Theater Group Does Veterans Performance At Nicolet College
By Ken Krall
The Boots on the Ground theater company will perform at Nicolet College tomorrow presenting its adaptation of See Me for Who I Am, a book on soldiers’ war experiences edited by Rhinelander native David Chrisinger.
The book is a collection of 20 first-person essays penned by Chrisinger’s students at UW-Stevens Point.
The collection was published in February.
Chrisinger says word of mouth led the South Carolina based theater group to his collection…
“…..sometime this summer, June or July, I got an email from a woman named Mikayla from a theater groups called “Boots On The Ground”. She explained she had gotten a copy of our book from a friend of a friend. There was some sort of serendipitous finding of it. She said she was really blown away by some of the stories….”
Mikayla Goetz says a student veteran coordinator at Coastal Carolina University gave her a copy of the book. The theater group was as impressed as Goetz and got permission from Chrisinger to perform the stories.
Goetz says this book and another performance based on a veteran’s experience changed her view of a soldier’s life..
“…with this book, I realized, and it seems so simple, that each service member has a wholly different story, a completely different experience that can’t be summed up in the one-dimensional ways that we portray them in movies, media and anything that doesn’t encapsulate who these people are….”
