Jeff led the collaboration between DE-CRUIT and Norwich University.
Wolfert and Stern are co-directors of DE-CRUIT, a program that uses trauma-informed practices, acting, and Shakespeare to address trauma in military veterans. In the fall 2018, Wolfert and Stern visited the Norwich campus, and Wolfert performed his one-person show Cry Havoc! and engaged with students and community members.
In the spring 2022, Norwich University hosted a residency for the DE-CRUIT team organized through the Norwich Humanities Initiative (NHI), headed by Professors Amy Woodbury Tease and Tara Kulkarni, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Davis Educational Foundation with additional funding from the Vermont Arts Council. Prof. Casey serves as the External Partners and Public Humanities Coordinator for the NHI. The residency included a performance of Wolfert's Cry Havoc!. Stern and Wolfert also visited classes over two weeks, including theatre, literature, architecture, and Naval ROTC courses. The residency also included free workshops on topics like trauma-informed teaching, trauma and writing, and the DE-CRUIT process.
Norwich Voices for International Women's Day is a co-production of Pegasus Players, created by Jeff Casey, Sachi de la Cruz, Dani Dinlocker-Santiago, Sonja Jordan, and Nicole Navarro in 2018. The annual event gives voice to the challenges and triumphs of women from Norwich campus and around the world.
Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative produced Voices of a People's History of the United States at Broom Street Theater on July 25–27, 2013. The performance was a fundraiser for Rainbow, and part of the proceeds were donated to Operation Welcome Home.
Jeff Casey and Sandy Peterson co-directed the performance. Inspired by the experience of directing the play in partnership with a community institution, Sandy and Jeff co-wrote an article, "Voicing Our Dissent: Theatre and Community after the Wisconsin Uprising," which was published in the scholarly journal Theatre Topics (2015), wherein they discussed the aims of the production:
The most famous performances of Voices have been readings in the strictest sense; for example, the History Channel documentary The People Speak includes performances done in the reading style: actors presenting monologues with scripts in hand. Similarly, the foundation, working with partners in New York City, produced a tenth anniversary performance structured as a reading. Such minimalist readings, in the hands of accomplished actors, can be surprisingly powerful. Nevertheless, we decided to differentiate our approach, first by interweaving the monologues (rather than having them presented successively), and second by asking the actors to perform their parts more “theatrically” by memorizing the script and executing complex blocking.
We took this approach to avoid an inherent danger in using Voices as a source text: that the performance can become elegiac, a reverential recitation of the American Left’s “greatest hits.” Performing in the wake of the Wisconsin Uprising and the failed recall attempt only increased the temptation to use nostalgia to displace despair as we looked back on the Left’s heroic past. Everyone on the production team wanted to avoid this outcome. Our desire was to not let one lost battle be the end of the war. The initial protests were performances of community and solidarity; they were politics performed, and we wanted to perform our politics—not in the sense of asserting a political ideology, but rather of performing our political commitment to collective action and open debate about the future of leftist politics in Madison and beyond. Theatre in this model is not about politics and does not represent the political world, but enacts a politics—a politics of community, infrastructure building, critical self-reflection, and optimism.
You can read more about the performance and find more information on the Facebook event page.