[Below
is Part 3 of “Theater of War,” a collection of press commentary on the work of
the theater troupe founded and directed by Bryan Doerries. I started with the company’s most recent
project, readings of Henrik Ibsen’s An Emeny of the People, an 1882 play that deals
with a public health official who is called upon to close his town’s hot water
spa, its main source of income, when he discovers the waters are contaminated.
[I
moved back through ToW’s history with other classic plays as vehicles for
discussing different conflicts faced by other professionals in modern society,
such as nurse burn-out during COVID (Sophocles’ Antigone). Part 3 continues that look back at the work
of Doerries’s company.
[Readers
who have just joined this thread may want to check back into Parts 1 and
2 (posted on 22 and 25 June). The first
installment in the series, for instance, includes a short profile of Theater of
War and the pieces of journalism in both the earlier parts include commentary that
might be useful.]
“THEATER OF WAR
GIVES TROOPS
MORE THAN A SHOW
OF SYMPATHY”
by Peter Marks
[Peter
Marks’s look at the Theater of War‘s reading of Sophocles’ Ajax to discuss the
issue of veterans who commit suicide ran in the Washington Post on 2
January 2022.]
Introducing a Greek tragedy about a soldier who dies by his
own hand is not what you think of as normal duty for one of the military’s top
brass. But that was the mission of Navy Rear Adm. Frank M. Bradley, commander
of U.S. armed forces’ Special Operations Command Central in Tampa, who recently
spoke to a gathering of servicemen and women watching the session online from
around the world.
“There’s not one of us that hasn’t been touched by suicide
somewhere in our lives, through our extended families and friends, and as
everybody knows, it is a plague that knows no bounds of time or segments of
society,” Bradley said. “And so, having the opportunity to witness this [play
reading] . . . is a great gift.”
The gift itself was not standard-issue, either. A series of
scenes from Sophocles’s “Ajax” [442 or 441 BCE] was performed live on Zoom by
Theater of War, a 13-year-old professional troupe that recruits actors – some
as renowned as Frances McDormand and Bill Murray – to give voice to ancient
texts. The nonprofit organization seeks to focus these dramas, like healing
lamps, on deep societal wounds. Their specialty is age-old plays that speak to
wrenching contemporary issues, such as drug addiction, racial injustice, terminal
illness and the climate crisis. Or, in the case of the performance for members
of the Special Operations Command Central – which goes by the acronym SOCCENT –
the aftershocks of combat.
A 2021 study by Brown University’s Cost of War Project
reported that suicides by active-duty personnel and veterans “are reaching new
peaks.” It found that while 7,057 members of the armed forces were killed in
military action since 9/11, more than four times as many active-duty members
and veterans – 30,177 – died by suicide. The report noted that the military
suicide rates now exceed those for the general population, when historically
they had been lower.
It was out of concern for this disturbing trend that
Bradley, who’d seen other Theater of War productions, brought its work to the
attention of Marine Corps Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., commander [2019-22] of
the U.S. Central Command [responsible for U.S. military operations in the
Middle East, Central Asia, and parts of South Asia]. He agreed to a series of
online training sessions for chaplains and others in Special Operations
intended to propel the issue of suicide more emphatically into the open.
“I’m very concerned about the very toxic effects that the
battlefield has on people – anybody who tells you it doesn’t affect you is
wrong. It does affect us all,” McKenzie said in a Zoom interview. “In the
largest sense, Theater of War is a mechanism to provide a venue for people to
talk about their experiences.”
Library bookshelves are
loaded with plays about war, but opportunities for serious drama and the modern
military to engage with each other remain rare. Bryan Doerries, Theater of
War’s artistic director, had no models to work with when, motivated by a personal
tragedy [Doerries addresses this in Eilf Batuman’s New Yorker article below]
and the desire to respond meaningfully to the war in Iraq, he formed the
classically oriented theater company in 2009 with co-founder Phyllis Kaufman,
who was its producing director until 2016. The company grew out of his work
earlier in the 2000s, when Doerries, a translator of ancient Greek drama, had
begun staging readings of the plays in hospitals and elsewhere, and sensed how
rawly and powerfully audiences experienced them.
“I began to see that the audience knew more than I did,”
Doerries recalled, “even though I studied Greek, even though I directed these
translations.” Having followed news reports about substandard care in veterans
hospitals, Doerries turned his attention to military audiences. “It took a year
and a half of learning how to talk to people in the military, of making a lot
of mistakes, of having doors slammed in my face, of sitting in smoke-filled
rooms with veterans,” he said.
Eventually, he made inroads, persuading organizers of a
conference on combat stress among Marines to allow him to stage scenes from
“Ajax” – which tells of a great Greek soldier’s decision to kill himself after
his humiliation at being denied a ceremonial honor. “A discussion [after the
reading] we scheduled for 45 minutes lasted 3½ hours, and had to be cut off at
midnight,” Doerries said. “And every person who stood up quoted lines from the
play as if they’d known it their entire lives.”
Given the profound catharsis a piece of relevant drama can
summon, it’s surprising more theater isn’t devised for those who’ve been to
war. Douglas Taurel, an actor and playwright, has learned this over the past
several years, as he’s traveled the country with his one-man show, “The
American Soldier.” Based in part on the letters of members of the armed forces,
Taurel’s 90-minute piece weaves together soldiers’ stories from the
Revolutionary War to the war in Afghanistan. He’s performed it in venues as large
as the Kennedy Center and as small as community halls.
“I have audiences where the veterans, they like to sit in
the front rows, you know, with their arms folded across their chests,” Taurel
said of their initial skepticism. By the end of his production – performed in
front of an American flag, along with a single trunk full of props – he said
many of them are in tears and asking why his play isn’t better known. “Some
even ask me why it isn’t on Broadway,” Taurel said with a laugh.
Theater of War has a more therapeutic aim. In its military
programming, the company, which relies on foundations and other private sources
for financial support, has visited bases all over the world. The pandemic, of
course, curtailed its mobility and compelled it to shift to virtual
presentations, but the move to digital actually expanded the company’s
audience. “Zoom was another explosion for us,” Doerries said, noting that as
many as 20,000 viewers in 82 countries have tuned in to a single event.
In November, the Internet provided what Doerries calls his
“digital amphitheater” for the 40-minute presentation for SOCCENT of scenes
from the Greek play. “‘Ajax,’” he said in his opening remarks, “was written by
a general named Sophocles [ca. 496-406 BCE] and performed in the 5th century
BCE for as many as 17,000 citizen soldiers, who sat shoulder to shoulder in an
ancient amphitheater with the generals in the front row.”
In the charged aftermath of the American withdrawal from
Afghanistan, a reckoning with the psychological toll of the country’s
two-decade involvement offered emotional subtext for the session. To underline
the issue of suicide, the actors – Alex Morf as Chorus, Glenn Davis as Ajax and
Marjolaine Goldsmith as Ajax’s mistress, Tecmessa – played out Sophocles’s
dramatization of the agonizing final moments of Ajax’s life, as the indignity
of being refused the armor of his dead friend, Achilles, overwhelms him.
“These are the last words you will hear Ajax speak!” Davis
cries, before shrieking out a high-pitched death rattle.
“It’s over, friends,” Goldsmith’s Tecmessa declares, upon
discovering Ajax’s body. “Everything is lost.”
“What is it?” shouts Morf.
“Ajax, impaled on his sword,” Tecmessa replies.
“He has killed us with this death!” Morf calls out.
After the reading, service members spoke of the familiar
signs of suffering that “Ajax” conjured; of the pain of loved ones, who could
not fully grasp what occurs to a human on a battlefield. (To protect the
privacy of the participants, a spokesman for SOCCENT asked that the audience
members remain anonymous.)
One commenter, though, seemed to speak for many when he gave
his own eloquent interpretation of Ajax’s pain: “His heart was broken from the
beginning,” he said of the title character. “And I think the entire play is a
cascading effect, that Ajax was slipping on a very slippery slope. At the very
end, he slips and it’s hard to watch because it’s real. It is extremely real
and it’s uncomfortable. But the fact that it is highly uncomfortable is
probably the best thing about it.”
McKenzie and Bradley acknowledged the value in exposing
military men and women to drama that explores the universality of trauma.
“The military has a very almost antiseptic veneer,” Bradley
said. “We behave with each other in a calm, cool [way] under stress. But you
know, deep down, these people are human.”
[Peter Marks was the Washington Post's chief theater critic from 2002 to
2023. He left the Post in
2024. Previously, he worked for nine
years at the New York Times, on the culture, metropolitan and national
desks, and spent about four years as its off-Broadway drama critic.]
* *
* *
“CAN GREEK TRAGEDY
GET US THROUGH THE PANDEMIC?”
by Elif Batuman
[Moving
back two years, Elif Batuman of the New Yorker examines Theater of War’s reading of Oedipus
the King (aka Oedipus Rex,
429-420 BCE) as a catalyst for discussing the response to COVID, which
was just beginning its devastation by 1 September 2020, when this
article appeared on the magazine’s website,
[A
quick caveat: Batuman’s discussion of ToW’s Oedipus is longer than most of the posts on
Rick On Theater because she discusses a great many topics—and she does
so at length. She also covers some bits
of the background and history of both Bryan Doerries and Theater of War,
including several of the other readings he and his troupe have given (including
one that was actually done before Doerries formed the company, a sort of
prototype of the work they’d do in their future).]
A theatre company has spent years bringing catharsis to
the traumatized. In the coronavirus era, that’s all of us.
Children of Thebes, why are you here?” Oscar Isaac asked.
His face filled the monitor on my dining table. (It was my partner’s turn to
use the desk.) We were a couple of months into lockdown, just past seven in the
evening, and a few straggling cheers for essential workers came in through the
window. Isaac was looking smoldery with a quarantine beard, a gold chain, an
Airpod, and a black T-shirt. His display name was set to “Oedipus.”
Isaac was one of several famous actors performing Sophocles’
“Oedipus the King” from their homes, in the first virtual
performance by Theater of War Productions: a group that got its start
in 2008, staging Sophocles’ “Ajax” and “Philoctetes” [409 BCE] for U.S.
military audiences and, beginning in 2009, on military installations around the
world, including in Kuwait, Qatar, and Guantánamo Bay, with a focus on combat
trauma. After each dramatic reading, a panel made up of people in active
service, veterans, military spouses, and/or psychiatrists would describe how
the play resonated with their experiences of war, before opening up the
discussion to the audience. Since its founding, Theater of War Productions has
addressed different kinds of trauma. It has produced Euripides’ [480-ca. 406 BCE]
“The Bacchae” [405 BCE] in rural communities affected by the opioid crisis,
“The Madness of Heracles” [416 BCE, also by Euripides] in neighborhoods
afflicted by gun violence and gang wars, and Aeschylus’ [ca. 525/524-456 BCE] “Prometheus
Bound” [ca. 430 BCE] in prisons. “Antigone in Ferguson” [based on Sophocles’ Antigone
(441 BCE)] which focusses on crises between communities and law
enforcement, was motivated by an analogy between Oedipus’ son’s unburied
body and that of Michael Brown, left on the street for roughly four
hours after Brown was killed by police [Ferguson, Missouri; 2014]; it was
originally performed at Michael Brown’s high school.
Now, with trauma roving the globe more contagiously than
ever, Theater of War Productions had traded its site-specific approach for
Zoom. The app was configured in a way I hadn’t seen before. There were no
buttons to change between gallery and speaker view, which alternated seemingly
by themselves. You were in a “meeting,” but one you were powerless to control,
proceeding by itself, with the inexorability of fate. There was no way to view
the other audience members, and not even the group’s founder and director,
Bryan Doerries, knew how numerous they were. Later, Zoom told him that it had
been fifteen thousand. This is roughly the seating capacity of the theatre of
Dionysus [on the Acropolis in Athens; dating to the mid- to late-6th century BCE],
where “Oedipus the King” is believed to have premièred, around 429 B.C. Those
viewers, like us, were in the middle of a pandemic: in their case, the Plague
of Athens.
[The
Plague of Athens (430-426 BCE) was an epidemic (of still-uncertain cause or
origin) that devastated Athens during the Peloponnesian War. The plague killed
an estimated 75,000 to 100,000 people, around a quarter to a third of the
population.]
The original audience would have known Oedipus’ story from
Greek mythology: how an oracle had predicted that Laius, the king of Thebes,
would be killed by his own son, who would then sleep with his mother; how the
queen, Jocasta, gave birth to a boy, and Laius pierced and bound the child’s
ankles, and ordered a shepherd to leave him on a mountainside. The shepherd
took pity on the maimed baby, Oedipus (“swollen foot”), and gave him to a
Corinthian servant, who handed him off to the king and queen of Corinth, who
raised him as their son. Years later, Oedipus killed Laius at a crossroads,
without knowing who he was. Then he saved Thebes from a Sphinx, became the king
of Thebes, had four children with Jocasta, and lived happily for many years.
That’s where Sophocles picks up the story. Everyone would
have known where things were headed—the truth would come out, and Oedipus would
blind himself—but not how they would get there. How Sophocles got there was by
drawing on contemporary events, on something that was in everyone’s mind,
though it doesn’t appear in the original myth: a plague.
In the opening scene, Thebes is in the grip of a terrible
epidemic. Oedipus’ subjects come to the palace, imploring him to save the city,
describing the scene of pestilence and panic, the screaming and the corpses in
the street. Something about the way Isaac voiced Oedipus’ response—“Children. I
am sorry. I know”—made me feel a kind of longing. It was a degree of
compassion conspicuous by its absence in the current Administration. [September
2020 was at the end of President Trump’s term, which ended on 20 January 2021.]
I never think of myself as someone who wants or needs “leadership,” yet I found
myself thinking, We would be better off with Oedipus. “I would be a weak
leader if I did not follow the gods’ orders,” Isaac continued,
subverting the masculine norm of never asking for advice. He had already sent
for the best information out there, from the Delphic Oracle.
Soon, Oedipus’ brother-in-law, Creon—John Turturro, in a
book-lined study—was doing his best to soft-pedal some weird news from Delphi.
Apparently, the oracle said that the plague wouldn’t end until the people of
Thebes expelled Laius’ killer: a person who was somehow still in the city, even
though Laius had died many years earlier on an out-of-town trip. Oedipus called
in the blind prophet, Tiresias, played by Jeffrey Wright, whose eyes were
invisible behind a circular glare in his eyeglasses.
Reading “Oedipus” in the past, I had always been exasperated
by Tiresias, by his cryptic lamentations—“I will never reveal the riddles
within me, or the evil in you”—and the way he seemed incapable of transmitting
useful information. Spoken by a Black actor in America in 2020, the line made a
sickening kind of sense. How do you tell the voice of power that the problem
is in him, really baked in there, going back generations? “Feel
free to spew all of your vitriol and rage in my direction,” Tiresias said, like
someone who knew he was in for a tweetstorm.
Oedipus accused Tiresias of treachery, calling out his
disability. He cast suspicion on foreigners, and touted his own “wealth, power,
unsurpassed skill.” He decried fake news: “It’s all a scam—you know nothing about
interpreting birds.” He elaborated a deep-state scenario: Creon had “hatched a
secret plan to expel me from office,” eliciting slanderous prophecies from
supposedly disinterested agencies. It was, in short, a coup, designed to
subvert the democratic will of the people of Thebes.
[A
reminder: director Doerries made his own translations and adaptations of the
ToW’s classic scripts to suit each project and the point he wanted to make.]
Frances McDormand appeared next, in the role of
Jocasta. Wearing no visible makeup, speaking from what looked like a cabin
somewhere with wood-panelled walls, she resembled the ghost of some
frontierswoman. I realized, when I saw her, that I had never tried to picture
Jocasta: not her appearance, or her attitude. What was her deal? How had she
felt about Laius maiming their baby? How had she felt about being offered as a
bride to whomever defeated the Sphinx? What did she think of Oedipus when she
met him? Did it never seem weird to her that he was her son’s age, and had
horrible scars on his ankles? How did they get along, those two?
When you’re reading the play, you don’t have to answer such
questions. You can entertain multiple possibilities without settling on one.
But actors have to make decisions and stick to them. One decision that had been
made in this case: Oedipus really liked her. “Since I have more
respect for you, my dear, than anyone else in the world,” Isaac said, with such
warmth in “my dear.” I was reminded of the fact that Euripides wrote a version
of “Oedipus” [ca. 415-406 BCE]—lost to posterity, like the majority of Greek
tragedies—that some scholars suggest foregrounds the loving
relationship between Oedipus and Jocasta.
Jocasta’s immediate task was to defuse the potentially
murderous argument between her husband and her brother. She took one of the few
rhetorical angles available to a woman: why, such grown men ought to be ashamed
of themselves, carrying on so when there was a plague going on. And yet,
listening to the lines that McDormand chose to emphasize, it was clear that, in
the guise of adult rationality and spreading peace, what she was actually doing
was silencing and trivializing. “Come inside,” she said, “and we’ll settle this
thing in private. And both of you quit making something out of nothing.” It was
the voice of denial, and, through the play, you could hear it spread from
character to character.
By this point in the performance, I found myself spinning
into a kind of cognitive overdrive, toggling between the text and the
performance, between the historical context, the current context, and the
“universal” themes. No matter how many times you see it pulled off, the magic
trick is always a surprise: how a text that is hundreds or thousands of years
old turns out to be about the thing that’s happening to you,
however modern and unprecedented you thought it was.
“Nothing can be foreseen,” Jocasta said, and I heard our
President declaring, of the global pandemic about which he had been
warned, repeatedly, in the direst possible terms, that “Nobody could have
predicted something like this.” Then the voice of denial passed to Oedipus:
“Why, my lady, should we ever again listen to the Pythian priestesses at Delphi
or study the patterns of eagles and kingfishers shrieking loudly above us in
the sky when they all foretold that I would one day kill my father? He is now
dead in the ground and I am still here.” That one sounded like climate change,
because it involved ignoring birds, but the sinister thing was precisely
how the objects became interchangeable: global warming, gun violence,
pandemics, sexual assault, genocide, the legacy of slavery.
You’ve never really seen “Oedipus,” I found myself thinking,
till you’ve seen it during a plague. The plague hadn’t really stood out to me
on previous readings, yet it was the key to everything: the way the denial of
the contagion reflected right back on the contagion of denial, its tendency to
morph into “denialism.” I felt a new appreciation, too, for all the work the
plague was doing to power the plot. It reprised the riddle of the Sphinx:
Oedipus had to save the city again. It was a ticking time bomb: every moment
that he didn’t solve the plague, the bodies were piling up,
death-rich Hades was making off with more shades. And the ultimatum from
Delphi—solve the murder, or the plague goes on—turned the myth of Oedipus into
a whodunnit, with Oedipus himself as both detective and murderer.
The plague arrived in Athens in 430 B.C., the
second year of the Peloponnesian War. Athens was under siege from Sparta. Much
of the rural population had, per instructions from the statesman Pericles [ca.
495-429 BCE; leader of Athens: 461-429 BCE], sought shelter within the city’s
newly built fortifications, putting an extra burden on sanitation and housing. [During
the war, the population of Athens increased from 100-150,000 inhabitants to
300-400,000.] Perhaps as much as one-third of the Athenian population died,
including Pericles and his two sons. Thucydides [historian and general; ca.
460-400 BCE] also got sick, but recovered, and was thus able to leave a vivid
record, in his history of the Peloponnesian War, of not only the physical
symptoms but the miasma of horror that swirled around the city: the confusion
of the doctors, whose efforts to increase their knowledge about this unknown
disease were generally rewarded by a slow and painful death; the absence of
reliable advice, “for what helped one sufferer harmed another”; the apparent
ineffectiveness of divine offerings and supplications, which led some people to
become more religious, and others to embrace the most antisocial behavior; the
collapse of the funeral rites and the desperation of the increasingly isolated
survivors.
And yet: evidence suggests that the theatre was still open.
What does that mean? Was Thucydides exaggerating how bad it was? Did Athenians
not believe in social distancing? Or were the city’s actors and playwrights
considered to be essential workers Increasing research has been
devoted, in recent years, to the connection between ancient theatre and medical
treatment, which often took place in the temple to Asklepios [at Epidaurus],
the god of healing. There is archeological evidence that some such temples
had an adjoining theatre, and some have argued that listening to a play
may have been a part of treatment that also typically included going
to sleep in the main hall, praying for gods to appear in their dreams and guide
them toward a cure, a dream that priests and attendants would then interpret.
When Athens got its own temple to Asklepios, it was built adjacent to the
theatre of Dionysus—reportedly, with some involvement by Sophocles.
I’ve been to the Asklepion in Pergamon, in present-day Turkey: an underground
passage provides easy access between the theatre and the patients’ sleeping
hall. According to Doerries, the acoustics in Athens were such that a person
bedridden in the temple would still be able to hear every word spoken in the
theatre.
How differentiated was the function of the
theatre from that of the clinic? The question might not have made that much
sense at the time. Plato [428/427 or 424/423-348 BCE] was born during the
Plague of Athens, so he hadn’t yet gotten around to articulating some of the
dichotomies—body versus soul, real versus ideal—without which we can now barely
imagine the world. According to some historians of science, the idea
of “religion” and “science” as opposing terms requiring reconciliation,
eternal as it may seem to us now, dates only to the nineteenth century, at
which time there was, for example, a lively debate—incited by Freud’s
wife’s uncle—over whether katharsis (purification, purging),
the term Aristotle [384-322 BCE; author of Poetics, ca. 335 BCE] used to
describe the effect of tragedy on an audience, had primarily a medical or a
religious connotation.
[Sigmund] Freud [Austrian neurologist; 1856-1939] himself
would complicate the categories again in his study of hysteria: a disease
marked by diverse physical symptoms in the absence of a physiological cause,
occurring primarily in women. In the eighteen-eighties, Josef Breuer [Austrian
physician; 1842-1925] came up with and introduced Freud to a treatment he
called the cathartic method. In Freud’s subsequent works, which were
more radical and which proposed treating physical symptoms through, for
example, the interpretation of dreams [Freud’s book of this title was published
in 1899], he drew support from his knowledge of the temples of
Asklepios, alluding to “such familiar procedures” from antiquity as “the
elicitation of oracular dreams by sleeping in the temple precincts.” The
records from the Asklepion at Epidaurus mentioned patients whose
symptoms—headaches, paralysis, blindness, stomach distress—matched those of
hysteria.
Freud had identified closely with the character of Oedipus
since he was in high school, where he studied classical Greek. At the
University of Vienna, he dreamed that he would be recognized for
solving the riddle of the Sphinx. In his psychoanalytic office, he had an
approximately two-thousand-year-old Greek Sphinx statue on his table
and a reproduction of Ingres’s “Oedipus and the Sphinx” over the
couch. His bookplates had a Sphinx on them. For Freud’s fiftieth birthday,
his followers gave him a medallion engraved with an image of Oedipus and the
Sphinx. Some sources say that, when Freud read the inscription—a quote from
Sophocles that read, roughly, “he who knew the famous riddles and was a most
powerful man”—he went pale: his adolescent fantasy had come true.
The basic insight of psychology, as it has come to us via
Freud, is closely connected to the riddle of the Sphinx: “What is that which
has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?”
Oedipus’ answer is man—who crawls as a baby, walks unassisted as an adult, and
uses a cane in old age. Thus do some strands of psychology tell us that babies
and children are already people, with emotions and boundaries and dignity that
can be violated, and that these violations cause sickness in adults. Psychology
also tells us that all adults, with no exceptions, were once babies, and aren’t
free from the indignities they suffered in this capacity. These truths may seem
self-evident, and classicists have occasionally critiqued the riddle
of the Sphinx for being too easy: why was nobody able to solve it before
Oedipus? And yet, however clear it is to us, intellectually, that the adult who
walks around on two feet is the same person as the baby who crawled on hands
and knees, we rarely acknowledge it fully. The adult doesn’t look the same as
the baby, or feel the same. “Former baby” isn’t part of anyone’s self-image.
All we want is to forget that we were ever so weak and helpless.
The riddle of the Sphinx plays out in the plot of “Oedipus,”
particularly in a scene near the end where the truth finally comes out. Two key
figures from Oedipus’ infancy are brought in for questioning: the Theban
shepherd, who was supposed to kill baby Oedipus but didn’t; and the Corinthian
messenger to whom he handed off the maimed child. The Theban shepherd is
walking proof that the Sphinx’s riddle is hard, because that man can’t
recognize anyone: not the Corinthian, whom he last saw as a young man, and certainly
not Oedipus, a baby with whom he’d had a passing acquaintance decades earlier.
“It all took place so long ago,” he grumbles. “Why on earth would you ask me?”
“Because,” the Corinthian (David Strathairn) explained
genially on Zoom, “this man whom you are now looking at was once that
child.”
This, for me, was the scene with the catharsis in it. At a
certain point, the shepherd (Frankie Faison) clearly understood everything, but
would not or could not admit it. Oedipus, now determined to learn the truth at
all costs, resorted to enhanced interrogation. “Bend back his arms until they
snap,” Isaac said icily; in another window, Faison screamed in highly realistic
agony. Faison was a personification of psychological resistance: the mechanism
a mind develops to protect itself from an unbearable truth. Those invisible
guardsmen had to nearly kill him before he would admit who had given him the
baby: “It was Laius’s child, or so people said. Your wife could tell you more.”
Tears glinted in Isaac’s eyes as he delivered the next line,
which I suddenly understood to be the most devastating in the whole play:
“Did . . . she . . . give it to you?” How had I
never fully realized, never felt, how painful it would have been for Oedipus to
realize that his parents hadn’t loved him?
In a famous early essay called “The Aetiology of Hysteria”
(1896; [aetiology, or etiology, is the study of the causes, origins, or reasons
behind the way that things are, or the way they function, or it can refer to
the causes themselves]), Freud described his treatment of eighteen patients
suffering from severe hysterical symptoms. In each case, he laboriously traced
each symptom back as far as human memory would go—all the way to early
childhood. Over the course of more than a hundred hours, each patient
independently recovered a memory of early-childhood sexual trauma. The trauma
frequently involved an interaction with an adult, often a close relative, like
a father. Both Freud and the patients were horrified. The patients’ memories were
“reproduced with the greatest reluctance,” Freud wrote. “While they are
recalling these infantile experiences to consciousness, they suffer under the
most violent sensations, of which they are ashamed and which they try to
conceal.”
Freud was extremely reluctant to believe that eighteen
people from respected Vienna families could have been abused as children.
(Indeed, he soon backed away from this conclusion, developing his idea of the
Oedipus complex, according to which the incestuous abuse wasn’t a real memory,
but rather an infantile fantasy.) But, at least in 1896, he found himself
unable not to believe the experiences that the patients
relived in front of him. The remembered scenes fit the larger story with the
specificity of a missing puzzle piece; in two cases, he found witnesses to
corroborate the patients’ memories. So, in “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” as in
“Oedipus the King,” an investigation into an inexplicable physical illness
(hysteria for Freud, plague for Sophocles) turns up a seemingly unrelated,
decades-old, father-implicating act of violence against a child. Wrestling out
the truth is a huge ordeal. The ex-child denies it as long as possible. When
the truth is finally spoken, the plague is over.
When I talked to Bryan Doerries over Zoom after the
performance, he told me that he had initially planned to stage “Oedipus” with a
focus on climate change. The themes were all there: a prophecy denied; children
paying for the sins of the fathers; a plague that “ravaged the land, killing
the cattle and the crops,” and which Sophocles compared to a raging wildfire;
as well as birth defects (“our women die in labor, delivering shrivelled [sic]
little corpses. . .”). He was hoping to cast Greta
Thunberg as Tiresias or the chorus. But once covid-19 happened, and a
physical plague started revealing and exacerbating the preëxisting conditions
of the body politic, a new application suggested itself. (A U.K.
production of “Oedipus,” starring Damian Lewis, is scheduled for September 3rd [2020].
“The narrative of a leader who discovers that he’s the contagion will probably
have a different resonance there,” Doerries reflected; [then-Prime Minister] Boris
Johnson had just returned to work after his own bout of covid-19.)
Doerries’s first encounter with Greek tragedy was playing
one of the children in [Euripides’] “Medea” [431 BCE]. (That’s the one where
Medea kills her children: his one line was, “No, no, the sword is falling!”) It
was 1985, and he was nine years old. The performance took place at a community
college in Newport News [Virginia], where Doerries’s father taught experimental
psychology. Doerries describes his father as one of the last old-school
behaviorists, a follower of B. F. Skinner [psychologist, behaviorist, inventor,
and social philosopher; 1904-90], who was known for his belief that free will
is an illusion, and that human and animal behavior are determined by positive
or negative conditioning. As a child, Doerries often visited his father’s lab,
where he watched albino rats act out the fate dictated to them by rewards and
punishments. In one experiment, rats were electrically shocked, seemingly at
random, until they gave up on life, resting their heads on the floor of their
cages and waiting to die.
Doerries went to Kenyon College [Gambier, Ohio], where he
majored in classics, learning ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and the principles
of Biblical exegesis. When he and his father debated the meaning of Greek
tragedy, his father thought the plays represented a world view in which people
didn’t have “human agency or consciousness.” Doerries disagreed. The analogy he
uses now for the working of fate in Greek tragedy is Type 2 diabetes, the
disease that eventually killed his father. Most people who get the diagnosis,
he explains, have a genetic predisposition—it’s “written into their DNA, like
an ancient intergenerational curse”—but they can choose what they do with the
knowledge, and that choice can change their own and others’ lives.
For his senior project, Doerries translated and staged
Euripides’ “Bacchae,” using a Buick Skylark for the deus ex machina. A career
choice loomed between academia and theatre. Interpreting a classical text,
translating it, and directing a play are traditionally viewed as different
jobs, to be done by different kinds of professionals, but Doerries saw them as
one thing: a set of techniques to get old plays to work on new audiences. He
applied to grad school for classics, then changed his mind and moved to New
York to pursue directing.
[A deus
ex machina (Latin from Greek; literally, ‘god from the machine’) is a plot
device—occasionally still used today—whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem in
a story is suddenly or abruptly resolved by an unexpected and unlikely
occurrence. The term comes from the convention of actors playing gods being brought
on stage using a machine, either a crane used to lower actors from above or a
riser that brought them up through a trapdoor.]
In New York, he began dating Laura Rothenberg, a friend
of many years, then a Brown [University, in Providence, Rhode Island] undergraduate,
who had just gotten a double lung transplant in a long-shot effort to treat the
cystic fibrosis she had been fighting since childhood. Becoming involved with
her was kind of a test. As Doerries later wrote in “Theater of War,” a book
about how his company came into being, “From the moment we first kissed,
awkwardly, hesitantly, in her apartment, I knew I would soon face a choice, one
that would define my own moral character and perhaps the rest of my life. If I
truly cared for Laura, then I would put everything else on
hold. . . . But a nagging and persistent voice of
self-preservation within me said to run away, as fast as I could.”
[2015’s Theater of War: What Ancient
Tragedies Can Teach Us Today (Alfred A. Knopf) was issued as a Vintage paperback in 2016 and is
available as an e-book. Part 1 of this
series includes a review of Theater of War. Vintage had also issued several
volumes of Doerries’s adaptations of Greek classic texts.]
He didn’t run away. Nor did the voice shut up. Doerries
ended up being Rothenberg’s primary caretaker, and during that period he
witnessed intubations, “air hunger,” and the “drowning on the inside” that
accompanies cystic fibrosis. He was twenty-six, and had never felt so close to
anyone, or realized his own “immense capacity to care for another person.” At
the same time, he found himself discovering the limits of that compassion—the
unbearableness, at times, of the plea to be present—and had never felt so
alone.
It was then that he reread Sophocles’ “Philoctetes.” It felt
as if it had been written for him. When the play starts, Philoctetes has been
stranded for ten years on a desert island, with a suppurating, foul-smelling
wound on his foot. He was bitten by a snake when he and the other Greek
warriors stopped on an island on the way to fight in the Trojan War. His
agonized screams were destroying the other soldiers’ morale, so Odysseus left
him behind. Then the Trojan War dragged on for a decade, and a seer told Odysseus
that the Greeks couldn’t win without Philoctetes. Now Odysseus has come back to
the island to get him—bringing a young soldier, Neoptolemus, to do the talking.
Doerries realized that “Philoctetes” was about chronic
illness—the way every sick person is on a desert island—and about the
temptation to leave them there and forget about them. After Rothenberg died, in
2003, at the age of twenty-two, he started work on a translation of the play.
By the time he was finishing it, Doerries was back in a hospital, where his
father was recovering from a kidney transplant, necessitated by his worsening
diabetes. (Doerries’s father had found out about the diabetes in 1976, the year
Doerries was born, but had eventually given up on changing his life style,
viewing the diagnosis as fate.)
Doerries now calls hospitals his “finishing school”: the
place where he came into contact with what the Greek plays were about. In 2007,
at the Weill Cornell medical school, he staged the first Theater of War
Productions-style event: a dramatic reading of “Philoctetes,” followed by a
discussion. It was written up in the Times, and when
Doerries’s father, who was suffering from an ulcerated foot, read the article,
he missed the mention of Philoctetes and thought he was reading about himself
and his foot.
[The
Times report Batuman refers to is “The Difficult Patient, a Problem Old
as History (or Older)” by Abigail Zuger, published on 6 March 2007. Another Times article on Doerries,
Theater of War, and Philoctetes is “The Anguish of War for Today’s
Soldiers, Explored by Sophocles” by Patrick Healy, 12 November 2009, which will
be posted in Part 4 of this series.]
In June, I saw Theater of War Productions do a Zoom staging
of a scene from “Philoctetes” for Baltimore-area front-line health-care
workers. Neoptolemus (Jesse Eisenberg) was trying to get Philoctetes (David
Strathairn) to agree to help the Greeks. Philoctetes kept seeming like he was
going to agree, then would start screaming in pain, expressing his anger
at Odysseus, his fear of being abandoned again. The scene was extremely hard to
watch. A respiratory technician said afterward that she felt as if she was
hearing what the covid-19 patients she dealt with were thinking, but did
not have the lung capacity to express. Eisenberg’s face registered all the
dismay of someone who is realizing, belatedly, just what he signed up for:
being on a desert island face to face with a screaming embodiment of unmeetable
need.
Doerries described “Philoctetes” to me as a “moment of
concrescence”—a “dawning that this is a path for me out of all this.” As in a
Freudian case history, new pieces kept fitting into the puzzle. A few weeks
later, reading about the Walter Reed scandal, in which Iraq and
Afghanistan veterans were left languishing in an understaffed D.C. hospital
plagued by vermin, black mold, and bureaucratic dysfunction, Doerries started
to think about Philoctetes, too, as a veteran. Technological advances in
warfare and medicine had created “a subclass of patients” like him, all
abandoned on their islands to live potentially long and unbearable lives. A few
months later, he read another exposé about a hundred and twenty-one
incidents of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who, on their return to the United
States, were charged with killing someone. Reading about soldiers who come home
only to “find themselves at war with their spouses, their children, their
fellow service members, the world at large and ultimately themselves,” Doerries
realized he was seeing a multiplication of Sophocles’ “Ajax”: the tragedy of a
war hero who loses his friend, comes home mad with grief, massacres livestock,
and tries, in Doerries’s translation, to strangle his wife in his sleep. How
had Doerries not recognized in it a textbook description of combat trauma?
[According
to Wikipedia: “The Walter Reed Army Medical Center neglect scandal
refers to a series of allegations of unsatisfactory conditions, treatment of
patients, and management at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC) in
Washington, D.C., culminating in two articles published by The Washington
Post in February 2007. Several cases of patient neglect and shoddy living
conditions were reported as early as 2004.”
[The
Washington Post article that reported the Walter Reed scandal was “Soldiers
Face Neglect, Frustration At Army's Top Medical Facility” by Dana Priest and
Anne Hull, 18 February 2007. The “exposé” to which the writer refers is Deborah
Sontag and Lizette Alvarez’s 13 January 2008 New York Times article “Iraq veterans leave a trail of death and
heartbreak in U.S.”]
Sophocles himself had been a general in the Athenian army—at
least twice. And it wasn’t just Sophocles: Aeschylus’ gravestone, which didn’t
mention that he was a playwright, praised him for fighting in the Battle of
Marathon [10 September 490 BCE, during the Persian invasion of Greece].
Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides, the three most famous Greek tragedians,
wrote their works in the course of a century in which Athens was at war for
roughly eighty years. Every citizen—a category that excluded women, children,
and slaves—was also a soldier. They were constantly having to fight, and then
return home. How many great tragedies—“Agamemnon,” “The Madness of
Heracles”—were about men who couldn’t switch the social contract back on?
Doerries started thinking of Greek tragedy in functional
terms, as “ritual reintegration, for combat veterans, by combat veterans.” It
was, in a way, a continuation of his argument with his father. If his father
had viewed the plays as more or less static representations of a fatalistic
world view, Bryan saw them as an “ancient technology”—a program that you run,
on an audience, to do something specific. What if he could start it up again?
In 2008, Doerries mounted his first combat-trauma event, for
several hundred Marines and their families, in a Hyatt ballroom in San Diego.
In his book, he describes the ensuing scene of painful awkwardness, with
Marines in the back of the room “nursing Budweisers, gazing at the floor,” and
everyone cringing as Ajax and Philoctetes screamed unsayable things at the top
of their lungs.
In the discussion afterward, the unsayable continued to be
said. “My husband went away four times to war, and each time he returned, like
Ajax, dragging invisible bodies into our house,” stated the wife of a
Navy seal, who was also the mother of a Marine. She invoked the words of
Ajax’s wife, asking his comrades for help: “How can I say something that should
never be spoken? You would rather die than hear what I’m about to say.” A nun
who had been an Army chaplain stood up and said that one of Ajax’s lines—“Witness
how the generals have destroyed me!”—was something she’d heard from countless
soldiers.
At that point, the wife of the assistant commandant of the
Marine Corps, who was sitting in the front with some other generals’ wives,
stood up and accused the nun and the seal’s wife of undermining their
husbands. “This is about healing, not assigning blame!” Soon, at least thirty
people were lined up at the microphone. The session became a conversation
between people usually prevented by different hierarchies and norms from
addressing one another. Not long afterward, the Theater of War Productions got
a $3.7 million contract from the Pentagon to replicate the program on
military sites around the world.
During the First World War, soldiers who had fought in
trenches began to display a range of troubling symptoms: muteness, speech
disorders, nightmares, paralyses, blindness, headaches, and uncontrollable
screaming. Some military doctors noted their similarity to the symptoms of
hysterical women, but hesitated to diagnose the soldiers with hysteria, at risk
of impugning their courage and masculinity. The new diagnosis they invented,
“shell shock,” was based on a theory, later disproved, that its cause was
“organic” damage resulting from proximity to exploding shells. Despite its
manly name, the treatment for shell shock, Elaine Showalter points out, was
pretty much the same as the treatment for hysteria: torture, by electric shocks
and isolation, designed to get the patient back in the trenches A.S.A.P.
In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, it became
increasingly clear that hysteria and shell shock shared not just many symptoms
but also an underlying mechanism. Studies conducted or supported by
second-wave feminists were yielding new data on domestic violence, rape, and
child abuse, at the same time that Vietnam veterans and antiwar activists were
finally managing to get combat trauma recognized as a legitimate affliction.
Repeated assaults on women and children, often by the people they most trusted,
had been producing the same feelings of unremitting physical terror, loss of
self, and blockages of memory and language that soldiers experienced in a war.
In other words, what had seemed to be a lot of different problems, or
non-problems, with different causes, or with no cause, was accepted as a
single, real phenomenon. This was the foundational insight of what became known
as trauma studies as we might think of it today. In 1980, post-traumatic stress
disorder (P.T.S.D.) was added to the DSM-III [Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd edition (1980)], based
on data from Vietnam vets, Holocaust survivors, and the survivors of sexual
trauma.
Judith Herman, an eminent figure in trauma studies,
has observed that every advancement in the study of trauma has taken
place only with the help of an accompanying progressive political movement. “It
never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it
upon herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on”:
trauma is inevitably met by the same denials, which are advanced by
perpetrators, and accepted by everyone else, because we are all predisposed to
identify with power. (By the same token, soldiers come home to realize that “no
one wants to know the real truth about war.”) Believing victims is a lot more
work than believing people who have brought about, or benefit from, the status
quo; after all, perpetrators and beneficiaries ask only for our neutrality,
whereas a victim asks us to listen to, and empathize with, their long, awful
story. Furthermore, believing the disempowered involves overcoming some of our
most deeply ingrained ideas, like that it’s natural or appropriate for children
and women to be subordinated in the family, or for young men to be sacrificed
in wars. The recognition of trauma becomes so controversial that it ends up
being suppressed, unless it is legitimized by a political movement. Rape trauma
wasn’t taken to be credible and real until second-wave feminism emerged; the
antiwar movement did the same thing for combat trauma. The major progressive
movements of recent years, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, are both about
acknowledging the credibility of certain long-denied traumas. The broken
N.D.A.s and the cell-phone videos put new information into the public sphere.
Something many individuals had known, and even experienced, but hadn’t always
named to themselves or to others, became accepted as reality. The reason Greek
tragedy works for so many of our social issues is that virtually all the
tragedies, like the social issues, dramatize the conservative, contagious
impulse to deny trauma: to negate that anyone is a victim or that anything bad
is happening. Then someone defies the impulse and screams horrifying stuff that
nobody wants to hear, and the spell is broken.
Where does the impulse of victim-denial come from? Many
psychologists of trauma would say that the answer is early childhood. The
psychoanalyst Alice Miller [Polish-Swiss psychologist, psychoanalyst, and
philosopher; 1923-2010] traced numerous individual and political ills to “the
Fourth Commandment”—the one about honoring thy parents—some version of which
exists in many religions. For Miller, it might more accurately be translated as
“Thou shalt not be aware,” because it has produced a taboo against children
admitting the reality of their own experiences. Even the life of a loved infant
is not an easy one. According to Miller, parents often have children in order
to satisfy their own unmet needs for love, respect, and attention, or to please
their own parents. (The phrase “have children” itself, perhaps, carries the
implication that children are their parents’ property: a moral and legal
notion that has been with us since Aristotle.) Infants, being totally
dependent on their caretakers for their survival, come to live in mortal terror
of disappointing their parents and losing their love.
“For most people, the idea that they were not loved by their
parents is unbearable,” Miller writes. “The more evidence there is for this
deprivation, the more strongly these people cling to the illusion.” In other
words, the first victim we don’t believe is ourselves. What most of us are
unable to feel for these powerless former selves is the “pity and terror”—the
Aristotelian catharsis—that is evoked in the course of a tragedy
like “Oedipus.” Before the catharsis, when Oedipus is asked about his scars, he
reacts only with shame: “Why do you speak of that ancient
disgrace? . . . A shameful disfigurement that has scarred me
since birth.” He must believe that the scars are inborn (not inflicted by his
parents), and also somehow his own fault (“shameful,” “a disgrace”). It’s only
through the confrontation with the Theban shepherd that he is able to feel, in
all its belated immediacy, the terror he had to block off in order to survive.
But, by that point, he has already passed on his trauma to all the “children of
Thebes,” including his literal sons—whom he curses, and who eventually murder
each other in a civil war.
Repressed trauma produces wars, just as it is produced by
them, in armies structured like families, with junior people forbidden to
criticize their superiors. Based on her study of the German child-rearing
manuals popular around Hitler’s parents’ generation, Alice Miller, who was a
Holocaust survivor, concluded that beating children “for their own
good”—training them to accept and idealize their own abuse—is the perfect way
to produce obedient subjects of an authoritarian government. Children whose
perceptions haven’t been respected become adults who support strongmen who rule
by gaslighting and disinformation. Children who aren’t allowed “to be aware of
their own needs or to defend their own interests,” as she wrote, will never
know them.
This is the simplest answer to the much-debated question of
why people vote against their own interests: the connection between “my
interests” and “good” has been scrambled at an early age. Christopher Wylie,
the Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower, has said that the
algorithm he worked on there found that one of the strongest predictors for
vulnerability to alt-right nationalism is whether a person is in favor of
corporal punishment for children. The algorithm was initially devised to
identify potential isis recruits, who apparently share the
alt-right’s enthusiasm for beating children. The worship of power, the
silencing of dissent and of logic, and the dehumanization of everyone perceived
as weak or other are characteristics shared by authoritarian groups across the
ideological spectrum. They might, according to Miller’s study, exercise a
magnetic effect on people who were dehumanized as children.
[According
to Wikipedia: “Wylie [b. 1989] is a British-Canadian data consultant. He is noted
as the whistleblower who released a cache of documents [in March 2018] to The
Guardian he obtained while he worked at Cambridge Analytica [former British
political consulting firm, closed in 2018]. This prompted the Facebook-Cambridge
Analytica data scandal, which triggered multiple government investigations and
raised wider concerns about privacy, the unchecked power of Big Tech, and
Western democracy's vulnerability to disinformation.”]
The Trump Administration is known for its readiness to put
children in harm’s way, whether by actually placing them in cages, or by
maintaining, despite evidence to the contrary, that they are “almost immune”
to covid-19. It is a truism among standup comics and on Twitter that
Trump wasn’t loved as a child; a new memoir by the
President’s psychologist niece makes the house of Fred Trump sound a lot like
the house of Laius: a place where children are raised to become “killers,” and
kindness is viewed as a form of criminal idiocy. But the immense political and
economic harm caused by the dehumanization of children has not yet been treated
as the urgent public-health crisis it is.
Invoking childhood is often dismissed as a way of
depoliticizing, of trying to “reduce” the affairs of nations to what happened
between mommy and daddy. And yet, as [Leo] Tolstoy [Russian writer; 1828-1910] shows
in his quarantine-compatible classic “War and Peace” [1867], what happens
between mommy and daddy may cause little Nikolai or Petya to flee their
feelings of humiliation and disempowerment by joining a war, thus determining
the fate of nations. We must do for childhood what the second-wave feminists
did for the lives of women (and tried, in some radical cases, to do for
children): politicize and de-privatize, eroding the rules that turn each family
into a closed-off realm where the weakest players (women, children) have no
recourse against the strongest (men, adults).
Perhaps the greatest obstacle to seeing the political
reality of childhood is our attachment to the moral scaffolding of individual
blame and personal responsibility. Within this framework, to ascribe any of
Hitler’s actions to his upbringing is seen as going easy on Hitler, or as
blaming the Holocaust on Hitler’s parents. And yet, to quote Alice Miller, “it
is not a matter of assigning blame to individual parents . . .
but of identifying a hidden societal structure that determines our lives.”
Western thought since Aristotle has largely construed children as
lacking in reason and thus in full personhood. The resulting systemic inability
to view children as fully human resembles the kind of moral alibi that has been
used to excuse slavery and anti-Black racism, and is still with us in parts of
the law and custom. Early learning—especially the education of
children between birth and age three, which is the period when the most brain
development takes place—is widely viewed either as the inalienable labor of mothers,
or as an unskilled job rightly left to low-status women.
The essence of structural or systemic problems is that they
can’t be solved by isolating and punishing individual culprits, leaving the
rest of the society pure. Which individuals should be isolated, punished, or
removed, so that our workplaces aren’t toxic to women? Which individual
is really a racist? The power of “Oedipus” is that it
eventually reveals such questions to be the wrong ones. Who is to blame for the
Plague of Thebes? Is it Oedipus, because he killed Laius? But Laius tried to
kill him, when he was a defenseless baby. Then again, Laius thought
the baby was going to kill him. On the other hand, Laius raped the son of the
king of Pelops, and yet, if you look up why Laius raped the son of the king of
Pelops, it all really started when he was driven from Thebes
in his youth. And on and on.
By introducing the theme of plague into his “Oedipus,”
Sophocles invites us to replace the mechanism of blame with that of contagion.
Of course, within a given plague, individuals may be responsible for making
things worse: mask refuseniks, governors who won’t issue stay-at-home orders,
or, you know, Pericles, for making the whole Attic countryside crowd into
Athens. But we don’t normally expect whoever gave us a respiratory virus to be
punished. Questions of personal responsibility are ultimately viewed as
secondary to questions of cure and containment.
It is in the context of contagion that I first felt able to
understand the role of fate, which is surely the most foreign thing to us in
Greek drama. “So does he have a choice, or doesn’t he?” we ask in exasperation.
It’s the conundrum that Doerries and his father used to argue about, and it’s
at the heart of the confusion elicited by questions of systemic injustice: “How
responsible or complicit am I?” Defunding the police and
decriminalizing mental illness, addiction, and poverty are ways to shift the
conversation from “Who is to blame?” to “What is to be done?” Fate, like
plague, gives us a way to remove guilt and innocence from the equation.
Fate is plague. We are what we catch. But that doesn’t mean
there’s no way to change it.
If we borrow the terms of Greek drama, 2020 might be viewed
as the year of anagnorisis: tragic recognition. On August 9th, the sixth
anniversary of the shooting of Michael Brown, I watched the Theater of War
Productions put on a Zoom production of “Antigone in Ferguson”: an adaptation
of Sophocles’ “Oedipus” narrative sequel, with the chorus represented by a
demographically and ideologically diverse gospel choir. Oscar Isaac was
back, this time as Creon, Oedipus’ successor as king. He started out as a bullying
inquisitor (“I will have your extremities removed one by one until you reveal
the criminal’s name”), ordering Antigone (Tracie Thoms) to be buried alive,
insulting everyone who criticized him, and accusing Tiresias of corruption. But
then Tiresias, with the help of the chorus, persuaded Creon to reconsider. In a
sustained gospel number, the Thebans, armed with picks and shovels, led by
their king, rushed to free Antigone.
“Antigone” being a tragedy, they got there too late,
resulting in multiple deaths, and in Isaac’s once again totally losing his
shit. It was almost the same performance he gave in “Oedipus,” and yet, where
Oedipus begins the play written into a corner, between walls that keep closing
in, Creon seems to have just a little more room to maneuver. His
misfortune—like that of Antigone and her brother—feels less irreversible. I
first saw “Antigone in Ferguson” live, last year, and, in the discussion
afterward, the subject of fate—inevitably—came up. I remember how Doerries
gently led the audience to view “Antigone” as an illustration of how easily
everything might happen differently, and how people’s minds can change. I
remember the energy that spread through the room that night, in talk about
prison reform and the urgency of collective change.
Tragic theatre and democracy arose around the same time in
Athens, and some scholars maintain that the two are related: that
Athens’s “homegrown literary vehicle allowed its citizens to think through how
to run their democracy.” It’s a tempting theory, especially with “Antigone” in
mind. On August 9th, the performance was followed by a panel discussion with
the Mothers of the Movement, an activist group comprising women whose Black
children have been killed by police. “Antigone was very much like us,”
said Marion Gray-Hopkins, whose nineteen-year-old son Gary Hopkins, Jr.,
was killed in 1999. “Creon is very much like the legislators that we are
dealing with every single day.” Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner,
beamed in her Zoom window and said, “Yes!” [Garner was killed in 2014 on Staten
Island, New York, when a New York City police officer put him in a prohibited
chokehold.]
“I was kind of proud of him,” Gray-Hopkins continued, of
Creon. She noted that he had initially seemed impermeable to reason and to new
information, and then suddenly “decided he was listening. So we are continuing
to talk to people,” she said, “because somebody is hearing our voice.”
[Elif
Batuman has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 2010. Her novel, Either/Or, was published in
May 2020.
[Because
I was taken a little by surprise by the length of Batuman’s New Yorker article, which caused
me to include only two of the articles I’d selected for this series in Part 3,
I will be posting Part 4 on Monday, 1 July.]
