Arizona Theatre Matters Education · Study Guide

On Track Study Guide

History, testimony, conscience, memory, nonviolent resistance, and the body as the place where public events become personal truth.

At a Glance

Playwright and director: Jeanmarie Simpson
Based on: the life and memoirs of S. Brian Willson, written with his permission and cooperation
Current form: solo epistolary parable for one actor carrying Brian’s voice alongside remembered and institutional voices
Performer: Mathew Zimmerer
Historical span: childhood, military service during the Vietnam War, postwar moral reckoning, peace activism, and the September 1, 1987 protest at the Concord Naval Weapons Station
Primary audiences: adults, college and advanced secondary students, veterans groups, theatre makers, humanities programs, and community discussion groups

Essential question: What happens when obedience and conscience stop pointing in the same direction?

Content Note

On Track includes accounts of war and military violence; racism; childhood abuse; death; trauma and moral injury; severe physical injury and amputation; political conflict; institutional power; and memories of harm involving people and animals. The play does not ask audiences to agree with Brian Willson’s political conclusions. It asks audiences to encounter how a person explains the changes in his own moral imagination.

About the Play

On Track follows S. Brian Willson across a life marked by dramatic changes in belief. The Brian who grew up wanting to be a patriotic “good citizen” is not erased when the later Brian becomes a peace activist. The play keeps both in the room.

The current script begins with childhood memory and moves through religious formation, law school, military service, the Vietnam War, work with veterans, travel and political awakening, nonviolent protest, and the 1987 action at the Concord Naval Weapons Station where Willson was struck by a munitions train and lost both legs below the knees.

Rather than presenting a conventional heroic biography, the play repeatedly returns to contradiction. Brian is asked to remember harm he caused, beliefs he once held, orders he followed, moments when his body resisted those orders, and choices he later made in response. The result is not a monument. It is a man trying to tell the truth without escaping his own implication in it.

How the Play Works

One actor, many pressures

Other voices enter through the same performer: family, officers, officials, healers, witnesses, and remembered ways of thinking. The actor distinguishes them without turning the play into an impersonation showcase.

Testimony and confession

Brian speaks as witness, participant, critic of his former self, and person still trying to understand events whose meaning has changed over time.

Silence as event

The script repeatedly refuses to fill difficult moments with explanation. Silence allows contradiction and consequence to remain active in the room.

The body remembers

Hands, feet, legs, breath, pain, hesitation, and movement carry the argument. The play’s moral questions are never only intellectual.

Documents enter the stage

Letters, official language, news, testimony, memory, and public record become theatrical material. The audience must listen for differences among them.

No final sainthood

The script explicitly resists presenting Brian as a saint, lecturer, or monument. His contradictions remain central to the theatrical event.

Historical Context: Record, Memory, and Interpretation

S. Brian Willson served in the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War and later became active in veterans and peace organizations. The National Archives preserves extensive records documenting both U.S. military activity in Vietnam and opposition to the war at home.

On September 1, 1987, Willson and other protesters attempted to block a munitions train at the Concord Naval Weapons Station while protesting U.S. arms shipments to Central America. The train struck Willson, causing catastrophic injuries and the loss of both legs below the knees. Contemporary and later reporting documents the event and the protests that followed.

Interpretations of responsibility and intent differed. The Contra Costa County district attorney declined to prosecute the train crew, stating that investigators found no evidence that the crew intended to hit protesters. Later in 1987, the Navy disciplined two officers for failures related to demonstrator safety and train-crew supervision and training. These different records belong beside Willson’s own account rather than being collapsed into a single explanation.

Historical practice for this guide: identify whether a claim comes from an official record, contemporary reporting, later reporting, Willson’s account, or the play’s dramatic reconstruction. Asking who is speaking is part of the work.

Themes and Big Ideas

Patriotism and conscience

The play begins inside a childhood model of patriotism and traces the slow unraveling of certainty. It asks whether loyalty to a country, institution, community, or moral principle must always mean obedience.

Moral injury

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs describes moral injury as distress that may follow experiences in which a person participates in, fails to prevent, or witnesses events that violate deeply held moral beliefs. Moral injury is not itself a psychiatric diagnosis and is not identical to PTSD. The concept offers one useful lens for parts of Brian’s story without reducing his life to a diagnosis.

Responsibility inside systems

Military chains of command, government agencies, political movements, families, religious communities, and activist organizations all shape choices. The play asks how responsibility functions when a person is both an individual decision-maker and part of a larger structure.

Nonviolence as practice

Nonviolence in the play is not presented as passivity. It appears as a contested set of ethical commitments and tactics involving refusal, witness, protest, risk, organization, and the willingness to accept consequences.

Memory and revision

The Brian speaking now understands the Brian of an earlier moment differently. The play treats changing interpretation not necessarily as dishonesty, but as one of the problems of autobiographical truth.

The body as evidence

The script repeatedly returns to what the body knows before language catches up: hands that carry remembered harm, a body that hesitates during bayonet training, and a body placed on railroad tracks as a political act.

Transformation without innocence

Change does not erase prior actions. The play’s challenge is to imagine transformation while refusing the easier story that a transformed person has always been morally clear.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

Why does the play begin with childhood rather than with the train?
What is gained by allowing one performer to carry both Brian and the voices that shaped, judged, commanded, or challenged him?
When does Brian’s body seem to know something before his conscious beliefs change?
How does the play distinguish guilt, responsibility, shame, and accountability?
What is the difference between explaining an earlier belief and excusing it?
How does the play complicate the idea of a “good citizen”?
When institutions give orders, where does individual responsibility begin and end?
What makes testimony different from autobiography, history, or argument?
How should audiences evaluate a historical claim when personal memory and official records differ?
What risks does civil disobedience ask a participant to accept? What risks may fall on other people?
Does the play ask us to admire Brian, understand him, challenge him, or all three?
What might it mean for “the train” not to have the last word?

Vocabulary

Testimony: an account offered by a witness or participant, often with an expectation that the speaker is trying to establish what happened or what an experience meant.
Primary source: material created during or close to the period being studied, such as letters, photographs, government records, recordings, or contemporary reporting.
Oral history: recorded recollection used as historical evidence, usually understood as both factual testimony and remembered experience.
Moral injury: lasting distress that may follow events experienced as violations of deeply held moral values or expectations.
Civil disobedience: a contested political concept commonly used for public, conscientious lawbreaking intended to communicate opposition to a law or policy.
Nonviolent direct action: organized action intended to create pressure or interruption without physical violence.
Chain of command: a formal hierarchy through which authority and orders move.
Conscience: a person’s moral judgment about what one should or should not do.
Dramatic reconstruction: theatrical shaping of historical material that may be grounded in evidence without functioning as a verbatim record.
Epistolary: built partly from documents, letters, messages, or other forms of communication that carry one voice toward another.

Before, During, and After

Before

Review the difference among primary sources, memoir, oral history, journalism, and dramatic reconstruction.
Explore a National Archives Vietnam War timeline and choose one 1969 document or image to examine closely.
Discuss the phrase “moral injury” as a lens rather than a diagnosis.
Create working definitions of patriotism, obedience, conscience, and dissent without requiring agreement.

During

Track every moment when another voice enters Brian’s speech. What kind of authority does that voice claim?
Notice each time hands, feet, legs, or physical movement become part of the story.
Mark the silences. What happens because the play does not explain immediately?
Listen for claims that sound like documented fact, personal memory, interpretation, or moral argument.

After

Choose one event and compare how the script, a contemporary news report, and Brian’s later account frame it.
Map the beliefs Brian holds at three different points. What changes them?
Identify one contradiction the play refuses to resolve.
Ask what the production makes possible that a documentary, lecture, or biography would do differently.

Sources and Research Paths

Source note: This guide draws on the current 2026 script, created from Willson’s life, memoirs, conversations, and documentary research, together with public historical sources. The play is theatre, not a substitute for the historical record. Where interpretations differ, the difference is part of the inquiry.

Continue Exploring

The companion Toolkit turns these questions into primary-source, theatre, writing, design, and facilitated discussion activities.

Open the On Track Toolkit → Explore the GIFF production →