Playwright partners with UC Merced students to bring war letters to the stage
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- UC Merced will perform If All the Sky Were Paper with students on May 1–3.
- The production stages monologues from Andrew Carroll’s collected wartime letters.
- Samuelson and her students met local veterans groups including the Merced Sunrise Rotary.
For many college students, war exists as something distant, flattened into textbook dates and grainy photographs.
UC Merced professor Jenni Samuelson is changing the way her students understand war as she prepares them to perform “If All the Sky Were Paper,” a play by Andrew Carroll that includes the real letters of soldiers and civilian witnesses to war. Carroll is the author of several books, including “War Letters,” which inspired an hourlong PBS documentary.
The production this weekend will feature 20 students performing monologues from dozens of letters, collected by Carroll and accompanied by projections that help the audience place the letters geographically and historically.
Bringing the play to Merced
Samuelson said she reached out to Carroll for the first time in 2020 after rediscovering a recording her father made of her grandfather — a Holocaust survivor — telling his life story before he died.
“Having his story, his words, is just so powerful,” Samuelson said, “And now my children are at an age … where I can share this with them, and that is, like, the most precious thing I have.”
According to Samuelson, Carroll was immediately enthusiastic about producing the play with UC Merced students and had only one request: that he be allowed to come meet with the students himself.
In March 2020, he visited Merced with a briefcase of the letters for students to hold and read. Samuelson recalled seeing a powerful connection to history: a letter from the Revolutionary War with a bullet hole through it.
The play has changed over the years, Carroll and Samuelson say, with some letters swapped out and the order of the monologues changed.
“It’s just so beautifully crafted,” Samuelson said, “and it does take us to really dark places, really dark places, but it also brings you … to a place of hope at the end and a sense of purpose.”
Connecting to history
Carroll said he loves to work with students on this production, because “they really get to know these people.” Samuelson first staged the play in 2020. At the time, the rights were not publicly available but Carroll granted permission on one condition: that he be allowed to come work with the students. This year, Carroll will attend the first two performances.
“The whole purpose of this project is to humanize the military experience,” Carroll said. “These are not just statistics that we send over to fight. These are … sailors, soldiers, Marines, airmen. And, you know, I want people to know that these are … real human beings, and every single one of them is somebody’s child.”
For students at UC Merced, performing monologues from the letters of real people during wartime has affected their perspectives on war.
Wayne Agbanlog, who plays three characters in the play, said it has opened up a conversation about “atrocities of war” but also “the people who are in it (and) who are stuck between it.”
“It’s got me thinking, … really empathizing with a lot of people who decide … to go out there, and even if I disagree a lot with all the wars,” said Agbanlog.
Maya Henry, another UC Merced student, said she connected to her role as Oscar Mitchell, a Tuskegee Airman. Henry identified with the role because she is African American and said she learned “that they were basically used as, like an experiment, because they wanted to see if African Americans could become pilots … and they were used to basically go in front of the white (pilots’) planes and, like, protect them.”
Another student said being in the play helped her connect to her own brother who was in the military. She said she felt she understood his experience better and developed a greater appreciation for the letters she kept from his time in boot camp.
Beyond the classroom
This project extends beyond UC Merced’s global arts studies programs, into the Merced community and beyond.
According to Carroll, “the whole purpose of the books and the film and the play is to get more letters and to encourage people to preserve these correspondences.”
The project has a personal connection for Carroll, too. He started collecting letters after his childhood home burned and everything inside was lost. Not long after, he connected with a distant cousin who had served in World War II. The cousin had letters recounting his visit to the German concentration camp Buchenwald “days after the war ended.”
The cousin gave his letters to Carroll and told him that otherwise, he likely would have thrown them away. The experience made Carroll curious, so he started asking more and more veterans about letters they might have.
Since then, Carroll has traveled to more than 40 countries to collect letters and has published six books of them. Many of the letters are also digitized and archived at warletters.us.
Samuelson wanted the lessons her students learned from the play to extend outside the classroom as well.
The first year she produced the play, she and her students met with 17 local veterans groups to tell them about the play and hear their stories.
This year, Samuelson’s students spoke with veterans at the Merced Sunrise Rotary, the organization that puts on the annual Field of Honor, and were tasked with doing their own research to help contextualize the letters.
The play includes letters from everyday people, including the mothers of soldiers, young men sent to war, their wives and partners back home, as well as letters from recognizable names including “Slaughterhouse-Five” author Kurt Vonnegut.
While the play takes a clear look at the human cost of war, not only during wartime but also in the scars it leaves, both visible and invisible, it is not written to be depressing, “The ending of the play is about reconciliation,” Carroll said.
Performances of “If All the Sky Were Paper” are scheduled for May 1 at 7 p.m., and May 2-3 at 2 p.m. The play will be performed at the Multicultural Arts Center, 645 W. Main St. in downtown Merced. Tickets cost $10 and proceeds will be donated to the American Legion Post 83 in Merced.
This story was originally published April 29, 2026 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Playwright partners with UC Merced students to bring war letters to the stage."
