There are more than 70 theater events listed on Facebook’s 518 Theatre Artists page for the month of March.
As if the annual confluence of high school musicals — more than 20 on the list — were not enough to challenge the adventurous theatergoer, the always worthwhile Bridge Street Theatre in Catskill is presenting SoloFest, four weekends of separate one-person shows. It is a terrific sampling of deeply personal works from theater makers from across the country.
First up is “Bent Compass” by Neil Brookshire and Colin Sesek, performed by Brookshire. The company describes “Bent Compass” as the transformation of a young man from raw recruit to seasoned combat Army medic to a civilian attempting to adjust to life back in the world. How did his personal experience of war change the way he sees and reacts to the world?
QUESTION: What first attracted you to performance or theater?
ANSWER: I was a gymnast as a kid and I started getting involved with theater about six months after I quit gymnastics. There’s a lot of crossover: training, preparation and practicing something until you can do it consistently. Then of course there are the physical demands of doing theater. I’ve always thought of theater as more an athletic event than an intellectual exercise. The real attraction came when I fused my inherent joy of using my imagination together with these physical aspects. It was using my whole self. That’s true to this day. I recently performed a role for which my physical preparation was as central to my performance as any text work I did.
Q: Where do you live and make theater?
A: I live in northern Wisconsin, north of Green Bay on the peninsula that juts into Lake Michigan. I’ve been lucky to work near home but a lot of the time I travel. That’s part of the fun. I get to see new places, meet new people. And it’s theater work that opens these doors for me.
Q: What is “Bent Compass” and how did it come about?
A: “Bent Compass” is a solo show about the transformation of a fresh Army recruit into an Army medic, combat veteran. I met my co-writer, Colin Sesek, at the Shakespeare festival in Idaho in 2004. He had just joined the Army to become a medic. We started talking about it and I was impressed with his clear sense of direction. We stayed in touch periodically when he was deployed to Iraq in 2006–07. But it wasn’t until 2013, when I was preparing to play Claudio in “Much Ado About Anything.” I was interested in fleshing out my character’s background. Here was a character who was returning from combat and trying to readjust to civilian life. That’s when I got in touch with Colin to see if he could give me some perspective. He had lived this very thing. So that was the unofficial beginning of “Bent Compass.” The following year we set aside some time to have more conversations, where I asked a bunch of questions, he told a bunch of stories. We recorded those with the vague notion that maybe we could turn it into a theater project. Over the years following those conversations, I transcribed the recordings and slowly the idea for a solo show came about. We wanted it to be as real as possible, so we kept it as close to the raw stories as possible. I’m telling those stories to audiences in the same way he told them to me. Colin wanted to communicate what it was really like to be a soldier and how a person changes. And I was completely on board with that.
Q: Have you written other plays, and how did you come to co-write this with Colin?
A: I have written a number of plays — some short, some for radio and a few full-length stage plays. I’ve also written a handful of short screenplays and even managed to produce some of them. Co-writing with Colin was a gift. “Bent Compass” would not have happened without his openness and interest in storytelling and theater. Our collaboration is based in friendship. We sometimes talk about how “Bent Compass” is the product of the best of our experiences: his time and experiences in the Army and as a veteran, and my time and experience in the theater.
Q: What is a play that changed your life, and how?
A: I read “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” before I saw it. That play changed my life. There on the page I was reading things that I thought couldn’t be expressed in words and actions. Another one is “Hamlet.” I had the opportunity to play the title character as a senior in high school. I was incredibly fortunate to be surrounded by a very talented group of theater kids. That process was foundational for me. Not just in the theater but in my life. Similarly to Eugene O’Neill, Shakespeare opened a door to an entirely different way of life, a different way of seeing the world. That has not always been easy, but it has been a path paved with empathy and curiosity and self exploration. It’s been worth it.