The American Soldier
Written and Performed by Douglas Taurel; Directed by Padraic Lillis
The Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre at A.R.T./New York Theatres | 502 West 53rd Street 10019
December 2 - December 21, 2025
There are theatrical events that flatter our appetite for diversion, and there are rarer ones that insist upon our moral attention. The American Soldier, written and performed by Douglas Taurel, belongs emphatically to the latter category. It is not entertainment so much as an act of civic and spiritual witness, a vigil held in the darkened space of the theater for those whose lives have been conscripted—sometimes willingly, often irrevocably—by the long, recursive history of American war.
Taurel appears alone onstage, yet solitude is an illusion. He is accompanied, invisibly but insistently, by over a dozen voices drawn from different centuries of conflict, from the frozen desperation of Valley Forge to the psychic wreckage of the contemporary veteran. These voices are not inventions in the dramatic sense; they originate in letters, interviews, and historical testimony, excavated through a labor of research that feels less scholarly than devotional. What Taurel offers is not characterization but channeling. Each figure arrives as a residue of lived experience, speaking through him with an urgency that resists aesthetic distance.
The cumulative effect is not narrative momentum but accretion—of pain, memory, and unanswered questions. As the lights fall and the disembodied snap of military commands ricochets through the theater, the language deliberately stripped of context or compassion, one begins to feel the play’s central inquiry forming beneath its surface: what, precisely, is the price of duty? And who is asked to pay it? The orders are familiar, even banal, yet in their repetition they become estranging, a reminder of how swiftly the human voice can be reduced to an instrument of control.
Among the most harrowing moments are those that unfold far from the battlefield. A father, hollowed out by the suicide of his son; a female soldier navigating life with a missing eye and the omnipresent tremor of PTSD; men and women undone not by enemy fire but by addiction, amputation, and the relentless persistence of phantom pain. Taurel refuses the consolations of heroism as spectacle. Instead, he directs our gaze toward the afterlife of war—the hospital wards, the bedrooms, and the devastating private silences where the real reckoning occurs.
Music functions here less as accompaniment than as a kind of mnemonic device. The plaintive strains of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and the thunderous, morally freighted cadences of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” open fissures in time. Each song becomes a threshold through which memory floods the present. We are not merely observing these stories; we are being asked to remember them, to feel their weight as something shared rather than safely historical.
Taurel identifies three pillars of the American soldier: honor, duty, and sacrifice. He treats these concepts with unmistakable reverence, yet the play’s power lies in its refusal to leave them uninterrogated. By embodying not only soldiers but also those who wait for them, mourn them, or live with what they bring home, Taurel exposes a central paradox of military life: the necessity of erasing the individual in service of the unit, and the psychic cost of that erasure. The question that hovers—never accusatory, never sentimental—is whether obedience to any system, however noble its aims, risks becoming a quiet form of spiritual self-betrayal. This is not, finally, an argument against service, but a meditation on systems and the ways they shape human beings. The conditioning, the rhetoric of noble cause, the ritualized suppression of doubt—these are presented not as unique to the military, but as extreme expressions of a broader human vulnerability. In this sense, The American Soldier gestures outward, implicating all structures that demand submission while promising meaning in return.
The production’s restraint is integral to its impact. Under the direction of Padraic Lillia, with additional direction by Patricia Duran, the staging avoids embellishment, allowing the words to carry their full burden. Andrew Patshnik’s lighting and Andy Evan Cohen’s sound design transform the space with quiet precision, alternately evoking blasted terrain and consecrated ground. Josh Iacovelli’s spare set offers no distractions, only a frame within which testimony can unfold.
The image with which Taurel begins and ends—saluting a projected American flag, weather-beaten and tattered—is unmistakably deliberate. It reads less as patriotic display than as benediction. This is not homage to an abstraction called the nation, but to the flesh-and-blood individuals who have lived, suffered, and died in its service, and to those who continue to carry war within their bodies long after the fighting has ceased.
The American Soldier is not a sociopolitical play in the conventional sense. It advances no policy, stages no debate. It is, instead, an offering of the soul: one actor, many stories, and a litany of truths that resists easy forgetting. Wars may conclude in treaties and textbooks, but they persist in nerves, memories, and dreams. Taurel asks us to listen—to listen deeply—and in doing so, to acknowledge a collective responsibility we too often relinquish once the uniforms and dog tags disappear from view.
Click HERE for tickets.
Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on December 14, 2025. All rights reserved.