Stephen LaRocque performs his one-man play 'Byline: Ernie Pyle,' to local audiences. A retired U.S. Naval officer, LaRocque has written more than 30 plays, including a new one, 'Declaration,' about the Baltimore woman who printed the Declaration of Independence. Photo by Harvey Levine

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Most playwrights spend their careers trying to create memorable characters. Stephen LaRocque spends his trying to understand them.

That may explain why his plays often linger long after the curtain falls. LaRocque, 74, is less interested in grand historical events than in the individuals who lived through them — ordinary people caught in extraordinary moments.

LaRocque believes history is best understood through the people who lived it. That’s the focus of Declaration, his latest play, which will be performed at Spotlighters Theatre later this year.

It tells the story of Mary Katharine Goddard, the Baltimore printer who published the first broadside of the Declaration of Independence bearing the names of its signers. It’s a story many Americans have never heard, despite Baltimore’s pivotal role during the Revolutionary War.

For LaRocque, that obscurity is precisely the point.

“I’m drawn to people who made a difference and then slipped out of the spotlight,” he said in an interview with the Beacon.

The play unfolds during the winter of 1776-77, when the Continental Congress temporarily relocated to Baltimore after fleeing Philadelphia to avoid capture by the advancing British forces.

While textbooks tend to focus on generals and statesmen, LaRocque’s attention falls on Goddard and the workers in her print shop, people whose decisions helped shape history but whose names rarely appear in classrooms.

“Everyone remembers the signing,” he said. “But the printing was its own act of courage. Once those names were published, there was no retreat.”

The groundbreaking play is a classic LaRocque work. Throughout a career spanning nearly five decades, he has consistently sought out the quiet stories hiding in the corners of history.

LaRocque’s characters are rarely comfortable. They are seekers and skeptics caught in the act of becoming or even unraveling. They live at thresholds: between faith and doubt, desire and duty, inheritance and reinvention. His plays ask questions that are at once personal and cultural: What do we owe each other? Who gets to belong? How do we survive the stories we inherit?

“I’m interested in the moment where certainty cracks. That’s where people tell the truth,” he said.

Almost a decade in the making

When LaRocque began researching Declaration in 2017, he discovered a woman whose contribution to American history far exceeded her public recognition.

“There is no biography of her,” he said. “Not even a portrait that is indisputably acknowledged to be her likeness.”

The oversight was strangely liberating.

“Her obscurity was actually an asset,” he said. “I could imagine her more freely than I could a fully documented historical character.”

During the decade-long project, drafts evolved. Characters disappeared. Entire storylines were cut.

Looking back, LaRocque estimates that he spent years researching and at least six years writing the script.

The final result not only revives an overlooked chapter of the city’s history but also reflects the values that have guided LaRocque’s career: curiosity, persistence, and a deep respect for people history has forgotten. Those qualities have sustained him through 50 years of writing.

The long game

LaRocque’s journey to the theater was not entirely conventional. Before establishing himself as a playwright, actor and director, he spent 29 years on active duty as a U.S. Naval officer.

Much of that writing happened during his daily commute to and from the Pentagon. While other passengers read newspapers or stared out the window, LaRocque filled notebooks with scenes, dialogue and ideas.

“I wrote so many scripts commuting back and forth from the Pentagon on the Metro trains,” he recalled.

The military and the theater may seem like very different worlds. One emphasizes discipline and hierarchy; the other imagination and interpretation. Yet both depend on collaboration, trust and a shared mission. In both settings, individuals must work together toward something larger than themselves.

LaRocque’s military career occasionally intersected with theater in unexpected ways. During one deployment aboard a submarine, he helped stage a parody awards ceremony for the crew.

“It filled some of the dead spaces that inevitably occur on a long patrol,” he recalled.

Whether aboard a submarine, in a Pentagon office or later in rehearsal halls and theaters, LaRocque has always looked for stories.

In 1976, LaRocque submitted his first play and received his first rejection letter.

“I have been submitting — and getting rejected — pretty regularly ever since,” he said.

LaRocque jokes that he wishes he had saved the rejection letters because they would have made “a nice collection of theater stationery.”

Powerful works

One of the advantages of a long career is perspective. In the decades since LaRocque first put pen to paper, theaters have changed, audiences have changed, and the culture itself has changed. Entire artistic movements have come and gone.

Perhaps the most abrupt cataclysm was September 11, 2001. Stationed at the Pentagon when it was attacked, LaRocque witnessed firsthand one of the defining events of modern American history. The experience, from moment of impact to seeing a makeshift morgue in the building’s courtyard, eventually inspired his play September 11th Was a Tuesday.

Many of the anecdotes in the play came directly from conversations he had with Pentagon coworkers in the days and weeks after the attack.

What do people do when history arrives at their doorstep? How much courage does it take to stand behind one’s convictions?

For LaRocque, such questions are not confined to other centuries. The best historical dramas are never really about the past; they are about the present viewed through a different lens. The historical settings provide context, but the emotional questions remain familiar: fear, loyalty, ambition, love of country, doubt.

Characters come to life

LaRocque has written more than 30 plays, 16 of which have been performed. He has worked not only as a playwright but also as an actor and director, spending much of his career in the Washington-Baltimore theater community.

The regional theater world is filled with artists who labor largely outside public recognition, and LaRocque is comfortable in that space. He talks less about success than craft, noting the delight of sitting in a rehearsal room and watching actors discover something unexpected.

“Once actors get hold of a script, they find things you never knew were there,” he said.

His characters are rarely heroes or villains. More often they are people wrestling with uncertainty, trying to do the right thing without knowing exactly what that is. His plays suggest that history is not inevitable but shaped by countless individual choices.

One of LaRocque’s most enduring projects wasn’t a traditional play at all. Fascinated by the work of legendary World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle, he created a one-man show drawn entirely from Pyle’s dispatches.

First staged in 2011 and still being performed today, Byline: Ernie Pyle has taken him to libraries, theaters and senior living communities throughout the region.

“I expect that I’ll keep doing it until the memory gives out, or the legs — or both,” he said.

No plans to slow down

LaRocque retired from the Navy in 2005. Today, while many of his peers are contemplating retirement, LaRocque is still creating, researching, revising and filling notebooks.

He’s still fascinated with history because he believes the past remains relevant. The main character of Declaration, for instance, represents the people who quietly keep society moving forward while others receive the credit.

The famous men arrive, make speeches, sign documents and move on. But someone still has to print the declaration. Someone still has to keep the shop running. Someone still has to tell the story.

That, in many ways, has been LaRocque’s life’s work.

As Baltimore prepares to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, Declaration offers audiences an opportunity to look at familiar history from a different angle. It asks them to notice the people standing just outside the frame.

For LaRocque, the production, scheduled to run in December, is more than another staging.

“It’s a chance to bring a Baltimore story home.”