Basetrack began as a place for embedded journalists to post photos. Later it became a social media site where families could keep up with their troops in Afghanistan. Now it has transformed again, into a new way for the most recent generation of veterans to tell the story of their service and survival.
Run the site past a composer from Juilliard, add a combat vet-turned-actor, a string section and a DJ, and you get BASETRACK Live.
"Not so much a play or a concert or art gallery," says Ed Bilous, the composer who created the project, "it represents ... not only a new kind of warfare, but also new way of creating art."
BASETRACK Live starts like a video documentary, with interviews of Marines in Afghanistan projected on a screen behind the stage. Strings, a horn and percussion take cues from what the Marines are saying. Their tales from patrols in Afghanistan morph into hip-hop.
Amid the videos, the rap and music, an actor takes the stage, playing the part of a Marine in Afghanistan. An actress plays his wife back home — live via Skype to the theater. The actor in the current production touring the East Coast is Tyler LaMarr, himself a Marine veteran who served in Iraq, in Fallujah and Ramadi.
"It does help that I'm a veteran — but this show is 100 percent authentic. Everything is verbatim text from interviews," says LaMarr.
The story climaxes with the Marine in a firefight — and his wife giving birth to their daughter alone back home. He comes home after he gets wounded, and post-traumatic stress disorder and trouble adjusting rip his marriage apart.
The character is based on A.J. Czubai, a former Marine.
"Believe it or not, my story's actually pretty common among service members who deployed," he says.
Czubai says it wasn't easy to let his story be made into a stage show, but he felt a duty to share his story of getting help for PTSD.
"I was really hurting at the time and, at first, you know, I didn't want to share," he says. "It doesn't exactly show me in my best light. But if I could just show a couple people who are hurting you can make it out, then I'm extremely happy I did it."
Most of the audience for BASETRACK Live won't be veterans, but people who want to know about their experience. The show's producers say that's the point.
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