Ethan Smyke | Travis

alexander's

Ethan Smyke
1 / 10

The intention of our play is to tell stories about remarkable events in history, both famous and less-known, from a unique or specific perspective. Our goal for the performances is to tell these stories in a clever, humorous, and powerful way. Our production accomplishes this by having relatively lighthearted and simple dialogue broken up with powerful monologues. This takes the audience on an intentional emotional roller coaster. 


My monologue is based on the events experienced by Cpl Kyle Carpenter in Afghanistan when he jumped on a grenade to save the life of a fellow marine. I write from the perspective of the person that has to call Cpl Carpenter’s parents telling them that he’s injured. In it, I tried to use shorter sentences to make it seem like the character is nervous and has a high heart rate. I also included some longer sentences that had words that no human would ever actually say without reading them to show that he is reading from a piece of paper in front of him. At the end of the call the mood changes when the character begins the call to Cpl Carpenter’s parents.