Iowa City playwright Mary Swander’s most recent play began with a chance find at a local store.
“Years ago, I took a walk down the road one day from my place, an old Amish one-room schoolhouse, to the country store,” Swander recounts on her Substack. “There, they have a rack of literature … My eyes fell on a little pamphlet, mimeographed and stapled together. Inside, the pages were an oral history of an Amish conscientious objector in WWII.”
“I stood before the rack and read the whole story. Wow, this man was drafted into the Army, granted C.O. status, put on a train with some fellow peace church resisters, then sent to Colorado as a smoke jumper, a firefighter in the West. The train got to Colorado, all right, but it came to an abrupt halt. The men were marched off at bayonet point and locked into an old chicken coop. There they remained for the rest of the war.”
Inspired, Swander wrote Coop. The new play, produced by Swander Woman Productions, was staged this fall in Iowa City and Kalona, as well as the Irish cities of Letterfrack, Clifden, Tully and Cross. More Iowa performances are scheduled in the new year, including shows in West Liberty and Coralville in January.
Swander is a nonfiction writer and the former Iowa Poet Laureate. Her poetry collection Driving the Body Back garnered praise from both the New York Times and L.A. Times. She’s received numerous awards, including from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Whiting Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and was inducted into the Iowa Women’s Hall of Fame.
There was no doubt that Swander could do justice to the story of Jake, the 21-year-old Amish conscientious objector, but there was a logistical issue. The only male actor from her company available was University of Iowa Theatre graduate Rip Russell, and he’s 60 years old. Swander confided to her friend Monica Leo that the play wasn’t going to work.
“It’ll work,” Leo told her, “if the Amish C.O. is a puppet.”
Swander liked the idea, but Leo was the puppeteer, not her. “‘I’m not crafty like you,’ I protested. ‘I can’t make puppets.’” Leo assured Swander she didn’t have to. “There’s object theatre.”
According to the World Encyclopedia of Puppet Arts, “any object can become a puppet”—“a trip to the second hand store or a quick tour around one’s home can become the basis for a performance.”
“In object theatre, the untransformed ‘thing’ is explored, either in itself (to find its inherent movement/physical properties) or to use as a character/symbol in a story.”
Rather than attempt to make characters out of felt and glue, Swander went object hunting. The main character, Jake, is played by a traffic cone. Other characters are portrayed by balloons and daggers and dusting tools.
As the only human actor in the Coop cast, Russell’s extensive theatrical experience (including productions with Riverside Theatre, Theatre Cedar Rapids, City Circle and Iowa City Community Theatre) serves him well here. He acts silently as the Hand of God, manipulating the various props, imbuing each object-character with personality and nuance, in concert with a prerecorded soundtrack of narration by Russell, mixed with scene-setting sound effects.
The play begins with the sound of Hitler’s voice segueing into the Amish praise song “Das Loblied.” Russell enters the scene as a janitor mocking Hitler using a small broom as a mustache. The actor drops the broom and begins dressing the traffic cones, and in doing so introduces us to Jake, our protagonist. We hear a news announcement regarding the 1940 Draft Act.
Jake confides, “The government is drafting me. If I go to war, my own Amish people will shun me. If I don’t go to war, my English neighbors will do even worse things to me.”
“Gott ist Die Liebe (God Loves Me Dearly)” plays on the soundtrack. Jake, being the thoughtful patriot that he is, goes to the draft board to register as a conscientious objector. He is under the impression that he will be trained as a “smoke jumper” to fight fires in Colorado. Instead of smoke jumping, of course, he is forcibly interred in a literal chicken coop (with all its inherent symbolism) along with eight other C.O.s for the duration of the conflict.
The narrative jumps between Jake’s personal recollections and the story of his Mennonite uncle Fred’s time as a C.O. during the first World War. Fred’s treatment parallels Jake’s situation, but was arguably worse. Fred’s hair and beard were forcibly cut. He was waterboarded. He was put in a cold dungeon. Two fellow C.O.s came down with pneumonia. One died. Then there were more deaths. Fred spent the rest of his interment stacking bodies.
Poignantly, a fair amount of Swander’s script comes from letters Jake “prays” home to his mother, having no mail privileges in the coop. These letters serve to recount the abuse Jake suffers as well as framing his Uncle Fred’s story.
The script often reads, unsurprisingly enough, like open form poetry, with its rhythms, specific line repetitions and its imagery. Take this line from Jake: “This is the battleground here, inside my head, inside this chicken coop. My guards are waiting for me to put on the uniform and be free. Free. What is freedom? The military says it’s fighting for freedom. For whom? Certainly not for a lowly Amish C.O. stuck here with a bunch of chickens.”
Coop brings to light these sad, obscured atrocities with a fascinating combination of the absurd, the surreal and the tragic, with brief moments of grace thrown in for good measure. The canny choice of using object theatre to tell the story of an objector, and having that objector double as the dispassionate Hand of God moving the objects to their objective fate over their objections, is a subtle but effective one.
Upcoming performances of Coop
Free and open to the public
Thursday, Jan. 22, 7 p.m., Owl Glass Puppetry Center, West Liberty
Saturday, Jan. 24, 2 p.m., New Song Episcopal Church, Coralville
Sunday, Feb. 22, Dewitt
Sunday, March 22, Prairiewoods, Cedar Rapids
Tuesday, April 21, Muscatine Community College
Saturday, April 25, Fairfield
This article was originally published in Little Village’s January 2026 issue.
