Global citizen, actor, writer and spoken word artist Lanna Joffrey first encountered Valiant Women in War and Exile by Sally Hayton-Keeva in the 1990s. The book has stuck with her ever since as she’s developed it into an ensemble play for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and the New York International Fringe Festival, among other venues. Joffrey’s script was recently published by NoPassport Press and I was glad to have read it over the weekend. It’s a stunner.

Reminiscences of war, whether by men or women, can easily become victim narratives (and in many cases, they should be). But these are tales of warriors, witting and unwitting from throughout the 20th century. Because the official combat armies of the time have been largely male, “War speaks in a male voice to all of us,” as Joffrey quotes Keeva in the early pages. But war is a human cruelty and we risk misunderstanding it by ignoring the perspectives of women or by relegating their voices to those of observers of war rather than as participants, perpetrators, rebels and activists. These characters have impressive and infectious agency that pull the reader through these vivid and compelling stories.

Through the show we meet survivors of Turkey’s genocide against Armenia experience how the lack of consequences for it led to Nazi Germany. We meet Catholic and Protestant women furing Ireland’s “troubles,” as well as interned Japanese Americans, surivivors of Hiroshima, a flight attendant who brought U.S. soldiers to Viet Nam and a Moscow woman who became a sniper to avenge herself against the Nazis.

I’m mixing up the chronology, but that’s sort of the point — these voices from a century of war remind us of the sheer senselessness of it all. We’re pscyhologically compelled to divide wars into good and bad, just or unjust, but the experience of taking all of this history in together washes away all rationalizations. It’s not just that war is cruel (we know that) or that the innocent suffer greatly (we know that too) but that people are forever changed by these experiences and we’ve found no way to offer them any remediation other than to listen.

The script moves at a rapid pace. Based on real interviews conducted by Hayton-Keeva and expertly dramatized by Joffrey, Valiant reminds me a bit of Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf because the effect of the work is built on a chorus of strong voices.