The American Soldier – An Interview with Douglas Taurel

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Feature by Jack Quinn, Publisher

On certain afternoons, when rehearsal dust still hangs in the air of an empty theater, you can hear an actor breathe before you see him. When Douglas Taurel joined our Zoom call from a quiet corner of a rehearsal space — audio cutting, light shifting, the spatial hesitations of a man still half inside his work — it felt less like an interview than like stepping into the wings of a performance already in motion.

Taurel has lived with The American Soldier for more than a decade. The one-man show, which he wrote and performs, is an atlas of American military experience spanning the Revolutionary War to Afghanistan. Fourteen characters. Fourteen bodies. Fourteen emotional climates. Yet the show never feels like a sequence of impersonations. It feels like a single pulse traveling through generations.

When I asked him the question he now hears in every city — what emotional truth he hopes an audience carries with them on the train ride home — he paused long enough for a door to open in the silence.

“It’s honor,” he finally said. “Honor, service, sacrifice. We say ‘thank you for your service’ so casually. But behind that phrase is a father missing every Thanksgiving. A mother at the Vietnam Memorial wall saying goodbye. A daughter whose father won’t come home.”

This is Taurel’s gift: returning weight to words that have gone hollow from overuse.

The Day the Mission Found Him

Taurel traces the origin of the piece to a smell, a street, a morning. He walked out of the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. That proximity — the ash, the chaos, the sudden clarity about vulnerability — lodged something inside him that didn’t dissolve with time.

The first character he wrote wasn’t contemporary at all. It was a Revolutionary War soldier. “I wanted to remind people who we were,” he said. “How this country was founded — what duty once meant.” The monologue is stitched from the diaries of Joseph Plumb Martin and Ebenezer Fox, both startlingly articulate young men whose words give the past an unexpected brightness.

But the character that refuses to leave him — “maybe because I’m stubborn,” he joked — is Sullivan Ballou, the Civil War major whose letter to his wife, Sarah, is one of the most devastating pieces of writing produced by an American soldier. Taurel performed a few lines for me during our call. Even through the tinny Zoom audio, the emotional voltage was unmistakable.

“He says, ‘If it is necessary that I should fall for my country, I am ready,’” Taurel said. “That is the through-line. Men and women across generations saying: I wish I could be home. I wish this weren’t happening. But I go because I must.”

There was a small, uncanny overlap here: I told him I launched TheaterScene nine days after 9/11 — a project meant to lift up New York theater at a moment when the city’s stages were empty, dark, abandoned. We had very different responses to the same catastrophe, but the impulse — to gather stories into meaning — was not so far apart.

The Craft of Containing Fourteen Lives

A one-man show only works if the audience forgets the arithmetic. Watching Taurel, you don’t think, this is one person making many shapes. You think, these people exist, and this man has become porous enough to carry them.

He does it with economy: boots, fatigues, a t-shirt manipulated sixteen different ways, a few props, and an astonishing sense of physical behavior.

“As Nancy, I grab my earrings and talk to the phone like she’s from the Bronx,” he said. “As a Texan from Vietnam, my whole spine shifts. You want dialect, but dialect’s not the point. If the acting is true, the audience forgets the accent in about thirty seconds.”

Before every performance, he arrives two hours early. Vocal work. Tongue twisters. Dialect tuning. Stretching large muscle groups. Rolling wrists and ankles. Running trouble spots. The ritual — and it is a ritual — is designed to create flow, looseness, permeability.

“The more relaxed your body is, the more the emotion can move,” he said. “Tension is a barrier. It blocks the moments you’re trying to reach.”

He said this with the matter-of-fact tone of someone who has lived inside his instrument long enough to understand its weaknesses and betrayals.

What he has not quite solved is the aftercare. The comedown.

“I’m pretty jacked up after a show,” he admitted. “It’s almost impossible to sleep. That’s how performers get into trouble — you’re buzzing, vibrating, and the only thing that quiets it is alcohol. I’m trying not to drink at all right now.”

He said it lightly, but anyone who’s worked around nightlife, touring, or eight-show weeks knows the truth of that sentence.

The Heaviest Material: Stories That Aren’t His

Every story in The American Soldier belongs to someone real. That is a responsibility, not a freedom.

It’s why he won’t publish the script, though universities request it every year.

“I don’t want anyone experimenting with these letters,” he said. “I don’t want a performance that would disrespect the families.”

He speaks regularly with many of the people whose loved ones appear in the show. One of the hardest pieces for him is the story of Jeffrey Lucey, a Marine who died by suicide after returning from Iraq. Taurel knows the family — Kevin, Joyce, Deborah. They have seen the piece. They are coming again.

“The father holds his son as a baby, then tells the audience: that would be the last time I held him,” Taurel said quietly. “In the beginning, I couldn’t get through that without melting.”

Over the years, he learned restraint — the discipline to let the audience do the emotional work. “If I cry, sometimes I cheat you out of crying,” he said. “There’s a fine line between truth and indulgence.”

His teacher’s voice still echoes in his head: Stop moving your hands. You’re ruining the movie.

What Veterans Give Back

This section could be its own book.

Medals. Patches. Coins. Pins. Letters. Emails. Friendships.

“They say, ‘You may have never served, but you’re serving now,’” Taurel said, before emotion overtook him. When he tried to continue, the sentence dissolved into breath.

He told me about Tracy Wise, whose husband Ben — a Green Beret — died in Afghanistan. Taurel uses Ben’s photograph in one of the monologues, mounted on a popsicle stick as a child might hold a father in memory. He called Tracy to ask permission.

“She broke down,” he said. “I apologized. She said, ‘No. Keep asking hard questions. What you’re doing keeps his voice alive.’”

He paused again.

“What review is ever going to top that?” he finally said.

The American Soldier Today — and the Story Still Unwritten

Taurel has begun exploring a new chapter: the withdrawal from Afghanistan and its echo of Vietnam. Not politically — historically. Personally. Spiritually.

Grown men who carried machine guns through cities half a world away now call him crying, asking what the last twenty years meant. Parents who lost children want something — clarity, acknowledgment, witness — that cannot be given back.

“We send people to war, then move on faster than they can,” he said. It was not angry, not accusatory. Just true.

He has added a new monologue, subtle and unfinished, like a wound not closed.

CURATED Q&A (SELECT EXCHANGES)

Excerpts from my conversation with Douglas Taurel

Q: When someone watches The American Soldier, what’s the one emotional truth you hope stays with them on the train ride home?

A: Honor. Service. Sacrifice. And a clearer understanding of what “thank you for your service” actually means.

Q: Which character arrived first — and which one refuses to leave?

A: The Revolutionary War diary entries were the first. Sullivan Ballou refuses to leave. Maybe I refuse to let him.

Q: How do you create the sense of a full cast with only your own body?

A: Dialect, physical behavior, tiny details. Once the monologue catches, the audience forgets the mechanics. They just follow the soul of the story.

Q: How do you protect yourself emotionally after a performance?

A: Not well. I’m working on that. The adrenaline is intense. But I’m trying to avoid the old habits.

Q: What do veterans tell you that stays with you?

A: “You may have never served… but you’re serving now.” That one undoes me every time.

Q: What emotional transition is the steepest climb in the show?

A: From grief to humor. From a father losing his son… to a Marine who wants to punch people in the face. But humor is a lifeline. You can’t let an audience drown in sorrow.

The Quiet Landing

At the end of our conversation, I asked him the question he rarely hears: what he wishes people asked.

He didn’t hesitate.

“My warm-up,” he said. “No one understands the work you have to do to be ready. They think memory is the hard part. Memory is the easiest part.”

This was the deepest clarity of the afternoon — the reminder that art requiring this level of emotional exposure must be built on an architecture of discipline.

Before we signed off, he laughed when I told him I’m 6’7”. “Good,” he said. “Then I’ll see you coming.”

And maybe that is the emblem of this piece: seeing someone coming. Seeing the human being before the uniform, before the headline, before the statistics of war.

The American Soldier is not just Taurel’s play. It’s his act of witness. And the rest of us — audience, critics, civilians — enter it the way we enter any sacred space.

NewYorkRep presents The American Soldier, a celebrated solo play written, conceived and performed by Douglas Taurel. The limited three-week engagement runs December 2 -21 at A.R.T./ New York (502 W. 53rd Street). Opening night is Thursday, December 4 at7:30PM. Tickets are now on sale atTicketTailor.com.

Author’s Note:

Jack Quinn founded TheaterScene.net in 2001, nine days after surviving the 9/11 tragedy at Ground Zero. Seeking to focus on what’s great about New York rather than what had been lost, he built the site into one of the city’s longest-running theatre publications. Now in its 24th year, TheaterScene.net features the work of ten writers covering productions across the city, while Quinn’s own writing centers on the human stories behind the art — the quiet determination, humor, and heart that keep New York theatre alive.