IT’S been 51 years since then-prime minister William McMahon announced Australian troops would be withdrawn from Vietnam and 48 years since the US officially ended its involvement, but the memory of that conflict still lives on.

Now a new play with a different slant on the war is coming to the Courtyard Studio. 

“In Their Footsteps” is based on oral histories, conducted by US playwright Ashley Adelman, of five American women who served in Vietnam. The play has enjoyed productions off-Broadway and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, but this is its first Australian airing.

Unlike its famous forbear, the 1980 play “Tracers”, about male veterans’ experiences in Vietnam, this focuses on the oft-hidden work of women in Vietnam – and the characters are real-life people. 

I caught up with its director, Carly Fisher, founder of Theatre Travels, which she formed in 2018. 

An academic graduate in drama from UNSW with a masters in PR and advertising, Fisher says she’d always wanted to run her own theatre company with the idea of giving more opportunity for women in the creative and management roles.

Her focus has been firmly on “verbatim” theatre, and her aim is to show what’s trending internationally to bring it to Australian theatres and thereby, ultimately, to help young Australian female writers create new work.

“Making contacts in the industry can be challenging, so I shared our news on Facebook and put the message out that we were interested in producing people’s work… over 450 scripts came in from 14 countries. We chose eight plays and one of them was ‘In Their Footsteps’, which focuses on the female American experience,” she says.

“This play documents the female experience in the Vietnam War and is beautifully woven, with a timelapse approach that shows what happened then and what are the memories now – how it impacts today.”

All five women, she says, are very much alive and they’ve spoken to them on Zoom.

“In Their Footsteps” tells the story not of military, but of civilian service, and Fisher finds the juxtaposition of the two most interesting, saying: “It’s remarkable how many people served in Vietnam that we’ve never heard of, like the librarian – I didn’t even know there were librarians in Vietnam.”

So, given the distance of the Vietnam War, can young people relate to it? 

“Definitely,” Fisher says.

“The experience of women in war is a universal experience, as is the feeling of not being heard, of not feeling safe, all that remains true.”

While all of those women would have been young when they served in Vietnam, she deliberately cast actors from ages 40 to 76.

“I didn’t want that youth perspective,” she says.

“Rowena Robinson plays intelligence specialist ‘Lucki’ Allen, a university student who was drafted, but in the play she also captures the emotions of friends who didn’t return or who were scarred, like the gymnast who came back without hands.”

Another cast member, Linda Nicholls-Gidley, plays librarian Ann Kelsey, who comes from a military family and Sonya Kerr plays Jeanne Christie, known as “Donut Dollie”– you can guess what her job was.

Nola Bartolo plays recreational services officer Judy Jenkins Gaudino and Suzann James plays nurse Lily Adams. 

“It’s not a typical verbatim show where people sit on black chairs,” she says. 

“We’ve deliberately set it somewhere like a community centre or a university, a space where people can chat.”

Fisher, who comes from a family of Holocaust survivors, has a lot of questions about the female Vietnam vets. Why, for instance, although 67 women died serving in Vietnam, do only eight of their names appear on the US Vietnam Memorial? And how can we have forgotten them?

So how does the play end? 

“It’s not a depressing piece of theatre,” she says.

“Although it’s full of hard memories, there are happy memories, but it ends quite pensively with a question and a call to see what women do in the history books.”

“In Their Footsteps”, Courtyard Studio, February 25-26. Booking at canberratheatrecentre.com.au or 6275 2700.