Theater of War, Part 1

 

Theater of War Productions is a “social impact” theater company, co-founded in 2009 by Bryan Doerries and Phyllis Kaufman, who served as producing director from 2009 to 2016.  Doerries (pronounced DOOR-eez) is the company’s current artistic director.  (The date of Theater of War’s founding is reported variously in other sources, with years earlier than 2009, but that is the year ToW puts on its website (Home - Theater of War).

Theater of War presents unstaged dramatic readings to create community-specific projects that “address pressing public health and social issues,” according to their website.  In the beginning, they addressed soldiers and veterans, but they have expanded their audience focus and have presented readings for nurses, corrections officers, public health workers, and even convicts.

The readings are performed by casts that include well-known professional actors such as Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Jeffrey Wright, Adam Driver, Jesse Eisenberg, Paul Giamatti, Jake Gyllenhaal, Alfred Molina, Samira Wiley, Jay O. Sanders, Frankie Faison, and David Strathairn.  Many of these prominent film, television, and stage performers have done several ToW projects.

The pros form the core of the readings’ casts, but they are joined by members of the target community, including senior officials and administrators.  At first, the texts were exclusively classic Greek tragedies, such as Ajax (442 or 441 BCE), Oedipus the King (429-420 BCE), and Antigone (441 BCE) by Sophocles (497/496-406/405 BCE) and Aeschylus’ (525/524-456 BCE) Prometheus Bound (ca. 430 BCE).  Sometimes this included non-dramatic texts, such as readings from The Iliad.

Soon Theater of War began using more modern classics, such as in their current project, Norwegian playwright and theater director Henrik Ibsen’s (1828-1906) An Enemy of the People (1882).  ToW will also use contemporary dramas for the right project. 

Doerries has a background and training in the classics and stage directing.  He’s also a writer and translator, and he composes the translations and adaptations of the texts used for ToW’s readings.  In his biographical sketch on the Theater of War website, Doerries calls himself ”an evangelist for ancient stories and their relevance to our lives today.”

The readings are designed to confront social issues highlighted in the plays.  (Ibsen’s Enemy, as you’ll read, is a 19th-century drama at whose center is a controversy that greatly resembles the COVID pandemic, with a central character who can be seen as an avatar of Dr. Anthony Fauci.)  The readings are followed by town hall-style panel discussions which are intended to draw out “raw and personal reactions” to the themes of the plays.  

“The guided discussions underscore how the plays resonate with contemporary audiences,” states the ToW website, “and invite audience members to share their perspectives and experiences, . . . helping to break down stigmas, foster empathy, compassion, and a deeper understanding of complex issues.”

[I’ve selected two articles that report on the work of Theater of War.  The first is the transcript of a segment from the PBS News Hour and focuses on the production of An Enemy of the People.  The second is a review of Brian Doerries’s book describing and explaining the work of his troupe, The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today.

[There is a surfeit of coverage of ToW’s work over the decade-and-a-half of its existence.  I’ll be posting a few more pieces dealing with different plays and communities.  The next post will be published on Tuesday, 25 June.]

*  *  *  *
“THEATER ADAPTS ‘AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE’
TO ADDRESS PUBLIC HEALTH AFTER THE PANDEMIC”
by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport 

[Correspondent Jeffrey Brown’s report on Bryan Doerries’s Theater of War project was aired on PBS News Hour on 7 June 2024. (Note that the broadcast has recently changed its name slightly.)]

Geoff Bennett [PBS News Hour Co-Anchor]: Actors, experts and community members are turning to a classic play to address contemporary trauma and tensions from the pandemic.

Jeffrey Brown has this look as part of our new series Art in Action, exploring the intersection of art and democracy. It’s part of our ongoing arts and culture coverage, Canvas.

Actor [Jay O. Sanders, in reading from stage]: Yesterday, you said that the water supply was contaminated by impurities in the soil.

David Strathairn, Actor [in reading]: Yes, exactly. The source is undoubtedly the toxic swamp up in Mildale.

Jeffrey Brown: A major health crisis has been discovered. The water in a local spa is contaminated. Lives and the economy are threatened. The public must be told, or should it?

Actor [in reading]: We must bury it for the good of the people.

Jeffrey Brown: Who decides, and who decides what actions, if any, to take? At stake, public health and democracy itself.

Bryan Doerries, Artistic Director, Theater of War Productions: This play is about a public health catastrophe that was in the late 19th century, in 1882. It’s made up, but it could be today.

And it creates the context where we can talk about not just what just happened over the last four years, but how do we ensure that it doesn’t happen again?

Let’s do the first couple pages.

Jeffrey Brown: Bryan Doerries is founder and artistic director of Theater of War Productions, which turns to ancient and classic plays to explore and spur discussion of contemporary issues and trauma.

Actress [in reading]: He has the thousand-yard stare.

Jeffrey Brown: We watched in 2010 as he used Greek tragedy that still speaks to the rise in suicide rates in today’s military, presented at a base.

And, in 2016, in a Missouri community torn apart after the killing of a young Black man, Michael Brown, in “Antigone in Ferguson.”

Actress [in reading]: Because there is nothing shameful in loyalty to a brother!

Bryan Doerries: I see it as a form of mediation. These ancient texts that we perform or the texts of the classical plays we perform create a kind of vocabulary for people to talk about hard things.

Protesters [“plants” in audience]: No more shots! No more shots!

Jeffrey Brown: Now a pandemic that took well over a million lives in the U.S. alone, uncertain, at times chaotic government responses, masks weaponized, public health officials threatened.

Frankie Faison, Actor [in reading]: Concoct all those conspiracies you can think of.

Jeffrey Brown: Here seen through the lens of an enduring 19th century play, “An Enemy of the People” by Henrik Ibsen about a doctor named Thomas Stockmann who wants to protect his community . . .

[The book on An Enemy of the People (Norwegian: En folkefiende): The play was published on 28 November 1882. Its reception was mixed, unsurprisingly, as Stockmann’s harsh remarks about political parties offended all the reviewers, who belonged to one or another party.  

[The first English translation (originally rendered as An Enemy of Society) was made in 1888 by Eleanor Marx-Aveling (1855-98), a daughter of Karl Marx (1818-83) and an influential socialist activist in her own right. Arthur Miller (1915-2005) made a popular adaptation in 1950 which was performed on Broadway in 1950-51. A film version based on Miller’s adaptation came out in 1978 with Steve McQueen (1930-80) as Stockmann. For Theater of War, Doerries created his own adaptation based on the Miller text.

[Enemy was first performed in Christiania (now Oslo) on 13 January 1883. It was quickly taken up by theaters in Denmark and Sweden, and then around Western Europe, eventually playing at the Moscow Art Theater in 1900. The play’s London première was on 14 June 1893 at the Haymarket Theatre, with Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1852-1917) as Stockmann, in a production that later went on tour to the United States, playing in New York City at Abbey’s Theatre at Broadway and 38th Street in what’s now Manhattan’s Garment District in April 1895.

[A current Broadway production, unrelated to the Theater of War readings, opened at the Circle in the Square Theatre in the Times Square district on 18 March 2024 (for a limited run until 23 June), adapted by Amy Herzog and directed by Sam Gold, with Jeremy Strong as Dr. Stockmann and Michael Imperioli as his brother, the mayor. The production received five Tony nominations (including for Best Revival of a Play) and won one (Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play for Strong).

[Ibsen wrote An Enemy of the People in response to the harsh criticism with which Ghosts (1881) had been received, but the plot of Enemy had its origin in two actual incidents. Alfred Meissner (German: Meißner; 1822-85), a young Austrian poet whom Ibsen knew in Munich, had told him how, when his father, Eduard (1785-1868), had been a medical officer at the Bohemian spa of Teplitz (now Teplice, Czech Republic) in the 1830s, there was an outbreak of cholera which the doctor felt it his duty to make known publicly. As a result, the season was ruined and the citizens of Teplitz became so enraged that they stoned the doctor’s house and forced him to flee the town.

[Then there had been the case in Norway of a pharmacist named Harald Thaulow (1815-81). For nearly 10 years, Thaulow had heatedly attacked the Christiania Steam Kitchens, ostensibly a charitable organization to feed the city’s poor while actually a profit­making scheme riddled with graft, for neglecting their duty toward the impoverished. He had delivered a violent speech on the subject in 1874 during Ibsen’s visit to Norway, and on 23 February 1881, only a fortnight before he died, Thaulow attempted to read a prepared speech at the annual meeting of the Steam Kitchens.

[The chairman of the meeting tried to prevent Thaulow from speaking, and eventually the public forced him, amid commotion, to withdraw. Ibsen read a report of this meeting in the Aftenposten (Oslo’s daily newspaper, regarded as the paper of record for Norway) of 24 February, just at the time when his indignation at the reception of Ghosts (1881) was reaching its climax.]

David Strathairn [in reading]: They will all have my back if things get ugly.

Jeffrey Brown: . . . but who in the process reveals his own biases and flaws and becomes both hero and enemy.

It was presented recently in what Doerries referred to as a temple of experts, the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., in reading [sic] by top actors, including David Strathairn . . .

David Strathairn [in reading]: This might just do nobody any good.

Jeffrey Brown: . . . known for such films as “Good Night, and Good Luck,” which brought an Oscar nomination for best actor [as legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow (1908-65)] . . .

David Strathairn [in a film clip]: That’s Jason Bourne.

Jeffrey Brown: . . . and for the blockbuster Bourne movies, here playing Dr. Stockmann.

David Strathairn: He’s a hero. He’s — he could be a civic servant, civil servant, a doctor, and do no harm, and that’s what he’s trying not to do.

Jeffrey Brown: You’re calling him a hero, but then, in the play, many see him as . . .

David Strathairn: As an enemy.

Jeffrey Brown: As an enemy.

David Strathairn: Yes.

Jeffrey Brown: Did that resonate for the way you see things today?

David Strathairn: Yeah. Yeah, in a word. I mean, yeah. I mean, there’s so many more issues than just him being an enemy. It’s about the press, the media . . .

Frankie Faison, Actor: The money.

David Strathairn: The money.

Frankie Faison: Politics.

David Strathairn: The politics of the situation, which are — it goes without saying how present those things are in our lives today.

Frankie Faison [clip from The Wire]: The Barksdale case was a successful prosecution.

Jeffrey Brown: Like Strathairn, actor Frankie Faison, best known from “The Wire” and the Hannibal Lecter films, has joined many Theater of War projects over the years.

Frankie Faison: I got a chance to work with amazing actors and amazing texts, I mean, scripts that are just brilliant. You got a chance to exercise that vocal thing without any pressure. You don’t have to worry about critics being on top of us, and you do this. It’s a sharing.

And we share this information. And then, through that sharing, it opens up a conversation with the audience that just blows our mind.

Jeffrey Brown: This audience included many in the public health community, several of whom took part in the performance from the audience, including Professor Jeffrey Kahn . . .

Jeffrey Kahn, Johns Hopkins University [in reading]: If you’re talking about me . . .

Jeffrey Brown: . . . director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, here playing a drunken citizen.

Jeffrey Kahn: I don’t think we all appreciated that public health professionals would be attacked for their views. That’s never happened in our lifetime.

Dr. Vivian Pinn, Director, NIH [National Institutes of Health] Office of Research on Women’s Health: Yes, that’s right.

Jeffrey Kahn: But here’s Ibsen, who wrote a play in 1882, writing about exactly that.

Jeffrey Brown: But there’s a twist. Here, the health experts play average citizens angry about the upheaval to their lives that the doctor is proposing.

Jeffrey Kahn: We are taking the position of shouting down the experts. So it’s a bit of a turning of the tables.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes, how does that feel?

(Laughter)

Jeffrey Kahn: It feels uncomfortable. I think that’s exactly the point.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes.

Dr. Vivian Pinn: Yes.

Jeffrey Kahn: Yes.

Jeffrey Brown: Dr. Vivian Pinn, the first full-time director of the NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health, has been through such battles.

To her, Dr. Stockmann was right in his science, but wrong in his interaction with the community, insulting the townspeople for not recognizing his expertise or following his demands.

David Strathairn [in reading]: How in God’s name can it ever be right for the wise to be ruled over by fools?

(Booing from “audience”)

Dr. Vivian Pinn: I was really kind of concerned when I was reading the script for this play at some of Dr. Stockmann’s comments about the lower class, the poor, the dirty, and I was thinking, yikes, what we’re really focusing on today in public health is being able to interact with the community, get the community involved in what we’re doing.

Jeffrey Brown: Still, she says, the tension hits home.

Dr. Vivian Pinn: Yes, he’s not right in everything he says, but, gee whiz, don’t you want to listen to the truth?

Jeffrey Brown: Such questions were then taken up by panel members, an emergency services paramedic lieutenant.

Man [from stage in panel discussion with audience]: During the pandemic, which this play resonates so deeply with, there was such certainty in the way people spoke that they planted the seeds of the automatic response when people speak from such certainty of, how do you know what you’re talking about? I know I didn’t know what I was seeing.

I saw it in [the] front line. I was going to, on 13 — average, 10 to 13 cardiac arrests a day. I didn’t know what was going on. How do they know?

Jeffrey Brown: Former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins.

Dr. Francis Collins, Former Director, National Institutes of Health [in panel discussion]: I’m always looking to find a hero. I always feel like there ought to be one. I didn’t find one in this play.

(Laughter)

Jeffrey Brown: A local business owner.

Woman [in panel discussion]: But how do you gain back the trust of officials and government and people that are in charge that you wanted to — that you believed in the beginning.

Jeffrey Brown: And members of the audience.

Woman [from audience]: As much as we want a hero, heroes do not monopolize truth, capital T. They may have a slice of truth.

Man [from audience]: Full disclosure, I’m a Catholic priest. This idea of learning how to trust each other again, which means learning how to love each other again, and recognizing that that is going to involve humility, of people recognizing they’re wrong.

Woman [from audience]: I was struck by the absence of an independent press in this play. A free press is essential to a democratic society.

Jeffrey Brown: Ultimately, just as in real life, the public health crisis in the play becomes a test of democracy itself.

In fact, says Bryan Doerries:

Bryan Doerries: I think the core critique is in the public health. It’s, can this kind of democracy work?

Jeffrey Brown: Right.

Bryan Doerries: And we’re entering 2024 with a giant crowd scene with people screaming at a stage and chanting vile things at someone who’s trying to help them, who then chants vile things back at them.

Seems like an appropriate place to start this election year and to be framing conversations.

Jeffrey Brown: Following the National Academy of Sciences performance, Theater of War Productions took “An Enemy of the People” to audiences in rural Ohio, next stop outdoors in New York’s Times Square on June 12.

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in Washington, D.C 

[In his more than 30-year career with the News Hour, Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe. 

[As arts correspondent, Brown has profiled many of the world's leading writers, musicians, actors and other artists.  Among his signature works at the News Hour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the News Hour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times.

[Anne Azzi Davenport is the Senior Producer of CANVAS at PBS News Hour.]

*  *  *  *
“‘THE THEATER OF WAR,’ BY BRYAN DOERRIES”
Reviewed by James Shapiro 

[In 2015, Doerries wrote a book about his classic theater work with various groups.  He entitled his volume the same as his project, The Theater of War.  Below is the New York Times review, published on 2 October 2015, of the book.]

The theater of ancient Greece was many things: a literary competition; a Dionysian religious rite; a place where citizens gathered to see plays that explored pressing social and political concerns; and through its portrayal of human suffering, a site of collective catharsis.

It is the last of these, especially the therapeutic potential of catharsis, that most interests Bryan Doerries. Trained as a classicist and theater director, and scarred by witnessing the suffering and death of his girlfriend and his father, Doerries sought in these old plays methods of dealing with unhealed wounds. “The Theater of War” recounts these and other experiences that led him to found a company that shares its name with his book. A catalyst for Doerries was the struggles of veterans who had returned home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Persuading the United States military that post-traumatic stress might be ameliorated by exposing troops to the words of classical dramatists could not have been an easy sell, though it probably helped to say that Sophocles’ plays had been written by a retired general. The stakes were high when in 2008 Doerries and his actors were at last given permission to perform scenes from Sophocles’ “Ajax” and “Philoctetes” [409 BCE], in his own translations, for 400 Marines, some of whom had brought along their spouses. (Doerries’s renderings of these and other plays are now available in a paperback volume from Vintage.) The postproduction discussion went on for over three hours before Doerries cut things off, and his account of the responses to the trauma experienced by two soldiers who fought in the Trojan War — the suicidal Ajax and the injured and abandoned Philoctetes — makes clear why the Department of Defense soon approved a hundred additional performances.

Over time Doerries managed to recruit dozens of star performers, including Adam Driver, Paul Giamatti, Frances McDormand, David Strathairn and Jesse Eisenberg, to provide energetic table readings of key scenes — “Vocal cords were shredded. Spit flew” — that preceded and prompted the often fraught public discussions.

What began on military bases gradually spread to scores of American communities where people were hurting and theater could make a difference. Doerries’s next choice, Aeschylus’ “Prometheus Bound,” whose protagonist endures “extreme incarceration,” was, Doerries believed, well suited for American prisons (though wardens proved even harder to persuade of the value of such performances than the generals had been). It would lead Doerries to prisons across the land and eventually to a performance before the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo Bay. If this chapter is less satisfying it’s probably because of the more tenuous connection between the strange and episodic play and the issue Doerries is keen to explore. I’m less sure than he that the tragedy is essentially about “discipline and power,” nor am I persuaded that the suffering of the god Prometheus, punished for giving fire to humanity, is all that similar to the experience of the thousands of convicts in America enduring solitary confinement. Doerries was on stronger ground with his next choice, Sophocles’ “The Women of Trachis” [ca. 450-425 BCE], about the assisted suicide of Heracles, where the play’s ethical dilemmas speak with greater immediacy to contemporary concerns.

It was in the aftermath of a 2011 performance of “The Women of Trachis” before an audience of mostly senior citizens in Falmouth, Mass., that it would dawn on Doerries — it’s the anagnorisis [the moment in a play or other work when a character makes a critical discovery] of his own drama — that all his work on Greek tragedy had been to one end, “surrounding myself with people who wanted to face the darkness together and tell their stories,” so that “hope can be found in tragedy.” His moment of recognition serves as a fitting climax to an impressive and accomplished journey.

THE THEATER OF WAR: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today
By Bryan Doerries
284 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.

[James Shapiro teaches English at Columbia University.  His most recent book is The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606.

[Vintage has published three books of play texts in Bryan Doerries’s adaptations.  The ones that were released when this review was published in the New York Times were Sophocles: Philoctetes: A New Translation (12 August 2014) and All That You’ve Seen Here Is God: New Versions of Four Greek Tragedies Sophocles’ Ajax, Philoctetes, Women of Trachis; Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound (1 September 2015).  These two volumes were joined on 26 October 2021 by Oedipus Trilogy: New Versions of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone.]