Embedded Files
Told through gripping interviews that unveil the raw truths and untold stories from frontline healthcare workers, TERMINAL EXHALE is a new play that delves deep into the heart of a uniquely American public health crisis: the gun violence epidemic.
THE MISSION:
To explore the gun violence issue through the unique lens of frontline health care workers, as well as victims, survivors, and other professionals such as therapists and social workers, with the goal of offering a fresh and eye-opening perspective on the America’s gun violence epidemic and encourage constructive dialogue on the impact it has had as a public health crisis.
THE METHOD:
In the spring of 2024, eight students from multiple disciplines joined Professor Martin McClendon and co-creator Michael Cotey in Carthage's Verbatim Theatre class to create a play about the effects of gun violence on American healthcare workers. The class included nursing majors as well as theatre, social work, and and English majors. Their theatre experience ran the gamut from seasoned upperclass theatre performers to complete theatre novices.
THE PROCESS:
After gaining knowledge about the history and techniques of verbatim theatre, the class conducted interviews with ten healthcare workers. Over 28 hours of interviews were gathered and transcribed by the class. Then the process of editing began. Students identified the most impactful stories and collected them into a rough draft. From there, weeks were spent reading and editing to bring the script down to about 90 minutes. Editing continued over the summer, as well as the addition of an eleventh interview. After fifteen drafts, the production script was pared down to 90 minutes.
FIRST READING:
TE was given an initial staged reading in May of 2024 with a cast of professional and alumni actors, supported by a grant from the Frank and Irene Saemann List Foundation. Click here for more.
FULL PRODUCTION:
Editing continued over the summer and into fall of 2024, as well as the addition of an eleventh interview. After fifteen drafts, the production script was pared down to exactly 90 minutes. Terminal Exhale received its full production premiere at Carthage College on March 27, 2025.
TOURING:
A 15-minute excerpt of TE was performed at the 2024 Gun Violence summit hosted by Wisconsin's 80% Coalition on October 10, 2024, with a cast of students and alumni. Click here for more.
TE toured its full production to two special off-campus venues following its initial run in March 2025.
HEALING THE HEALERS
On March 29, 2025, the Carthage Theatre, Nursing, and Social Work departments collaborated to present an afternoon of special programming around the gun violence epidemic. Guest speakers included four of the professionals interviewed for Terminal Exhale as well as other experts. Click here for more.
What is Verbatim Theatre?
"The words of real people are recorded or transcribed by a dramatist during an interview or research process, or are appropriated from existing records...they are then edited, arranged or re-contextualized to form a dramatic presentation, in which actors take on the characters of the real individuals whose words are being used." --Will Hammond, VERBATIM VERBATIM
Verbatim Theatre allows community members to get their story "out there" to the public without having to be in the spotlight themselves. Participants are anonymous and we strive to present their words without editorializing or changing the meaning of their testimony.
CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT PAST CARTHAGE VERBATIM PROJECTS
THE WRITING TEAM:
Carthage Theatre faculty member Martin McClendon teamed up with Michael Cotey, creator and Joaquin Oliver Artistic Producer of ENOUGH! Plays to End Gun Violence, and eight Carthage students to create the Gun Violence Project.
Written by:
Michael Cotey, Martin McClendon, and
The Carthage Verbatim Theatre Class of 2024:
Terrell Franklin, Owen Holecko, Grant Larkins, Katie Layendecker,Stephanie Majer, Hope Posley, Ericka Sanchez, Nicolette Zawrazky
Martin McClendon
Professor McClendon has worked at Carthage for 17 years, directing plays and teaching acting, design, voice for the stage, and verbatim theatre. For the last 6 years, Martin has been teaching and using verbatim techniques to collaborate with students and other faculty to tell unheard stories. He started with issues facing veterans, collaborating with student Laurel McKenzie to create "Afghanistan/Wisconsin," with Lawrence Gums, David Chrisinger, and many Carthage students to create the Carthage Veteran Night of the Arts 2016-19, as well as the verbatim plays "Welcome Back?," and "Fighting For Home: Stories of Women Who Serve," in collaboration with Dr. Becki Hornung.
More recently, he collaborated with students and fellow faculty to produce "Frontline" about healthcare workers during the pandemic, and "The Kenosha Verbatim Project" to explore the aftermath of the Jacob Blake shooting in summer of 2020.
Previous to his work at Carthage, Martin was a professional actor and scene designer for 12 years, working in Los Angeles, Chicago, and around the midwest.
Contact: mmcclendon@carthage.edu
Michael Cotey
Michael Cotey is the Joaquin Oliver Artistic Producer of ENOUGH! Plays to End Gun Violence, a ground-breaking campaign of theater activism for teens to confront the issue gun violence by writing original short plays on the topic and staging readings of those plays in theatres across the country. Readings of ENOUGH! have taken place in over a hundred locations since 2020, including flagship productions at The Kennedy Center and Lincoln Center. The work of ENOUGH! has been featured on PBS NewsHour, NPR, and the BBC, and was awarded the Golding Foundation Exemplary Project Award.
In addition to generating new plays about gun violence written by teens, Michael and ENOUGH! has collaborated with gun violence prevention activist Manuel Oliver to develop his solo theater piece GUAC: The One Man Show, about his relationship with his son Joaquin, who was one of the victims of the Marjory Stoneman Douglass mass shooting.
Michael has directed at Illinois Shakespeare Festival, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, Next Act, Nebraska Repertory Theater, First Stage, Northwestern University, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Illinois Wesleyan University and Youngblood Theatre. He has also assisted at Goodman Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Utah Shakespeare, Steppenwolf, and Milwaukee Rep, for prominent directors, like Tony Award-winners Mary Zimmerman and Robert Falls.
In 2023 he served as the Festival Producer for World Premiere Wisconsin, an inagural and first-of-its-kind statewide new play festival. From 2009-2013 he was the Founding Artistic Director of Youngblood Theatre, regularly celebrated by the theater community and the press as one of the most exciting new Milwaukee theater ventures in decades.
Michael graduated from UW-Milwaukee with a BFA in Acting and from Northwestern University with an MFA in Directing. In 2014 he was named UWM’s “Graduate of the Last Decade.”
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