BWW Q&A: Bill Raskin of The Team Room at Keegan Theatre

The story of a Special Forces team – and the day the world changed forever. “The Team Room” follows Special Forces A-Team 824 serving at Camp Diamond, West Virginia. On the morning of September 10th, 2001, they report for a routine week of duty and training exercises.

The audience steps into the world of Army Special Forces operators, during their last day of peace and a sudden transition to war. "An entertaining, insightful glimpse into the team room, and into the minds of a Special Forces detachment at the outset of war. The “Green Berets,” as they are known, are a collection of young warriors whose skills and human emotions are laid bare by the realities of combat.

Tickets are $65 and can be purchased at www.teamroomfoundation.org. About The Team Room Foundation: This is a veteran-led project, written and produced by retired Army Special Forces veteran Bill Raskin, and the net proceeds of the show will benefit the Special Operations Warrior Foundation. Bring this veterans arts project to the stage for a world premiere run in October 2023.

Bill Raskin served as a career Army Special Forces officer, retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel with 20 years on active duty. This included multiple combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and wide-ranging overseas deployments. Bill led and commanded special operators at every level from small teams to command of a Special Forces battalion and battalion level task force. He continues to consult to the national security community, and holds an MA in Security Studies and a BA in History from Georgetown University. A native of Dallas, Texas; Bill now lives in Bethesda, Maryland with his loving wife, a wonderful college student, and an awesome dog. Together they pursue many adventures.

What inspired you to transition from a military career to playwriting? Going back to the Green Beret mission of “Working by, with and through,” there was one thing that some might not anticipate going into that career field, and that is the intensive amount of writing and communication that is crucial to getting the job done. One thing you learn very early on is how critical it is to be able to effectively capture that reality in writing for the benefit of major US military commands and policy makers. Even in an era of video communication, no one's going to go back and look at those video archives, so you’d better be able to capture it in an understandable way in writing, with facts and recommendations that someone might make use of. As I got to the tail end of my career, it struck me that many times that some of those written communications we sent out were probably strategically the most valuable thing our team did across the course of a deployment. So that was probably the interest while on active duty that I thought I'd might like to see where this goes. One of the weird things about the military is, I retired after 20 years. I was 44 years old. I grew up in Texas and, you know, there's the syndrome there of the former high school quarterback- the best part of their lives may be over by the age of 20. So, with my ‘early retirement,’ this has been a very meaningful way to do something positive and constructive. Can you talk about how your military experiences, especially your deployment post 9/11, influenced the writing of "The Team Room"? For the past 20 years now of my career — 9/11 until now — change was at an intensity and speed that was very difficult to process at the time. So, I think my initial curiosity to write was a personal mission, just to try and digest and make sense of what those changes meant to me. I obviously had a very specific experience in regards to 9/11, but I did not want this to be an autobiography about that experience. Instead, the goal was to share a more universal story about the apprenticeship and growing up process as a special operator, and the incredibly tight bonds of comradeship and friendship that develop. When we first meet the team on September 10, there’s a range of experience and maturity. The Team Sergeant is the only combat veteran. Some of his charges are snapped-in and performing their jobs efficiently. Some get distracted and he has to motivate them. A couple get too wrapped up in peer-rivalry and the Team Sergeant has to rein that in. But then 9/11 happens and overnight we see why this community must have such deep and immersive training and preparation. They have essentially no time to prepare and deploy. These young, special operators quickly fall into their training, and know how to prepare and undertake these very complex tasks. What are some of the challenges you've faced bringing your first play to the stage? It's certainly a first rodeo for me, so that makes it very challenging. What I thought would be a short story anthology, I began to see as a bunch of vignettes linked with the same characters. Three or four weeks into writing The Team Room, I said to my editor Kathryn, “You know, I think this needs to be a play.” To her credit, she's a novelist, and she said, “I'll edit you as far as I can, but I'm not a playwright. So let's find some playwrights.” I took some seminars with a playwright at The Writer’s Center, and then Covid hit and we lost touch. Our now-producer, Michael Hare and I actually started talking during the writing of my novel, Cardiac Gap, and Michael said, “well, you know… our old classmate Ray Ficca is a 30-year stage professional. We went down to his conservatory, grabbed a coffee and sat down. In a nutshell, he said, Hey, you've got a fully developed story here. But you have never written for the stage. And so what's ahead of you is at least a year of working with actors to figure out what resonates in spoken medium. Then there was the process of taking that back for editing and then rinse and repeat. You've mentioned that this project is a team effort of Georgetown alumni and veterans, can you discuss how this shared background helped in the play's development? Your play provides an intimate look into the world of Army Special Forces operators, how did you balance maintaining authenticity while also making it accessible for the general audience? In special operations, each team really becomes an incubator. Place strong personalities together under equally strong leadership, and you get the full range of human experience: tough mission sets that demand high commitment and focus; young operators who are finding their way and need help; and occasional interpersonal conflict in such close quarters. I really wanted people to be able to experience the energy and camaraderie of being in such a room. There are important stories that I wanted to tell, and I wanted to maintain creative control so they could be told with authenticity and integrity as we reworked “The Team Room” for the stage. What impact do you hope "The Team Room" will have on audiences, particularly those who may not have personal experience with the military? I hope the audience gets a sense of two things. The first is the incredible confusion that dominates most combat engagements, and how challenging it can be to sort through what happened and why. The second take away is the tremendous, life-long bond that often develops among comrades who have entrusted their lives to each other. I think as humans, we're always trying to put into context and understand what it means for us as human beings to go through periods of incredible change. And that's what I always hope — if I can convey anything — maybe I can give the audience a sense of what it felt like to live through certain periods of rapid change at a time when there were some really important things that we needed to deal with as a country. Why should audiences come see "The Team Room" at Keegan Theatre? Bringing “The Team Room” to the stage has been a tremendous team effort by a group of multitalented, passionate individuals of different walks of life. This is a story about the strength in togetherness, about rising together through tragedy. It’s a story for everyone.

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