If a common narrative about military service in the post-9/11 wars is emerging, it's this: A service member joins the military for patriotic reasons, deploys to combat and experiences some form of life-changing trauma — a physical wound, a moral injury, or some manifestation of post-traumatic stress.

Upon returning home, the service member finds reintegration to civilian life a challenge and often struggles to find healing and help. It's a story that highlights an emerging modern understanding with the realities of PTS and reflects the hardships of being a veteran in a culture where the vast majority of the population has no real familiarity with the military and the realities of war.

"Basetrack Live" is a performance that seeks to make that story relatable, rather than to elevate it. The one-act show tells the real story of AJ Czubai, a Marine with 1st Battalion, 8th Marines who narrates his own journey from boot camp to combat in Afghanistan's Helmand province and home to the painful complexities of life after war. Actors Tyler LaMarr and Ashley Bloom play AJ and his wife Melissa, speaking in overlapping monologues pulled faithfully from interviews with the Czubais.

The monologues are interspersed with rich, poignant photos and video footage from that deployment, which flash above the stage as a backdrop while a live four-piece band plays an adrenaline-charged musical score. A cello and electric violin heighten the mystique of nighttime desert vistas with Marines under a full moon, while the driving beat of an electric drum set accompanies scenes of rocket attacks.

The source material for "Basetrack Live" is Basetrack One-Eight, a prior journalistic endeavor in which a small group of talented embedded photographers used social media to broadcast photos and videos of Marines over the course of a seven-month deployment to Afghanistan beginning in September 2010. The project was shut down a month early by Marine officials who cited security concerns, but the project remains one of the more prolific embeds of the war.

Unfortunately, the actors, though competent, are sometimes upstaged by the video clips and photos of real Marines and spouses that frequently play over their heads. No matter how faithful to reality, an actor portraying someone else's grief could never be as compelling as the Basetrack One-Eight crew's short interviews with Marines who had freshly lost a comrade and strove to put words to their loss. More than once, I caught myself wishing the actors would leave the stage so I could focus on the simple, poignant scenes portrayed in the original photo and video.

"Basetrack Live" is strongest as it captures the rift that grows between AJ and Melissa over the course of his time in the war zone. Well before he returns home and his trauma manifests in struggles with alcohol and anger, we see that the couple is no longer speaking the same language. Melissa frets about her high-risk pregnancy while AJ is consumed with the task of staying alert and keeping his men alive. The crescendo of conflict that follows seems inevitable, and the show carefully avoids painting either spouse as a villain or a victim.

Perhaps intentionally, the story of the Czubais has little, fundamentally, to do with the war in Afghanistan. While several projected photographs show Marines interacting with Afghan civilians, the show doesn't concern itself with attempting to explain the war or the specific work of the troops of 1/8. AJ fights and returns home, and it's not clear what, if anything, his labor and sacrifice might have accomplished.

"[AJ's is] the everyman story," said LaMarr, himself a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.

Clearly, it's also a story for which the ending has not yet been written.

"Basetrack Live's" national tour continues with a New York run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Nov. 11-15. For more information on the production, visit Basetracklive.com.

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