Arizona Theatre Matters Education · Toolkit
On Track Toolkit
Practical pathways into testimony, historical evidence, conscience, embodied storytelling, civic action, memory, and the ethics of telling a living person’s story.
Start Here
This Toolkit accompanies Jeanmarie Simpson’s On Track, based on the life and memoirs of S. Brian Willson and created with his permission and cooperation. Use it before or after a performance, alongside the Study Guide, or as a stand-alone set of humanities and theatre activities.
Essential question: What do we do when the story we inherited about ourselves, our institutions, or our country no longer explains what we have experienced?
Facilitation with Care
The work includes war, racism, childhood abuse, death, trauma, severe physical injury and amputation, political conflict, and morally difficult memories. Give participants advance information. No one should be required to disclose military experience, trauma history, political beliefs, family history, or personal experiences of violence.
- Offer speaking, writing, drawing, movement, listening, and observation as equally valid forms of participation.
- Allow participants to pass or leave an activity without explanation.
- Do not stage the train collision through unsafe physical contact.
- Separate historical inquiry from debate about a participant’s personal patriotism or morality.
- Distinguish disagreement from interrogation. The aim is inquiry, not conversion.
Choose a Pathway
Theatre Classroom
- Explore one actor carrying multiple kinds of voice.
- Stage silence as action.
- Translate documents into playable theatrical events.
History or Civics
- Compare primary sources with memoir and dramatic reconstruction.
- Study civil disobedience as a contested civic practice.
- Analyze responsibility inside institutions.
Veterans and Community Groups
- Discuss moral change without demanding disclosure.
- Separate testimony from diagnosis.
- Examine the difference between service, obedience, dissent, and conscience.
Writing and Humanities
- Work with letters, testimony, public record, and memory.
- Make point of view visible rather than pretending it is absent.
- Explore what biography gains and loses when it becomes theatre.
Activities
1 · The Inherited Story
Write four headings: family, institution, country, and self. Under each, invent a neutral fictional example of a belief someone might inherit before examining it closely. Do not use participants’ personal histories unless they volunteer them.
Then ask: What kinds of experience can make an inherited story unstable? What might make someone cling to it more tightly?
2 · One Event, Three Sources
Study the September 1, 1987 Concord incident through three source types: a contemporary news report, a later official or reported account, and Willson’s own retrospective account.
For each, mark: facts stated; facts attributed to someone else; interpretation; missing information; emotionally charged language; and what the source could not yet know.
End by writing a paragraph that makes its own source limits visible.
3 · Voices of Authority
Create a short scene in which one performer says a simple sentence such as “You will do what we tell you to do.” Repeat it as a parent, teacher, military superior, bureaucratic form, remembered inner voice, and compassionate guide.
Change only breath, focus, rhythm, distance, or physical placement. Avoid caricature. Discuss how authority changes without changing the words.
4 · Let the Silence Happen
Stage a short invented testimony twice. In version one, keep the pace conversational. In version two, insert a genuine silence after each fact that changes how the speaker understands himself.
What does silence allow the audience to do? When does silence become manipulative? When does it become necessary?
5 · Before the Decision
Choose one major decision from the play. Build a timeline containing only what happened before the decision.
Include pressures, information available, institutional expectations, relationships, bodily responses, and possible alternatives. Then ask which details later retellings tend to erase once the outcome is known.
6 · Conscience and Chain of Command
Invent a fictional situation in which a person receives an order that conflicts with a deeply held value. Map at least five possible responses, including compliance, delay, question, refusal, and seeking review.
For each, identify likely consequences for the individual and for other people. The activity is not about finding the “correct” choice. It is about making responsibility visible.
7 · Moral Injury Is Not a Diagnosis
Read a short overview from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs on moral injury. Then identify moments in a fictional scenario involving guilt, betrayal, shame, anger, or a violated value.
Discuss what the concept helps us notice and what it cannot tell us about a particular person’s mental health. Do not diagnose Brian, the performer, or participants.
8 · Civic Action Spectrum
Create cards for civic actions such as voting, contacting an official, public testimony, petition, march, boycott, strike, vigil, sit-in, conscientious refusal, and civil disobedience.
Arrange them not from “good” to “bad,” but by different variables: legal risk, bodily risk, disruption, visibility, collective participation, or dependence on institutions. Notice that the order changes with the variable.
9 · The Body Knows
Without touch, stage three versions of a character receiving an instruction the mind accepts but the body resists. Use weight shift, breath, hands, gaze, or stillness rather than dialogue.
Then add one line of text. Ask which physical information the line clarifies and which it weakens.
10 · Letter into Theatre
Choose a public historical letter, memo, or government notice connected to the period. First read it as a document. Then stage it using only one actor, one object, one silence, and one line of response.
Discuss what theatrical framing adds and what it risks distorting.
11 · Tracks as Design Problem
Design the railroad-track image without reproducing the collision literally. Consider light, sound, floor pattern, projection, vibration, objects, captioning, or spatial distance.
Your design must communicate danger and inevitability without making bodily harm into spectacle.
12 · The Last Word
Choose an event that seems to define a fictional character permanently. Write three possible endings: one in which the event has the last word, one in which the character denies it, and one in which the event remains true but no longer controls the whole story.
Compare the ethical difference among erasure, triumph, and continuation.
Primary-Source Lab
Use the National Archives Vietnam War collections to choose one document, image, or recording from 1969. Examine it before reading any explanatory caption beyond the minimum needed to identify the source.
- List only what you can directly observe.
- Identify who created the source and for what purpose.
- Ask what the source makes easy to see and what remains outside its frame.
- Compare the source with one moment in On Track.
- Write two sentences: one a historian could support directly, one that belongs to interpretation.
Directing and Performance Experiments
Brian is not a monument
Stage a short invented autobiographical passage three ways: as heroic speech, as apology, and as unfinished inquiry. Which version leaves the most room for contradiction?
The remembered voice
Let another voice enter without a costume change, accent, or comic demonstration. Test what the smallest readable shift can be.
Documents have temperature
Read an official-sounding paragraph with three relationships to it: belief, suspicion, and grief. Keep the words unchanged.
Do not rescue the room
When a difficult fact lands, resist the impulse to signal how the audience should feel. Explore what performance choices invite attention without dictating judgment.
Writing Prompts
- Write a letter from an earlier version of a person to the person they later become.
- Write a scene in which the body refuses before the mind does.
- Turn a bureaucratic sentence into a piece of dialogue that reveals who benefits from its impersonality.
- Write 300 words beginning: “At the time, I believed…” without allowing the speaker to mock the earlier self.
- Write two accounts of the same public event: one the morning after, one twenty years later.
- Write a monologue in which a person explains the difference between regret and responsibility.
- Create an epistolary scene from three documents that contradict one another without deciding for the audience which is “the truth.”
Multiple Ways to Participate
- Provide timelines, content information, and activity instructions in advance.
- Offer captions and clear speaker identification for recorded or live material.
- Describe visual and physical choices when they carry essential information.
- Permit responses through speech, writing, drawing, movement, selection, or observation.
- Use high-contrast print and uncluttered layouts for source packets.
- Do not require eye contact, physical touch, standing, walking, or personal disclosure.
- When an activity involves bodily experience, offer a seated, imagined, written, or observational pathway with equal status.
Facilitator Notes for Political Disagreement
- Begin with evidence and questions rather than asking participants to declare a side.
- Distinguish a participant’s description of a source from their evaluation of it.
- Ask people to attribute claims: “According to the report…” or “Willson later recalled…”
- Do not treat veterans, military families, activists, or people from any political viewpoint as representatives of a group.
- Make room for disagreement about tactics, responsibility, patriotism, nonviolence, and civil disobedience.
- Do not require consensus. Require specificity.
Closing Reflection
Invite each participant to complete one sentence in any medium:
- A certainty that changed was…
- A voice of authority I noticed was…
- A source I want to examine more closely is…
- A contradiction the play leaves alive is…
- A question I am carrying out of the room is…
Continue Exploring
This Toolkit responds to the play for educational and community-engagement purposes. It does not reproduce the script. The aim is not to tell participants what to conclude about the historical or political questions in the work, but to give them stronger tools for inquiry.