Steve LaRocque Performs BYLINE: ERNIE PYLE

Steve LaRocque, one of DC's finest local actors and playwrights and co-founder of Quotidian Theatre
Company at the Writer’s Center, will be performing his new one-man show, Byline:  Ernie Pyle on the day we observe
Veterans Day. 

Byline:  Ernie Pyle consists of excerpts from the wartime dispatches of Ernie Pyle, one of the first “embedded” reporters.  The war that he wrote about was World War II.  He seemed to be everywhere: with sailors and aviators, anti-aircraft gunners and mule packers, medical teams and combat engineers, and, above all, with the infantry,
“the underdogs … without whom wars cannot be won.”  His dispatches, published across the country in the Scripps-Howard chain of newspapers, gave the American public an intimate account of their young generation at war. 
When Pyle fell to a sniper’s bullet on a tiny island in the Pacific, the men of his unit marked the location and placed this inscription: “On this spot the 77th Infantry Division lost a Buddy.  Ernie Pyle, 18 April 1945.” 

In this play, featuring Steve LaRocque as Ernie Pyle, the actor becomes the reporter, appalled at the tragic
waste of war and the brutal conditions it imposes on the men who fight it, yet convinced of the need for it, and personally committed to going back to it, again and again, until the end.

Steve LaRocque brings to the role of Ernie Pyle a wealth of experience on two fronts:  as an actor/playwright for over 18 years in the greater Washington DC area, and as a Navy veteran with 29 years on active duty.