in American Theatres of, “Oh, it's therapeutic but it's not therapy”. Not for me. It was. It was more than therapy. It was true medicine. I was healing from this. I was learning skills to help me overcome everything I was going through. So I put that in the show. And I interwove about 13 Shakespeare monologues seamlessly into my own story. So you can think of almost like an American musical, the way they the actors seamlessly go into a song, or in theory do, because the song is required to express in a heightened way something that mere words just spoken wouldn't. So I use Shakespeare the same way.

Jo Reed: Give me an example.

Stephan Wolfert: So, for example, I become an officer in the infantry and, you know, I was in my early twenties. You know, I trained solid and I was frankly pretty good in the army. I was good at what I did. I was convinced that in my first firefight, you know, I was going to be more like what Hollywood portrays standing up, you know, fearless and bulletproof—but it wasn't even a big firefight. A single bullet ripped by my body and I just ducked behind a tree and I had a very human response. And then realized, “Oh God right, no, I got to, I got to, I got to do something or my men will die.” So in the show, I talked about how I'm lying there and I realize, “Oh, yeah, right, shoot back first squad on nine. Second squad bound around to the right flank and kill those guys. Once more unto the breach dear friends once more. Or close the wall up with our English dead.” So I go seamlessly into a Henry V speech of “once more into the breach” and try to do this throughout, because Shakespeare describes in that moment “once more into the breach,” I know you're afraid but do this, and you can overcome your fear. “Summon up the blood, stiffen the sinews, disguise fair nature with hard favorite rage.” And then he calls on camaraderie which the American military does. “And you, good Yeoman, whose limbs were made in England show us here the mettle of your pasture. Let us swear that you are worth your breeding.” So he calls on the very things that we use today in our military to get us to go against our natural human instincts to run from danger, and instead run towards danger for our brothers and sisters in arms.

Jo Reed: Okay, so let's say I walk into a DE-CRUIT Workshop. What am I likely to experience? How does it begin?

Stephan Wolfert: It begins and ends with ritual, as always, again from the Native American Theater communities, Native Voices, in particular, taught me this in Los Angeles

Jo Reed: Oh, Randy Reinholz.

Stephan Wolfert: Randy Reinholz. Yes. He was so wonderful to me. I moved to California in large part to be mentored by him, to learn because their mission is clear, “We develop and produce original works by Native Americans for the stage.” And I thought yeah, I want to learn what he does there for veterans, so I can do that for vets but I want to mostly focus on Shakespeare serving as that tool. But in any case, we begin with a medicine circle, where we literally gather up in a circle that way everyone's equidistant. And we begin with the check in. We begin the check-in, the first time we let people say whatever they need to begin that practice that Shakespeare does so brilliantly which is I think something or feel something and I express it out loud to strangers. We begin there and, with each class, we start refining it down and getting more brief, but brilliant, more concise, using only the first person, me, me and I not, “You know, when you're walking down the street and you get bumped into and you're angry.” Nope. It's when I'm bumped into on the street, I get angry. So we begin with that to let everything that happened in the day be done and for the present moment to be all there is with this group. Once we’re dialed in that way, and we have been doing mindfulness practices of grounding and breathing and doing that self-expression, that check-in, I tend to do short narrative writing, writing prompts. We’ll tend to do something like, you know, “when I joined the military” or “the landscape of my childhood” or “the incident that most affects me,” things like that. But I don't let them write very long--it's five to ten minutes. It's merely to bring up the experience in the foremost of their mind and body. All I want is for them to have that moment fresh, then we leap right into Shakespeare. We grab a monologue or a scene that helps them express exactly what they're going through in a different way, and see what works.

Jo Reed: Or embody it.

Stephan Wolfert: What’s that? And to embody it. Exactly. And Shakespeare demands that of us. So, yeah, so then they'll—everyone does Shakespeare. Every single class. Everyone performs. Everyone speaks Shakespeare out loud. Everyone's on their feet in front of others. And then, by the end of class, we close it with a ritual, a reinforcement. We circle up again and we look each other in the eye, we make sure we're present in this moment, and we carry the faces forward that just carried us for the last two to three hours through some really intense experiences. We look at those faces, so we can remember these faces to carry us through the next week until we meet again the following week, because we do weekly classes. That's the container within which we do DE-CRUIT.

Jo Reed: Is a commitment necessary? Do I have to commit to be there for what? Is it seven weeks, six weeks?

Stephan Wolfert: It's a great question. We have several different models. So our weekly classes that we have we have in Fort Worth and New York City are just weekly classes, come and go as you please. We profess a shame-free and an apology-free zone and part of that means you show up when you show up and you leave when you have to leave. Self-care is your new mission. If someone comes in late, we’re not, “Oh, God, you ruined it.” Nope. It's, “We're so happy to see you. We're so happy you made it,” because the mere act of leaving one's apartment, for anyone in trauma, not to mention veterans, that mere act can sometimes be so insurmountable that we are in awe that they overcame that to join us in that room. So we acknowledge that and bring that into the room; whenever they get there is when they get there, whenever they have to leave. We will be there every week so that as they need they can come join us. But there it's not required that you be there every week. When we do the eight-week DE-CRUIT course, as it were, there's a very specific model, we hope the people meet a minimum of six of the eight classes, but that's really only because we are measuring it. We have scientists who are actually measuring the results of our course to see if it's working or not. We are considered an evidence-based treatment protocol.  We do EEGs, heart rate variability and self-disclosure surveys, as well as some other parameters that we're now beginning to add. But for the last seven years, the data has been a crucial part of DE-CRUIT being legitimized and that theater being welcomed into the rooms worldwide as a as a supplemental component at least in the healing of trauma. Yeah, so that helped us. The studies, the seven weeks and people showing up was merely so that we could get the data together, but we want you to show up as you're able.

Jo Reed: Do you find that the veterans are receptive to Shakespeare? Are they are they at all resistant to the language?

Stephan Wolfert: Yeah. They're absolutely resistant. Especially early on. I mean now I'm lucky enough to work—there’s enough word of mouth going around where people show up. But especially early on, they were resistant. And I even had a guy at one group, who after about seven weeks finally admitted that he initially showed up to make fun of us and to trash the class and to be disruptive. I was in awe that he admitted this. And then he said within about 15 minutes, he found himself getting involved in and leaping in and forgot why he was there and seven weeks later he shared, he goes, “Well, it really works. it does.” The theater community is so welcoming and embracing and then that idea that we get to do a Shakespeare says, “Speak what we feel and not what we ought to say not to.” Not to be polite. Not to apologize. Like I said, shame-free an apology-free—we don't let people say, “I'm sorry.” There's no raising of hands. It's your voice. Find your voice. Ground, breathe in and speak. And then the Shakespeare they’re really--they're resistant because I think that Shakespeare's been inflicted on a lot of us at a young age.

Jo Reed: I think that's right.

Stephan Wolfert: When I hand them a speech, I'll say here take this and they’ll say, “Hamlet, who’s that?”  “Or Lady Percy, wait, I'm playing a woman.” No, don't worry about who you're playing, just read the words. And as soon as they start reading the words, we just go line by line. They breathe in, speak it and say what word, what sound what of any of that speaks to you? Not what does it mean? What do you think it means? I don't care. What happens to you when you speak this? We begin there working our way through a speech. And they just innately get it. To see that light bulb go on by the second or third time through where they’re just connecting with it and they understand it. They're breathing in before each new line of verse, and it's crystal clear and they're personalizing it. They’re bringing it right to their own experience. It's as brilliant, if not more, than any trained actor I've ever seen do most of these speeches. It's deeply moving.

Jo Reed: There are two things that I see as parallel between theater and the military. And the first is the camaraderie that happens in theater. And I'm interested in you talking about that—but the second thing is your basic fear and terror of being up on a stage. I've heard rumors you actually don't die. I'm not—I am not convinced myself, but that seems to be the general wisdom out there.

Stephan Wolfert: That’s what I’m told, too.

<group laughter>

Jo Reed: But I would imagine it's scary for them.

Stephan Wolfert: Yes it is.

Jo Reed: And that being on-stage allows them to access that fear, but not be taken over by it—it’s safe.

Stephan Wolfert: Yeah. It's-- you've nailed it. You've nailed two of the most pronounced tenants of what of how theater and the military translate to each other. But let me hit the terror first, because military experience, in particular combat or training for combat, there's exactly what you described, that fear, that anticipation. So we're taught in the military to some degree how to overcome it. I'll give you a quick example if I can. I went to Airborne School and the Airborne School is three weeks long. Now, a Jeep can be airborne and needs no schooling at all, because they strap a parachute to it and they push it out the back of an airplane while it's flying, because the Jeep won't fight the people trying to push it out of the aircraft. Human beings will. So we have to actually come up with rituals and routines to go through that are legitimate, but they're also to keep us thinking about something else other than the fact that we're about to leap out of an aircraft. Right? So they go through all this training and a lot of it is breath and that camaraderie that you're talking about to overcome the fear. So acting provides these same tools. Before you go on stage, we learn to ground and breathe and how to focus on the moment rather than leave the moment or leave our body. For acting we're focused solely on getting into our body and in the moment, so we don't worry about what's next or this emotion appointment or the fight coming up later. So the same techniques are used to overcome that fear. And yes, like you said going on stage from—there was yet another study that came out that said that estimates that people are more afraid-- in general, human beings are more afraid of public speaking and performing than they are of death, so that gives us an idea of what we're up against. But it also gives us a valuable insight to show that, ah, this can be a simulation of life or death. That we can put veterans on stage. Their body will automatically go into that fight or flight, that limbic response, and feel like it's going to die but we provide as a container of enough security to where they know ultimately that they're not going to and are willing to leap in.  So that's how they—you’re very astute that those two things go hand in hand. In the military, it's a binary go/no-go, kill/don't kill. Everything is life or death. But in theater, we actually live in the middle of that binary. It's more process oriented than product-oriented. It's—I don't know. Let's see. As Dennis Crosnig at Shakespeare and Company used to say, “We're going to go into a room and something will happen.” And that's really terrifying to a lot of veterans, right? Because they want to know the outcome. They want to—they’re good soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines. They want to know what the task is and how to complete it and get a go. And we're saying, “No. There is no go. There is no no-go. Let's see what happens,” and that can be more terrifying—or as terrifying as performing in public.

Jo Reed: And does that camaraderie continue past the workshops? Do friendships and relationships develop? I’m curious.

Stephan Wolfert: It does. And the camaraderie, in particular, with this group is what I think brings veterans back into the room more than anything else. I think it's the fact that not only does each veteran get something out of it. But I-- they realize very quickly—we all begin to realize how important it is that I show up, that I be there for the other—my brothers and sisters in arms in the room. To be there in that room, to support them when they're sharing what they need to share. That camaraderie absolutely bleeds into this. That's the other thing that this helps to build, DE-CRUIT, is a community within a community.

Jo Reed: And in five years, where would you like to see DE-CRUIT?

Stephan Wolfert: My dream would be a national program. DE-CRUIT would be similar to, hear me out on the model, A.A.—in the regard that a veteran could go to any city, find a meeting that's free, and run relatively the same way. That's the part of A.A. that I've sort of adopted for DE-CRUIT and I would love for some level of that in five years to where veterans could be in a state and go, “Yeah. Yeah. All right. I know where to go,” and be getting help through the arts and through community. That's where I would like it to be in five years.

Jo Reed: Well, we'll keep our fingers crossed. Stephan, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you for giving me your time and the work you're doing is just so significant and thank you for that, too.

Stephan Wolfert: Thank you. Thanks for having me on and letting me ramble me on the way I do.

<group laughter>

Jo Reed: No problem at all.

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Jo Reed: That is actor and founder of DE-CRUIT, US Army veteran Stephan Wolfert

You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. You can subscribe to Art Works where ever you get your podcasts—so please do and leave us a rating on Apple—it helps people to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

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