Before he joined the U.S. Army, Ben Grimes was a professional actor, bringing a variety of characters and their stories to the stage. After serving a tour in Iraq, he needed an outlet to process the mental toll his deployment took on him. So, he turned his story and the experiences of his fellow soldiers and penned a one-man play – one that he will now perform for an audience in Paducah ahead of Veteran’s Day.
On Friday, Grimes, Paducah’s Market House Theatre managing artistic director, will perform “Death of Kings,” a one-man show in Shakespearean style that tells the story of his service in the military and his struggles with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after returning home.
Grimes said the play was his way of telling his story, and processing it, while in the format of a favorite playwright. His title “Death of Kings,” is a direct reference to Shakespeare’s play “Richard II.”
“The play is the story of my journey from professional actor to U.S. Army soldier, and then coming out of that,” he said. “And actually, the play opens with that text, that Death of Kings monologue… and throughout the play, I intersperse my story with Shakespearean text that I've lifted from all his different plays to help kind of, hopefully, elevate the language and give the audience something to to grasp as as I'm going through this journey.”
Grimes said “Death of Kings” wasn’t just his story, but also about others he knew along his journeys and their stories too.
“The Death of Kings alludes to the men and women that I met in my journeys, and their stories as well, and their fight with PTSD, mental health, and things like that,” he said. “And so it's a story not just about myself, but also about the men and women that I served with.”
Grimes said he had a unique journey throughout his professional life, first theatre, then the U.S. military, then theatre again.
“The joke that I always say is that my acting career was going so well that I joined the Army, and it's true. I went to college at a theatre conservatory in St. Louis, and that was my path. When I graduated college, I went to Chicago and then finally to New York, and made the go at the professional actor thing,” said Grimes. “And in 2006, I was 30 years old, and I had kind of been waiting tables and trying to make this acting thing work. And I finally just said, ‘you know what? I'm going to go into the Army for four years, and then I'll use the GI Bill to pay for my graduate degree.’”
That decision sent Grimes to Iraq at the height of the troop surge ordered by the Bush Administration in 2006 to secure Baghdad and curb increasing insurgent violence. He said the price of service in the military goes beyond the risk of injury or dying on the front lines.
“I ended up deploying to Iraq in 2007 as a member of the surge, and with the 82nd Airborne, and that's all part of the story. Off to war I went,” he said. “I think that the important thing to remember for anybody going through service, no one gets out clean. You pay a price when you serve. I think that the greatest gift you can give anyone is to serve them, but you also pay a price for that.”
Even after his tour was over, Grimes said he struggled processing what he saw while at war.
“I'll speak from my experience, you have to compartmentalize a lot. Things you're seeing, things that you're experiencing, even just being away from your family – you compartmentalize that guilt, whatever it is that you're feeling in order to get the job done. You just kind of pack that away and say, ‘I'll deal with that later,’” he said. “And what that can do is that can, oftentimes, create some problems down the road when you actually do end up dealing with those things.”
Grimes said that his experience with PTSD after his tour of duty was not all at once, but it can creep up in unexpected ways.
“It sneaks up on you at random times. There's a section in the play that I talk about redeploying and coming home, and how it can be overwhelming because everything's so green… especially where I was [in Iraq] there was not a lot of green… it was pretty brown and drab and and and everyone's wearing the same military uniforms and stuff,” he said. “And so when you get back into the civilian world where everyone's wearing different colors, and the flowers are blooming. I'd redeployed in the spring, and I just remember everything being so green.”
Grimes said he thought about his story and those that served with him, thought it was unique enough story for a play and decided to give it a try.
As I started to write the play, I realized, ‘oh, this is an opportunity for me to talk about some really influential people that I met, and still are powerful inspirations in my life. And so I was,” he said. “It was a way for me to honor them and honor their memory. And so that once I kind of found that hook, I was all in, and I wrote it in, actually a couple days.”
Grimes said he was very nervous performing his one-man show in front of an audience for the first time because he was portraying himself – not another character. .
“I found it therapeutic to perform it. But I was a nervous wreck to perform it because I felt very naked. And as an actor, I have a character to hide behind, a mask. And I can say, ‘oh well, that wasn't me. I wasn't this horrible person. That was the character.’ And with this, I can't do that. This is my story, and so it is a different experience, but it's also a very rewarding experience. I've had such positive feedback and I feel like it helps other veterans and other people going through traumatic incidents and gives them permission to to tell their story.”
Grimes said he is excited to be bringing “Death of Kings” to Paducah for the first time.
“I'm very, very excited for people to see this, and I'm excited about the conversations that it might elicit,” he said. “I couldn't be more happy to share it with them.”
Ben Grimes will perform “Death of Kings,” Friday at 8 p.m. at the Clemens Fine Arts Center on the campus of West Kentucky Community & Technical College. Ticket reservations can be made at the center’s box office website.
