This Veterans Day, Alliance for New Music-Theatre artists John Boulanger, Alan Naylor, and Cara Schaefer will transport audience members back in time some hundred years in our nation’s history. Portraying noted essayist, biographer, and playwright John Jay Chapman, his wife, Elizabeth Astor Chapman, and son Victor, they reminisce about Victor’s signing up with the French Foreign Legion while on a family trip to Europe.

The program commemorates the story of Victor Chapman, who joined the Foreign Legion in September 1914. After a year in the trenches, he joined the “Lafayette Escadrille,” the Legion’s American Aviation Corps, and was the first American aviator to perish in the conflict, all before the United States entered the war in 1917.

The program will serve as a “salon event,” and invitation into the Chapman’s home as they read from Victor’s letters from the front, interspersed with poetry and songs written during the “Great War.” Selections include the iconic “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae and poems by other noted war poets including Wilfred Owen, Alan Seeger, and Siegfried Sassoon.

You’ll also hear American popular songs by George M. Cohan and others of the period, settings of John McCrae’s famous title poem by Charles Ives and John Phillip Sousa, and a group of settings of A.E. Housman’s “A Shropshire Lad” poems by George Butterworth, a British composer who died in the “War to End All Wars.”

Boulanger and Schaefer reunite here to pay tribute not only to the men who died in WWI but the artists whose expressions led us through the arc from a vision of heroic combat to the grim and heartbreaking realities of that terrible conflict. They are joined by Helen Hayes award-winner Alan Naylor, who will serve as pianist in addition to portraying the young Victor Chapman.

Period attire encouraged.

The Arts Club will provide a small bites buffet and beverages, included in the price of the ticket. The salon program starts at 7:00 pm.