Cast List

Justin Treasure
Jim Thorp
Andrea Bertsch
Tyler McGill
Donna Blanchard
John Kroll
Karl Berner
Eric Brant
Kim Sgouroudis
Jama Kay Emerson
Kat Lutze
Kim Meyne
Brian Sherwinski
Patrick Morley
John Evans
Douglas Dravininkas
Nathan Felton
Kelsey Dougherty
Patricia Schulz
Mary Deboer
David Pera

A Note from the Adaptor: Bill Massolia

Letters Home, is based on Frank Schaeffer’s books, Voices From the Front, Letters Home From America’s Military Family, Faith of Our Sons, and Keeping Faith, a book he co-authored with his son John Schaeffer. The production is also inspired by the New York Times Article, The Things They Wrote and subsequent HBO documentary, Last Letters Home. Although the title of the play implies that all the letters are from soldiers, we have also chosen to include a small number of correspondences from family–their words being no less important.

We hope these letters will give you a powerful portrait of the soldier experience in an ongoing war. These letters were written under the most difficult of circumstances; the disorientation of training, deployment, and combat and occupation duties in Afghanistan and Iraq. One theme seems to unite their diverse voices; the belief that the person standing next to you is more important than you are. They also define patriotism and what it meant to serve our country today, through acts of bravery, compassion, social responsibility, sense of community and brotherhood. Collectively they give voice to a generation that went to war against terror in Afghanistan and to war in Iraq, for reasons that are still being debated. They are still fighting and dying in those wars today.