[One
of the things that has interested me in my reading about Bryan Doerries’s
Theater of War and their work is the way the script-writer and artistic
director selects a specific play from the classic repertoire for each problem
he wants to address.
[Then he creates the reading text himself—he was schooled as a classicist and translator—to suit the issue so that it’ll bring out the crux of each situation he wants his audience, made up of members of the community who suffer the most directly from the specific conflict—nurses, for instance, and the burn-out they experienced during the two-year pandemic brought on by the corona virus.
[I’m starting with another look at the readings of Henrik Ibsen’s An Emeny of the People this year, and then I’ll work backwards chronologically and look at other crises handled by other plays. There are four articles from various publications in Part 2 below.
[I should point out to readers who haven’t seen Part 1 (posted on 22 June) that it begins with a brief backgrounder of the company and some of its aims and tactics. It might be worth your while to go back now, before reading Part 2, and read that profile (as well as the two other pieces posted in that first installment).]
“AN ENEMY OF THE
by Dorothy Yaqub
[Part 1 of this series of posts on Theater of War focused largely on the reading of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People as a way to examine the dilemma of the public health professionals' apparent conflict with the general population, most notably during the COVID pandemic.
[I’m starting off my coverage of some of the other conflicts Bryan Doerries and his troupe confronted with other plays and texts with another look at the Ibsen reading by Dorothy Yaqub from the Kenyon Collegian of 11 April 2024. The Kenyon Collegian is the official student newspaper of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.]
Bryan Doerries ’98 co-founded Theater of War Productions in 2009 with a specific goal in mind. “We present readings and performances of seminal texts to create the conditions for dialogue about challenging and sometimes divisive, hard-to-discuss issues,” he told the audience gathered in Oden Auditorium [at Kenyon College] on Sunday afternoon [14 April 2024]. It was the second of two staged readings of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play An Enemy of the People, which Doerries himself adapted and directed [see Part 1, 22 June 2024]. The first performance was staged the previous night at the Knox Memorial Theater in Mount Vernon [Ohio].
The original version of An Enemy of the People is a lengthy play. Its five acts tell the story of Thomas Stockmann, a doctor in a small Norwegian town who discovers that the local water supply is contaminated. When Stockmann tries to alert the community to this crisis, he is scapegoated and shunned. Doerries’ adaptation features only the third and fourth acts of the play, which depict the doctor’s decision to call a town meeting about the contamination and the meeting itself, where Stockmann is shouted down by the townspeople. [I inserted a note about the play and its background in the first section of Part 1 of this serial post.]
The cast featured a diverse array of figures, ranging from professional actors (David Strathairn of “Nomadland”) to Mount Vernon public officials (Mayor Matthew T. Starr) to a Kenyon student (Osose Omofomah ’26) — there was even a cameo from President Julie Kornfeld [of Kenyon College]. However, the official performers were far from the only participants. During the scene of the town meeting, the audience was encouraged to take on the role of local attendees, shouting their opinions and heckling the doctor. Omofomah praised this element of the production in an email to the Collegian: “I thought it was really intriguing to observe the audience’s reactions change and evolve as the play wore on.”
After the performance concluded, the actors were replaced by a group of five panelists, with different community members composing the Saturday and Sunday panels. Each panelist briefly introduced themselves and shared their thoughts on An Enemy of the People’s modern-day relevance. Following these statements, Doerries turned the discussion over to the audience. Both in-person and Zoom attendees took turns asking questions and sharing their own insights about the play.
One topic that was clearly on everyone’s mind was public health. In a post-pandemic world, the town folks’ scapegoating of the doctor reminded audience members of COVID-19 denialism. They also discussed a variety of social issues, including access to clean drinking water and breakdown of democracy. “I’ve seen this three times now, and what struck me today was mob rule,” one attendee said. “It’s so terrifying, and we’re seeing it today in this country.”
This was just one of the many passionate testimonials that audience members shared. The panelists responded to each person thoughtfully, so even though the topics of discussion were serious, the dialogue session felt positive and productive. “I really enjoyed being a part of such a visceral and powerful experience for everyone involved, including the other actors on the panel and the audience who were constantly challenging us in our performances,” Omofomah reflected. Although An Enemy of the People’s protagonist may not have succeeded in his mission to save the town, Doerries certainly succeeded in his mission to create community dialogue.
[Dorothy Yaqub (Kenyon College class of 2026) is a journalist for the Kenyon Collegian, focusing on local news and events in Gambier, Ohio. Her articles cover a range of topics including arts and culture, student organizations, and community events. Yaqub aims to provide readers with engaging and informative stories that highlight the vibrant and diverse community at Kenyon College.]
* *
* *
“A
CONFLICT-THEATRE TROUPE
by Eric Lach
[The New Yorker posted Eric Lach’s look at the very current—and thorny—problem of student demonstrations from opposite perspectives on the Israeli war in Gaza on 4 March 2024.]
Theater of War productions tries [sic] to create a dialogue about Israel and Palestine through the Iliad and “The Trojan Women.”
The director and translator Bryan Doerries stood by the stage in Columbia University’s Miller Theatre the other night, watching an audience of students, faculty, and alumni file in. Since 2006, Doerries, who founded Theater of War Productions, has put on performances in locations riven by trauma and strife: military bases, prisons, gang-dominated neighborhoods, opioid-gripped towns. An Ivy League campus in 2024 was as volatile a venue as his troupe had encountered. Since October 7th, Columbia has been wrenched by protests, rage, and grief, with students, faculty, and alumni drawing rhetorical battle lines in support of either Israel or Palestine—yet Doerries expressed no trepidation. “In our form, the whole point is that the audience is the main character,” he said. “What Theater of War does for institutions is create conditions for dialogue that they couldn’t create for themselves.”
Three hundred and forty people had R.S.V.P.’d. College I.D.s were checked at the door. Doerries had chosen to present two passages from ancient Greek literature: Book VI of the Iliad, when the doomed Trojan warrior Hector bids farewell to both his wife, Andromache, and his young son, Astyanax; and the climax of Euripides’ [480-ca. 406 BCE] “The Trojan Women” [415 BCE], in which the freshly widowed Andromache is informed that a victorious Greek war council, led by Odysseus, has decided to execute her son, raze her city, and cart her off into slavery. The texts were Doerries’s translations. “If the dating is correct,” he said, “then the audience that originally watched ‘The Trojan Women’ would have been a militarized democracy that had just committed the kinds of atrocities, on the island of Melos, as the characters in the play.” After the performance, Doerries would lead a discussion. “We read something,” he said. “And then we break it open.”
[The Siege of Melos (according to Wikipedia): “During the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC) between Athens and Sparta, the Melians made some small donations to the Spartan war effort, but remained largely neutral despite sharing the Spartans’ Dorian ethnicity. In 426 BC, the Athenians raided the Melian countryside, and the following year demanded tribute, but Melos refused. In the summer of 416 BC, Athens invaded again with 3,400 men, and demanded that Melos ally with them against Sparta, or be destroyed. The Melians rejected this, so the Athenian army laid siege to the city and eventually captured it in the winter. After the city’s fall, the Athenians executed all the adult men, and sold the women and children into slavery. They then settled 500 of their own colonists on the island.”]
From his spot beside the stage, Doerries waved at Clémence Boulouque, a professor of Jewish and Israel studies, who had helped plan the performance. She took a seat in the auditorium. Boulouque is a member of the university’s task force on antisemitism; the group’s records are being sought by the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce. The night’s turnout encouraged her. The production had been placed on a boycott list by the Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition, a student group spurred, in part, by the university’s decision to suspend two other groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, both of which had been protesting the Israeli military’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza. “This is the reality here now,” Boulouque said. A few moments before the performance began, Minouche Shafik, the president of the university, sat down near Boulouque.
Doerries, who has a bushy beard and was wearing a black ball cap, introduced the players—five professional actors and seven students. The actors included the Tony winner Lois Smith, the Obie winner Elizabeth Marvel, and Glenn Davis, an artistic director of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company. The seven students, several of whom identified as Jewish or Arab, played the chorus. An eighth chorus member had got nervous and dropped out. The actors sat at a long table draped in black cloth. For an hour, they read their lines with blunt emotion.
[I’ve seen many of Lois Smith’s performances and reported on them on this blog. See “The Illusion,” 1 July 2011; “Heartless,” 10 September 2012; “The Trip to Bountiful,” 25 May 2013; “The Old Friends,” 10 October 2013; and “John,” 1 September 2015.]
“I would prefer to be dead, the earth piled high above my remains, than to hear your blood-curdling screams as they drag you away,” Davis (Hector) told Marvel (Andromache).
“Oh, dearest women,” Smith (Hector’s mother, Hecuba) said. “The gods, the gods—all this time they only wished to see us suffer. So great was their hatred for Troy.”
When the readings were done, the professionals exited the stage, leaving the student chorus. Doerries appeared with a microphone and floated around the audience, collecting responses. “It’s as if nothing will be left of Troy,” a member of the chorus, who identified himself as Palestinian and Egyptian, said, kicking off the conversation. “That is something that worries me every day.” A woman in the front row spoke about the Greeks’ taking “hostages,” and the horror of mourning loved ones without being able to bury their bodies. Another student in the audience talked about “Hamlet” [William Shakespeare (1564-1616); written between 1599 and 1601].
Thirty minutes into the discussion, Shafik, the university president, left. The members of the chorus took note. “There’s a large part of the community who has been wanting to engage in dialogue,” a young woman, who identified herself as Israeli, said. “And it’s not been happening, no matter how many administrators we go to.”
Afterward, Smith ambled out to the lobby and looked for Doerries. He was her ride home. Ninety-three years old, Smith made her film début in 1955, in “East of Eden.” She was full of praise for the students. “There’s been this sense of ‘Oh, it’s so fraught,’” she said. “Thank God it’s not all explosive. There was very much a sense of their thoughtfulness and seriousness.” Doerries found Smith, and the two walked out.
[Eric Lach, a New Yorker staff writer, has contributed to the magazine since 2008. His column on life in New York City appears regularly on newyorker.com.]
* *
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“THEATER OF WAR, A
VETERAN-HEALING PERFORMANCE,
by Alex Mitchell
[Alex Mitchell’s article about Theater of War’s reading of Sophocles’ Ajax to address the issue of suicide among combat veterans was posted to the website of the New York Post on 26 September 2023.]
A profound event that connects to veterans who may be struggling with life at home is coming to Roosevelt Island Wednesday [27 September 2023].
Theater of War Productions, an organization that uses ancient acting to connect with active and former military members, will be performing the ancient Greek tragedy “Ajax” with a star-studded cast at Four Freedoms Park from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. The event is free to attend both in person and online.
Jesse Eisenberg, Amy Ryan, Bill Camp and Ato Blankson-Wood are some of the lineup slated to read the intense script in front of more than 400 veterans – who have served as early as the Korean War [1950-53] – in addition to Blue Star families [the immediate family members of an active duty service member] and the Special Forces Association.
Although “Ajax” was written by Sophocles [ca. 496-406 BCE] in the 5th century B.C. [ca. 444 BCE], its content is something that even the most modern soldiers can connect with, according to Eduardo Jany, News Corp senior vice president of global security — a company which, in addition to Fox, partners with Theater of War Productions. [Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. also owns the New York Post, the publisher of this article.]
The timeless link is particularly in how the titular Greek warrior, glorified as a mighty hero, spirals after losing his close friend Achilles in the Trojan War. Ensuing trauma leads to his eventual suicide.
“If you listen to the words spoken, you understand how it resonates with modern battle and our lives today,” Jany – a retired Marine colonel who also served in the Army and Special Forces and is reading the role of Agamemnon – told The Post.
“Nothing has changed. There is the same guilty psyche, the worry from family and friends.”
It is the intention of the table-style reading, similar to the 15 years of past runnings from Theater of War Productions, to reach veterans in a way that connects them – along with their families – to unresolved issues brought on by their time in and after service.
“After 30 years in the military, I am aware that emotions often wind up like rocks in a rucksack. Eventually, your knees will buckle if you do not let it out,” Jany said.
A community panel and discussion with those in attendance will occur afterward as a public health tool for attendees. It will begin with raw reactions from Jany, other veterans, and one spouse of a service member.
“That’s when the real performance begins . . . audience members relating those [ancient Greek] lines to often harrowing personal experiences they haven’t shared with people they know, let alone a community that’s coming together to collectively bear witness to them,” Bryan Doerries, Theater of War’s artistic director, told The Post of the many cathartic moments had in front of a community of veterans.
“We’re only now, in the 21st century, rediscovering what the Greeks knew 2,500 years ago — which is that real healing takes place in groups and real healing takes place in the public,” Doerries, who personally translated the text from Greek, added.
Doerries said that he has witnessed firsthand the powerful impacts and uncanny connections that the audience makes after a Theater of War reading.
In many ways, it has saved lives.
“There are people getting up and saying, ‘I was thinking about taking my own life, but I saw myself reflected in the character and now I’m going to pursue a path of healing,’ or ‘I checked myself into a 28-day treatment program for drug and alcohol abuse.’”
While Doerries was quick to commend millenials for bringing a softer conversation on trauma into the open that’s allowed events like Theater of War to succeed, Jany too has seen connections made to the text span generations.
“Older warriors have stood up with tears in their eyes . . . many will see the light bulb go off and say ‘I know what I need to do now,’” he said.
The remarkable healing effect that Theater of War has on service members is, in many ways. why so many celebrity actors — including Paul Giamatti, Damian Lewis and Adam Driver [a former Marine] to name a few — were more than willing to sign onto the project in years past.
“If you told me 16 years ago, before I got started, that reading a play for an audience could be of life and death significance for those in attendance, I would say that sounds really exaggerated,” Doerries said.
“But the actors and I know . . . sometimes hearing a play, and seeing an ancient story that reflects your own experiences back to you, can be just a thing that’s needed for someone to begin pursuing a path of healing.”
[There’s no connection of which I know between Doerries and Theater of War, and Scott Mann and The Heroes Journey, creator and producer of Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret (see my post on 10 July 2023), but the rationale for both efforts—to let vets tell their stories—seems to come from the same impulse.
[On 3 September 2023, I posted an article called “Theater: A Healing Art.” Mann’s Last Out has a prominent place in that discussion, along a with a few other plays and performances. I didn’t know about Doerries and Theater of War at that time, but it clearly belongs in that effort as well.]
*
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“CONFRONTING GRIEF, WITH MARGARET ATWOOD,
[Alisha Haridasani Gupta’s report in Theater of War’s reading of Antigone for audiences of nurses appeared in the print edition of the New York Times on 16 March 2022.]
A dramatic reading by Theater of War Productions will include the author and practicing nurses who have held the front line of the pandemic.
It was a tragedy — an ancient Greek tragedy — that brought together three nurses on a Zoom call one night last week.
Charlaine Lasse, 55, had rushed home to Bowie, Md., after a 12-hour shift at Anne Arundel Medical Center, propping open her laptop as soon as she got to her dining room table. Also on the call were Amy Smith, 52, a nurse practitioner at Northwell Health-GoHealth Urgent Care in New York who was winding down for the night, and Aliki Argiropoulos, 26, a registered nurse in Baltimore who was studying for an exam.
[Anne Arundel Medical Center is in Annapolis, Maryland, the state capital and the seat of Anne Arundel County. Annapolis is about 20 miles east of Bowie in Prince George’s County and 32 miles south of Baltimore, site of Johns Hopkins University, a renowned private university with highly-rated medical and nursing schools. Bowie is about 27 miles south of Baltimore.]
After a few technical hiccups and brief introductions, they slipped into character, pretending to be elders in the city of Thebes.
“Oh, Light of the Sun, / more beautiful and / radiant than any rays / that have ever graced / this seven-gated city!” Argiropoulos said, kicking things off.
The three women were preparing for “The Nurse Antigone,” a dramatic reading of a translation of Sophocles’ “Antigone” [441 BCE] that is to be presented on Zoom on Thursday [17 March 2022] by Theater of War Productions. It will include famous names like the actors Bill Camp (“The Queen’s Gambit,” “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night”) and Taylor Schilling (“Orange Is the New Black”). The nurses will make up the chorus, though they have no professional acting experience — a fact that they share with one other famous co-star: the [Canadian] author Margaret Atwood [1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale].
Bryan Doerries, a founder of Theater of War Productions, said he wanted to present a play that specifically shined a light on the grief and anguish of nurses who have held the front line of the pandemic for the last two years. And “Antigone,” he added, touched on many of the themes that nurses around the world would be familiar with today. In the story, Antigone is determined to properly bury her brother — Polynices, the son of the former, disgraced king Oedipus — even though his burial has been forbidden by a decree from the new king, Creon. When she goes ahead and does what she thinks is right anyway, she is ordered to be buried alive.
“It’s a play about not being able to live up to your own standards of care and about deferred grief, which I think is the moral injury of the pandemic,” Doerries explained. “It’s an injury that has been visited upon nurses, not just because they lost their own because of their profession, but because they were also proxy family members for people in isolation.”
While most of the professional actors in this play have worked with Doerries on earlier projects, the addition of Atwood, who is portraying the blind prophet Tiresias, a character that pops up in several of Sophocles’ tragedies first as a man and then as a woman, was a fresh, last-minute addition. When the role opened up, Doerries said he turned to Atwood, who knows a thing or two about prophetic work. Her work, like “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “just seems so prescient,” he said. “One could see a Gilead easily emerging from the current climate.”
It wasn’t a hard sell. She responded to Doerries over email. “You want me to play an old, blind transgender prophet? That’s a dream come true!” he recalled her writing.
“We have a great admiration for nurses, and you just say yes to these things,” Atwood said later, during a call from her home in Toronto. “It’s like giving blood — you don’t say, ‘Well, on the one hand . . . and on the other.’”
The actors, both professional and nonprofessional, will not be wearing costumes (an attempt by Doerries to keep things unpolished and raw) — except for Atwood, who is the only one who needs some indicator that her character is blind. Days before the performance, she was contemplating a hooded cape that covered most of her face and possibly a pair of skeleton gloves.
The reading, which will be performed virtually and is the first in a yearlong initiative of 12 performances in collaboration with different nursing organizations around the country, comes about two years after the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic. It’s a crisis that has left frontline medical workers so exhausted and traumatized that they are quitting their jobs in droves. And a recent survey of thousands of nurses by the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses found that 66 percent considered leaving their posts because of their experiences during the pandemic.
“Nurses talk about how in the beginning everybody was clapping and cheering and calling us heroes,” said Cynda Rushton, a leader in clinical ethics who teaches at Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and at Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, who helped Doerries recruit nurses for the play. “But then as time has gone on and you think about the social unrest, the political divide, the anger that has developed in response to the pandemic, nurses — as the people who are closest to the patient — have been the recipient of that anger or that violence and frustration.”
Theater of War Productions was founded in 2008 [the ToW website says 2009] to take community-based performances of Greek tragedies to military bases, hospitals and other venues to help active service members and veterans, as well as their spouses and other military-adjacent workers, process and share war trauma. In the 14 years since its founding, the group has expanded its mission beyond military circles to other communities in crisis: the homeless, the incarcerated and survivors of addiction, abuse, natural disaster or racial violence.
During the pandemic — as people across socioeconomic, racial and geographic lines were thrust into crisis, grief, isolation and sickness — Theater of War Productions pivoted to performances on Zoom, many exploring the “moral suffering of frontline health care workers,” Doerries said.
In May 2020, the group presented a virtual reading of “Oedipus the King” [also by Sophocles; 429-420 BCE], starring Oscar Isaac as Oedipus, as well as Frances McDormand, John Turturro and Jeffrey Wright. More than 15,000 people tuned in that night, Doerries said.
For that production, Doerries worked with Rushton to find professionals to act in the virtual productions and participate in the post-performance panels. But the pandemic series has mostly centered on physicians. After that first performance on Zoom, Rushton proposed focusing solely on nurses.
“I just kept at it like a little chihuahua on your heels, saying, ‘Bryan, the nurses! The nurses!’ We have to find a way to give voice to that experience.”
After the “Antigone” reading, which will be broadcast live to groups of gathered nurses across the country, the actors will be removed from the screen. Lasse, Smith and Argiropoulos will remain to participate in a discussion with three other nurses and to engage with the audience.
Smith, who works in emergency medical care, had worked with Doerries in February as a panelist. Returning as an actor, she said, felt like an opportunity to finally process some of the emotions and themes that she and nurses across the world have been too busy to tackle. “A lot of us, especially in nursing, have to keep moving,” Smith said. “There’s no time to stop and say, ‘Hey, let’s reflect on what just happened.’”
“Hopefully, the play is healing for people,” she said.
[Alisha Haridasani Gupta is a gender reporter for the New York Times, covering politics, business, technology, health and culture through the gender lens. She writes the “In Her Words” newsletter.
[I have more articles that reveal
how Theater of War uses different plays from the classic repertoire to address different
issues arising from emotional conflicts among different communities. I’ll be posting Part 3 of this series on 28
June, reaching further back in ToW’s history.]
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