At 8:30 p.m. October 20-23 will be performances of Night Raid, written, directed and performed by WKU students.

Performances will happen in the rocky alleyway between Helm Library and Cravens Library, beside the air conditioner—on WKU’s campus. The play is free and open to the public. It was completed developed by WKU students, without incentive, out of pure desire.

The text is part collage, part original work. Texts that have been quoted/excerpted/revised/adapted/shredded/subverted are by James Oppenheim and Maxwell Bodenheim (two obscure anti-war American poets active in the 10s and 20s) as well as the monolithic Sufi theologian and wise man, al-Ghazali.

There is even a bit from a Buddhist sutra. This has all been layered together with some new material to create a new work that is being articulated as a response to the wars of the last ten years (one being the longest in U.S. history). We’re in a strange period in our history in which we can now start to look back with some clarity at our choices as a nation at war while still being engaged in the war in question.

The play is a meditation/lamentation on the struggles of two individuals who have survived the destruction of their village, and the death of their family members. Emulating the form of an old Buddhist fable, a broken woman with her dead son in her arms demands answers from an infuriated war protester who claims to have the authority to answer her many large existentialist questions, though he too is suffering like her and understands almost as little. Both curse the forces that have pulverized their lives and catapulted them into this tenuous state in which their worse selves are being appealed to with an unconscionable cycle of violence.

What are the first thoughts that cross the mind and heart of these people? Having thus suffered a great human injustice, they fear what they could become, see a fork in the road, and ask the question, “What is the human heart capable of and how do you prove it?” Could we really be shocked to find that these people months later try to put a bomb in Time Square? Or aid the larger resistance against NATO forces? Can we, for one night, as deeply empathetic human beings, be mindful of what we don’t see in the New York Times statistics or the 3 minute spot on CNN? Can we face the real physical and emotional consequences of our actions, with the help of great poetry, voices from over a thousand years ago, and two brilliant performers? What aren’t we seeing amid our daily hustle and bustle? Who aren’t we hearing from? What pain and suffering is raging outside our consciousness on a daily basis? Art and spirituality share many things including the quest to see the unseen, to acknowledge the invisible, the immeasurable, and what will last vs. what cannot be sustained.

The play mixes the current climate of social unrest growing in America as well as actual video footage from night raids in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It is a play, a conversation, a protest, a ritual, a prayer, a night vision, among other things.

We would be deeply touched to see you and your friends there. All are welcome.