Kenn Stilson and Southeast graduate Cody Cole co-write dramatic historical musical titled 'An American Hero'

For Kenn Stilson, a lifelong interest in history and a career spent writing for and teaching theater coincide in his collaborative work with a former student, titled "An American Hero."

Stilson, professor of acting, directing and musical theater at Southeast Missouri State University, and author of the acting textbook "Seeing is Believing," has been writing the play for two and a half years with Cody Cole, a then-Southeast student who has since graduated. A few years back, Cole approached Stilson with a germ of an idea about a musical set in World War II, focusing on an immigrant.

"He had a song," Stilson says. "I thought it was really something ... intriguing."

Of Cole, Stilson says, "He's a really exceptional talent."

In addition, Stilson says, Cole had come to the right person without really knowing he was doing so.

Cutline-Body Copy:Kenn Stilson poses for a photo Thursday, Aug. 24 in the Rust Flexible Theatre on the River Campus of Southeast Missouri State University.Fred Lynch

"He had no way of knowing I had an interest in World War II," Stilson says.

The timing was right, as Stilson had just finished the script for "Murphy's Law," so he had some free time, as he put it.

Stilson says he suggested Cole storyboard his ideas for the musical, and, as Southeast's theater program isn't a playwriting program, Stilson would help him along with that aspect.

"I says, 'I'll write the first scene and see what happens,'" Stilson says.

After that first scene, Stilson wrote the next, the next and the next, until between the two of them, they had the first draft of "An American Hero."

Kenn Stilson poses for a photo Thursday, Aug. 24, 2017 in the Rust Flexible Theater on the River Campus of Southeast Missouri State University.Fred Lynch

He wrote the dialogue and Cole wrote the music, Stilson says, and the collaboration worked out well.

The process is a long one, from inception to production, Stilson says.

"After each staged reading, we take a look at what works, what doesn't," Stilson says. He described the process of taking the script and breaking it apart, taking out entire scenes, even characters, that weren't working, writing new sections and reassembling everything.

"Musical theater asks a lot of the audience," Stilson says, especially a dramatic musical such as this one is. "This isn't something you can lean back in an easy chair to watch."

Other art forms, such as film or television or even a novel, are more static, Stilson says. It's more complicated to write a musical, which is a living thing.

"Theater doesn't happen without an audience," Stilson says.

Shortly before Carlos Vargas took over as Southeast's president in 2015, Stilson says, Vargas' wife Pam came to a staging of an early draft of "An American Hero," and the positive feedback from that audience strongly suggested to Stilson that "this was worthwhile."

That suggestion was reinforced when an off-off-Broadway production company, the Gallery Players in New York, picked up the script for its staged reading series in December 2016.

"After that, we tore it apart again and reworked it again," Stilson says, though at this point, it's more of a refinement than an overhaul.

Stilson says the process of writing a musical is lengthy, as it's a complex art form with many moving parts, and a lot of considerations.

A dramatic musical builds an entire universe, Stilson says, and that universe must make sense internally and be compelling to the audience.

"You're asking the audience on a journey," Stilson says. "And although it's a fictitious world, it looks similar to our world."

"An American Hero" is historical fiction, Stilson says, and while the characters didn't exist and the dialogue at actual events isn't exactly what was says, "we're trying to be as historically accurate as we can be while still telling a fictional story."

The main character's Irish background was a "very conscious decision," Stilson says.

Stilson's ancestry includes some Irish, he says, and he's always been fascinated by the Irish people.

Co-author Cole also has an Irish background, Stilson says, and "he had no idea I had the background as well."

From a historical perspective, the Irish involvement in World War II was also pertinent, Stilson says.

"Ireland was neutral in World War II," he says, adding that the Irish gained independence from the British between the two wars, and there was a great deal of bitterness toward the British on the part of the Irish.

"If anything, Ireland was against the Allies," Stilson says, "not that they were pro-Nazi, not at all, but that they were under colonial rule for centuries, and when they finally broke away, it was not an amicable separation."

There was even a sentiment that the Irish who did join the British military, or Irish immigrants who joined the American forces, were traitors, Stilson says.

"It adds contention and drama to the situation the main character, Thomas, finds himself in," Stilson says.

Stilson doesn't have a military background himself, he says, and neither does Cole, although both of them have family members who were and are members of the armed forces.

"People might say 'You weren't there, you can't imagine what it's like,'" Stilson says. "And to an extent that's true. You can hear stories, see war movies, but it's not the same as living it. So we have to place ourselves inside this great big 'what if.' That's what we do as artists, is create a universe of what-ifs. And this is simply my interpretation of this idea, what this immigrant went through to become a real American, a reluctant hero."

Stilson says this effort is collaborative, and that a lot more goes into a musical than simply writing dialogue and putting together a piano score of 20 songs.

There's an orchestrator who took Cole's piano score and built orchestration around it for enough instruments to qualify as a full-blown musical, for instance.

There's a director who works with the actors to bring out nuanced performances from the actors, a musical director, a slew of people backstage, Stilson says.

"This is not a musical comedy," Stilson says. "We try to be very honest, try to fill the musical with humanity, even in the worst situations."

Even so, this is not for a general audience, Stilson says.

Stilson says he would recommend the show to anyone with an interest in history, who has a sense of what happened during World War II.

"There are no f-bombs, but people die," he says. "These men and women were in hell, and we show how they dealt with it."

"An American Hero" will be presented at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, Sept. 27 through 30, and at 2 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 1, in the Bedell Performance Hall at the River Campus, 518 S. Fountain St. in Cape Girardeau.