Shakespearean play, ‘Cry Havoc’ brings light to veterans’ experiences

Stephan Wolfert first stumbled upon Shakespeare and his work while traveling through the western United States in 1991. He was on a leave of absence from the Army after suffering a breakdown when a friend was shot before his eyes during live-round training.

After watching Shakespeare’s “Richard III” for the first time and experiencing a visceral catharsis, Wolfert said he realized that studying and embodying Shakespeare’s plays could help give him the language he needed to articulate his experiences.

The product of his struggles is “Cry Havoc,” a one-man play that unites Shakespeare’s language with Wolfert’s message: Training people for combat and not providing them with any tools to reintegrate back into society can have significant effects on their mental health.

Wolfert performed the play Tuesday night in the Northwest Campus Auditorium, after it was brought to UCLA through the Friends of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, an organization dedicated to raising awareness of mental health issues. Vicky Goodman, the founder of the Friends of the Semel Institute, said she wanted to bring “Cry Havoc” to UCLA because it brings to light the mental health issues that can be faced by veterans.

The seeds of the play were planted while developing his graduate thesis in acting at the Trinity Repertory Conservatory in Providence, Rhode Island, Wolfert said. Five years ago, Wolfert and his wife began to develop it as a touring play, opening for the first time at the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles in 2012.

Wolfert said he drew from around three-quarters of the Shakespeare canon, forming the dialogue of his play to show what happens when men and women are put into a combat-centric mindset through military training, but are not unwired for war afterwards.

To more closely emulate the original performance style of Shakespeare’s soliloquies, Wolfert wrote the script to be a one-man play, allowing him to directly address his audience. When he first began formulating the script, he went on-stage with only an idea of the messages he wanted to tell and 20 Shakespearean monologues memorized which encompassed his experiences. Even now, with a developed script, he still adapts the tone of the play to suit the audience.

“Because we travel so much, I have different audiences all the time. Sometimes they’re people who have no idea of veteran’s experiences at all. I can keep it fresh, honest, and directly related to whatever that community is going through,” Wolfert said.

Wolfert said the soldiers in Shakespeare’s plays suffer from the same difficulties that modern soldiers suffer from when trying to reintegrate into society. He said that in one of Lady Percy’s monologues in “Henry IV, Part 1,” Shakespeare captured the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder better than any other writing he has read.

Lady Percy asks her husband, who has just returned from combat and is about to go back, a series of questions, each of which illustrates a symptom of PTSD.

Stephen Dickey, a senior UCLA English lecturer, said that although Shakespeare’s canon includes characters that celebrate war and those that are skeptical of it, the social cost of war is highlighted in his plays. He also said that the plays show the cycle of violence that is created by war, and ask the question: When does war end?

Wolfert said that his play aims to ask audiences that same question and to go further by exploring what happens after combatants come home.

“I want to ask each community, now that you know this, now that you have a greater understanding: If you agree with me – and the vast majority of the time they do – what will you do now?”