Both Bryan Doerries
and KJ Sanchez use theatre to confront the toughest human challenges, from
battlefield trauma to prison
[This post is a follow-up
on “Theater:
A Healing Art” (3 September 2023). Theater as a
healing art is an idea that was put into my head by Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97),
an experimental theater director I knew in the 1980s and ’90s, and about whom I’ve
blogged often on Rick On Theater.]
“NOT ALONE”
by Rob Weinert-Kendt
[The article below, the
transcript of a conversation between KJ Sanchez and Bryan Doerries moderated by
Rob Weinert-Kendt, was published in American
Theatre’s October 2015 issue (volume 32, number 8) under the heading
“Conversations.” It was posted as “Bryan Doerries and KJ Sanchez, Mediators and
Resensitizers” and slugged “Interviews”
on the AT website on 23 September
2015.
[(The text below is taken
from the online version of the article which has more of the conversation than
the printed text. The final passages of
the digital edition were badly edited; I’ve taken the liberty of cleaning them
up for reposting on Rick On Theater.)
[Bryan Doerries and his
Theater of War, which is all about healing through theater, are the subject of “Theater
of War” (22, 25,
and 28
June, and 1
July 2024).]
The creators of ‘Theater of War’ and ‘ReEntry’ compare
notes on adapting and creating cathartic experiences for servicemembers and
other hard-hit communities.
Neither has served in the military, but both Bryan Doerries [b.
ca. 1977; pronounced DOOR-eez] and KJ Sanchez [b. ca. 1967] have felt called to
serve in other ways: Doerries with his company Outside the
Wire, which since 2008 has toured his stripped-down translations of Greek
tragedies to military bases around the world, including at Guantanamo Bay (AT, July/August ’11), and Sanchez with ReEntry,
a docutheatre piece she created with Emily Ackerman [playwright and actress
based in New York City] based on interviews with veterans of the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan (in the same AT issue) [premiered at Two River
Theater Company, Red Bank, New Jersey, 24 January-15 February 2009]. Both have
since branched out to do similar work in other contexts: Doerries with
healthcare workers and prison guards, and Sanchez with pieces about equity in
the arts and most recently the legacy of brain injuries in professional
football (X’s and O’s: A Football Love Story at Berkeley Rep
[premiere: 16 January-1 March 2015], coming soon to Baltimore’s Center Stage [13
November-18 December 2015]; AT, March ’15).
[Outside the Wire is “a
social-impact company,” say the official statements of its mission, “that uses
theater and a variety of other media to address pressing public health and
social issues, such as combat-related psychological injury, end-of-life care,
prison reform, domestic violence, political violence, recovery from natural and
man-made disasters, substance abuse, and addiction.” It was started in 2009 by Doerries, its co-founder
(with Phyllis Kaufman, a lawyer and the company’s producer).
[Outside the Wire is the umbrella
organization for several related projects, including the Theater of War, whose
origins reach back to 2005, though it, too, was formed in 2009. ToW is “a
project that presents readings of ancient Greek plays to service members,
veterans, and their families to help them initiate conversations about the
visible and invisible wounds of war.” (The dates of formation for both Outside
the Wire and Theater of War are given variously in different sources.)]
Doerries’s new book about his work, The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach
Us Today, will be published on Sept. 22 by Knopf [2015; for a review by
James Shapiro, see Theater
of War, Part 1], along with a volume of his translations of Ajax, Women of Trachis, Philoctetes, and Prometheus Bound, titled All That You’ve Seen Here Is God [Vintage, 2015]. A
star-studded 10-city fall tour to mark the book launch begins Sept. 27 [2015] at the Brooklyn Academy of
Music.
Some months ago, Sanchez and Doerries, who are friends and
colleagues, met for drinks at Soho’s [New York City] Ear Inn to talk shop about
military culture, the machinery of tragedy, and why talkbacks are an obscenity.
[For some thoughts on
“talkbacks” from a playwright’s and a dramaturg/writing teacher’s perspective,
see “Thoughts
on Playwriting” by Kirk Woodward (31 January 2021).]
KJ Sanchez: What I love about your book is that
it covers all your work, not just your work with the military, but how all of
these plays can serve as palliative, as healing, as a reflecting pool and a
conduit to important, life-changing conversations we don’t seem to be able to
have until we have that play that can ignite them. What the book can do is
become a lighthouse for a lot of people who want to do this kind of work.
Bryan Doerries: I hope so. I certainly hope so.
Sanchez: I have to make a confession. When I
first saw your presentation on an Army base, I got really emotional—and that
was before the actors even started. I got emotional with your introduction. You
get up there and say that in your marrow you are committed to this conversation
that is about to happen. It’s clear how personally dangerous it is, how
professionally dangerous it is, and you lay it all out on the line. The way
that you introduced Ajax [442 or 441 BCE; by Sophocles
(497/496-406/405 BCE)]—the way you set the stage for who Ajax was and what his
friend Achilles meant to him, and the loss of dignity and humanity that Ajax
suffered when Achilles’s shield is given to Odysseus instead—this was all in
your introduction, and I was already just completely engaged.
And I was so happy to see that you put all that personal
investment in the book, too. You had talked to me a little bit about losing
your girlfriend Laura. Obviously, losing someone you love is a key moment in
anyone’s life, but I didn’t realize how that really triggered what you would do
for the rest of your life.
[Laura Rothenberg and Doerries
met at the University of Virginia in 2002. She had cystic fibrosis from birth
and died on 20 March 2003 at age 22 when her body rejected her transplanted lungs.
In his grief, Doerries said, he turned to the Greek tragedies he’d read in
college because he could relate to the great suffering the characters
underwent. That experience, he professed, led him to the Theater of War.]
Doerries: You know, you make one decision in
your life: I’m going to care for a person; I’m going to put it all on the line
and see where this leads. I’m going to face death, I’m going to face suffering.
And it just continues to open world upon world upon world. I owe all my work to
that experience, and it keeps unfolding in all these ways that I could never
expect. Laura died on March 20, 2003, in the East Village in our apartment, and
a year ago, on March 20 [2014], I found myself sitting in an office at [Memorial]
Sloan Kettering [Cancer Center; cancer treatment and research institution in
Manhattan] being asked whether we’d bring Philoctetes [409 BCE
by Sophocles] to this cancer hospital. We did five or six free performances,
engaging these oncologists in open discussions about death and dying and being
in the presence of suffering, using this ancient play as a catalyst. At the end
of that, the head of surgery’s wife comes up to me and says, “We’d like to ask
you to be our commencement speaker this year for the surgical oncologists.” I
always thought I would get a high school graduation, or you know, the Rotary
Club, but to be given the opportunity to speak to 75 of the top surgeons at the
top training institution in the world for oncology was a huge opportunity.
So standing in front of these doctors, I hit them really
hard—I talked a lot about Philoctetes and about Hippocratic
medicine, the limits of medicine in the ancient world and how there was wisdom
in conceiving of a medicine with limits. I had no idea if it would land. And
then, at this black-tie event at Cipriani, one by one these doctors, these
chairs and chiefs of the program, came up and said, “That really touched me.”
[Doerries was probably
speaking of Cipriani 42nd Street, an elegant event space known for its high-end
Italian cuisine. It is directly across East 42nd Street from Grand Central
Terminal. (There are—or were in 2015—a number of Cipriani eateries of different
types in Manhattan.)]
What I’ve learned over the last six years or seven years is
that sometimes it really takes an outsider to change the culture of an
institution, whether that institution is the theatre or a hospital or the
military. The only way to stand in front of an audience of a thousand Marines
who are thinking about the ways they could disembowel you, who are resentful at
the fact that you’re there telling them about Greek tragedy and they’ve been
“volun-told” to see it—the only way to stand there with any confidence in my
opinion is to revel in being the outsider. You don’t have to be
hyper-masculine; you don’t have to be accepted or even be liked by them. You
just have to deliver this thing to them.
Sanchez: And you have to be willing to listen.
That is very, very clear with what you do. Even if what you ask them is, “So
tell me how we got it wrong,” then that opens the door.
Doerries: That’s the best!
Sanchez: That’s the best question, right?
Doerries: I know it’s working when two things
happen. One is when the lowest-ranking member of the community for which we’re
performing, the food service worker in the prison, the private in the military,
the palliative care hospice nurse in the hospital setting, stands up and speaks
the truth of his or her experience in front of the highest-ranking members. The
second way I know it’s working is when people talk about how much they hate the
experience, and they can openly do it in their own words. It becomes all the
more validating, after the person who said, “This is the fucking most
pretentious thing I’ve ever experienced,” for someone to say, “This is the most
life-changing thing I’ve ever experienced.” I find myself grinning from ear to
ear when people stand up and say, “This is bullshit.” Because we’ve created a
place where that can be said. I mean, where else can that be said in these
regimented hierarchical environments, you know? I mean, it’s okay for us to get
up and say it at the Public Theater, but to say it where your job is on the
line?
Sanchez: Wouldn’t that be fantastic if we could
have more of that immediate feedback loop in the American theatre at large?
Because the only way we have feedback is audiences can give thumbs up, thumbs
down, reviewers can talk about what they liked or whether the writing was
successful. This isn’t about, “Do you think we’re good playwrights?” It’s: I’m
going to do my very best to share, to tell you this story in an artistic, human
way. Then I want to hear whatever you have to offer, all of you.
Doerries: When we move the needle and audiences
are buzzing because they’ve been touched in some meaningful way—not necessarily
explicitly about a social issue, but touched as human beings—we have an
opportunity to do something with that energy. Yet 99 percent of the time, with
great speed and efficiency, we suck the life out of the possibility in that
audience. We do that by having a dramaturg come out and give a lecture; we do
that by having people who share our political beliefs come out and congratulate
us for having those beliefs; we do that by, worst of all—with all due
respect—having the artists come out and talk about process. That’s the most
soul-deadening thing you can do after an uplifting experience in the theatre.
Instead, this model, which I know you subscribe to—
Sanchez: Well, we outright stole it from your
design when we did ReEntry at Center Stage, then
at Actors Theatre of
Louisville [Humana Festival of New American Plays; 15 November-17 December
2011]. We did exactly what you do: Immediately after the performance, panelists
came up. With ReEntry it was a veteran, a spouse, and either a
chaplain or a mental health worker. And their job was to give their first-blush
personal response to the play. It can be, “This play made me angry,” “This play
was exactly my story,” “This play made me question how I’m going to talk to my
husband,” or, “What you didn’t get in the play was this.” And then a town hall
discussion. It’s completely different than having the actors come out, and then
the audience has to be nice and say, “What was it like to be that character?”
Doerries: It’s to the point where the word
“talkback” has become an obscenity to me. Not because the word isn’t
descriptive of what we should be doing—we should be talking back. It’s an
obscenity because we have turned it into a manifestation of our most banal,
most unimaginative impulses in the theatre. Theatre is a psychotropic
experience; it changes us biochemically. It puts us in a different state of
consciousness. And once we enter that state of consciousness, something can
happen.
Sanchez: We need to coin a new
phrase—“talk-across.”
Doerries: Yeah!
Sanchez: Instead of a talkback, you know?
Doerries: I mean, right now it’s really a “talk
down.” It’s about, how many different ways can we condescend to the
intelligence of this audience? Until we’ve deadened the possibility we’ve
created. The model that we use and that you have innovated on in your own way—I
do think it speaks to the ancient model from which these ancient texts derived
and evolved, which is that a city would empty all of its courts, its places of
work, its places of worship, and send one third of its population to a theatre,
and 17,000 people would sit according to tribe and rank and watch plays that
were explicitly speaking in some way to fundamental human experiences. Not as
sheer entertainment and not as therapy per se, but as a religious experience—a
rite, something that is sacred.
Sanchez: I get a little squirrely when I hear
the word religious, but my version of that is about bearing witness.
Doerries: If I had one word to define this work,
it’s permission. How many different ways can we give you permission—you, the
audience—to speak the unspeakable? To acknowledge the thing that you buried
deep and denied? To face death? To collectively acknowledge our shared
humanity, and also, most importantly with the tragedies we perform, to
acknowledge the limitations of human compassion? The note I give actors before
they go onstage is: “Make them wish they’d never come.” The reason I say that
is because if we push an audience to a point where they wish they weren’t
there, and in some way they’ve been trapped—whether they’re “volun-told” or
it’s socially unacceptable to walk out, or it’s a place without an aisle—that
then we can create this moment where we can actually interrogate why it was so
difficult to be in the room. I used to think it was all about empathy, but for
me it’s much more about shared discomfort.
[For an example of a situation like the one Doerries
describes above, see my discussion of Richard Schechner’s The
Prometheus Project in December 1985 in “Appropriation
in the Theater” (8 May 2015).].
Sanchez: Right. You know, we use the phrase
“compassion fatigue” a lot, when we’re not really all that tired of being
compassionate. But you are actually dealing with communities, with doctors and
hospice workers who are facing death every day, dealing with a military on
their 8th, 9th, 10th deployment—you are dealing with people hitting the wall.
Doerries: Absolutely.
Sanchez: And you’re saying to the actors: Throw
the wall back at them and then somehow you bust through together.
Doerries: Yeah. Push it past them, past what
people in the room can handle. I mean, most of our audiences are red state
audiences; they don’t share a lot necessarily in common with the actors or with
me in terms of our values, our political perspectives. But if we share nothing,
at least we share that we were uncomfortable.
Sanchez: That is such a great place to start.
That’s the base of human experience.
Doerries: So if you want to have a conversation
about abortion, if you want to have a conversation about war, if you want to
have a conversation about traumatic brain injury, start with a portrayal of
human suffering first, push the audience past its ability to hear it, witness
it—and then have the conversation. I guarantee you it won’t be a shouting match
of people trying to savage each other with ideology, because we have moved the
audience from one cognitive space to another, and it creates the opening. I see
it every place we go, from San Francisco and Cambridge and D.C. to the most
rigidly conservative audiences in the middle of the country.
Sanchez: Ajax was your first
project; you used that play as a way of talking about battle fatigue,
post-traumatic stress disorder or post-traumatic stress—depending on who you
talk to, because some folks don’t like the term “disorder”—the spousal
experience, and obviously suicide. Talk us through a couple of the other pieces
that you cover.
Doerries: Concurrent with the development of
Theater of War, I also developed this project, presenting readings of Prometheus in
supermax prisons. At first I thought we were going to perform it for the
inmates.
Sanchez: But then something even more
interesting happened.
Doerries: After trying to get into Rikers Island
and getting very close but not making it, I met a social worker there who said,
“Listen, I have a cousin who is the director for corrections in the state of
Missouri, and he might just be crazy enough to allow you to come in with Prometheus
Bound [ca. 430 BCE; by Aeschylus (525/524-456 BCE)].”
Sanchez: It’s always about meeting the one
that’s crazy enough. Or desperate enough. I once had a Marine Corps retired
general say to me, “We’re desperate now—we’ll try anything.” That’s why he was
all for bringing theatre into the military.
Doerries: Yeah, God bless the military. They’re
not like foundations that need metrics before they try something. They have a
problem the scale of which is so large, and for better or worse, they have such
a large portion of our gross domestic product and our tax dollars, and you and
I came in at this moment where they were trying everything: They were trying
sand rock gardens, they were trying equestrian therapy, they were trying
dolphins. Greek tragedy or documentary-style theatre [what Sanchez does; see “Feud
for Thought” and “Real
Talk About Real Talk”] actually seems relatively middle of the road when
you think about all the things they were trying. They were throwing them up
against a wall and seeing what stuck.
Sanchez: So back to: You met this woman who had
a cousin who might have been crazy enough to try this.
Doerries: Yeah, so I call the cousin and he
immediately returns my call. His name is George Lombardi, he’s the director of
corrections in the state of Missouri. And he says, “Listen, I really like your
idea. We have some programs already for prisoners, but what I think maybe would
be more valuable is if you came in and did the performance for corrections
officers and other people working in the prisons. No one ever does anything for
them, we have very little psychological services for them, and they do time
eight hours a day and live in these hellish environments, and, you know, maybe
something could happen.” The more I thought about it, I thought, well, there’s
not closer analogue to the military, where I knew the project was really
working, than the sort of paramilitary apparatus of those who work in prisons.
They have rank, they have file, they report their surveillance, there’s
punishment. To a certain extent, there’s no difference between a barracks and a
hospital and a prison. They’re all systems of rigid hierarchy, of discipline
and punishment. And Prometheus is about discipline and
punishment! It’s about living within this hierarchical structure.
Sanchez: I was very struck with how many guards
identified with Prometheus, and see themselves as part of the prison industrial
complex in a way that really surprised me.
Doerries: Theatre gives us the opportunity to
step back from the roles we’re all playing, to acknowledge the archetypes and
look at them more objectively. Everyone who works inside a prison is aware that
a very thin barrier separates them from the people they have power over—that
only grace separates them in many ways. Many who work in prisons come from the
same socioeconomic background, the same neighborhoods, the same classrooms, the
same gangs, as the people who are in the prison themselves. So that came out
immediately in the discussion of Prometheus Bound after the
first performance we did at a supermax prison for the guards: “I’m Prometheus;
I’m the one who can be punished for showing compassion to the people that I’m
guarding,” or, “I’m the one that if I get a DUI will get a mandatory sentence
of five years or more, while you, because you can afford a much better lawyer,
Bryan, will get off.”
You know, all of these communities that we go into are
communities that practice a kind of emotional detachment at the center of their
work, whether it’s surgeons or soldiers or guards or corrections officers. And
theatre has the capacity to create a safe space for them to let down the
barriers—to allow the Trojan horse of Greek tragedy in and to feel something,
and to do it in a public, and even in a performative way.
One of the things I’ve also learned from this work—and this
is the center of your work in every way—is that we need mediation. Theatre is
mediation. Like, if I allowed myself to feel the things it would be appropriate
to feel from the walk from here to the subway in relation to people that I saw
on the street, I would be destroyed. So I practice this clinical detachment as
well. I need to be wrested from it, for it be wrenched away from me, and the
shock of being in the presence of a believable portrayal of human suffering,
with an amazing actor delivering it, can do that.
Sanchez: I understand why some doctors and
others become desensitized; it’s a survival mechanism.
Doerries: Certainly. It’s not adaptive to be
crying when bullets are flying at you, or when you’re in an ER and you’re
having to cut open someone’s chest. But there has to be a sanctioned place to
feel those things, and the theatre was that sanctioned place. This is not some
fanciful fabrication. It was the place where everyone stopped working, they
came together, and they purposely put themselves in front of an experience that
would elicit these feelings. In a century in which 80 years of that century was
spent fighting war—in the latter half of a century in which a third of the
Athenian population had died, if we believe Thucydides—there is no one in the
Athenian audience who wouldn’t have known the screams of these characters.
There was no one in the audience who wouldn’t have understood that first- or
secondhand. So for the last six years, the experiment for me has been: What do
we do when we take these ancient stories, which I think are a technology
designed for very specific audiences that had lived these experiences—
Sanchez: The original apps, is that what you’re
saying?
Doerries: Yeah, I think of them more like
external hard drives. When you plug them into an audience for which they were
designed, the plays know what to do and the audience knows what to do in
return. Like when you transplant a kidney, and before you finish suturing it
into the new body, the urethra is pumping urine. There’s something about these
plays that are living, breathing, organic technology for delivering a very
specific experience.
But this is where your work comes in; there are so many
people who are suffering and need an intervention of this nature for which
there is no classic text and something needs to be devised.
Sanchez: Right, American Records’ mission
is to make work that chronicles our time, and work that serves as a bridge
between people. So my job is to listen to a particular community, to a
particular story, and then what I do is I frame it in a palatable way. I’m a
huge fan of documentary films, but documentary theatre does something very
different, similar to what you do, which is that it allows us to bear witness
together. So I start with a subject, something that I find burning and
interesting. This is going to not make any sense, perhaps, but I pick subjects
I don’t understand yet what I feel about. That’s been my guiding principle for
the last 10 years: that what I think and feel about a situation has nothing to
do with what I’m trying to do. In fact, I’ve turned down stories and projects—
Doerries: Where you have a lot of skin in the
game?
[My recent post “Documentary
and Investigative Theater” (10 September 2025) is an excerpt from KJ
Sanchez’s book The
Radical Act of Listening: Making Documentary and Investigative Theatre (Routledge,
2024). (The selection was published as “Feud for Thought: How I Made a Play Out
of a Family Drama” on the American Theatre webpage
on 20 March 2025.) The book explores the field of documentary and
investigative theater and offers a guide for making interview-based plays.]
Sanchez: Yeah. I’ve been asked to do something
about immigration, and it’s like, no, I know how I feel about that. Then it
becomes agitprop theatre.
Doerries: That’s a really important distinction.
Because I think theatre that wears its politics on its sleeve alienates the
very audience one would hope to engage. It’s not about the opening of meaning,
or discovery, it’s about the closing of meaning and discovery.
Sanchez: I took some heat from my colleagues
with ReEntry. I had a handful of people angry at me because I
didn’t make an antiwar play. They thought that Emily and I made a pro-military
play because I didn’t end the play with “war is bad.” I ended it with, “You
know what? They’re still going back, and they couldn’t give a shit what the war
is about.”
But all of these stories are incredibly emotional; the
stakes are unbelievably high. For the last 9 years I’ve been promising myself a
nervous breakdown. I keep saying that when I’m interviewing somebody, my job is
not to let them know how I feel about anything. I’m on board for wherever
they’re going to take me. So I don’t cry; I set aside all of that. Someday I’m
going to go away, find a shaman, get into a sweat lodge, and let it all out.
And I’m sure this happens everywhere you present: There’s a line of people who
want to tell you their story, right? I find people who don’t feel comfortable
talking in front of the group, they pull you aside.
Doerries: Yeah, definitely. It goes on for
hours.
Sanchez: Where do you put that?
Doerries: It just gives me energy. It doesn’t
take away. What I see night after night in the audiences when we perform is a
palpable sense of relief.
The first question I ask all audiences is: Why do you think
Sophocles wrote these plays and staged them for his community? What was he
trying to say—what was his objective? Of course, the subtext of that is, How
did this make you feel? And “how does this make you feel” is a question I
wouldn’t want to be asked myself. So I say, “Why did Sophocles write this
play?” I’m making it sound like a quasi-academic question. At one of our first
performances, at an artillery base in Germany, this junior-enlisted soldier
immediately raises his hand and says, “I think Sophocles wrote Ajax to
boost morale.” And I say, “What’s morale-boosting about watching a great
warrior lose his best friend, come unglued, attempt to kill his commanding
officers, and ultimately, against the pleading of his wife and family, take his
own life?” Before I could finish the question, the soldier shoots back,
“Because it’s the truth.”
Sanchez: One of the best compliments I ever got
was a lance corporal who walked up to me and said, “First of all, ma’am, I
would like to say, I’m very glad this did not suck. And secondly, it’s good to
know I’m not alone.”
Doerries: That’s terrific. I was at Camp
Pendleton, and a Marine came up to me and said afterward, “Hey, sir, I liked
your little skit.” I was like: You’re right, it is a skit.
Sanchez: We’ve talked about this before, but you
and I have both noted the difference in communicating with military leadership
versus leadership in the American theatre.
Doerries: Oh yeah.
Sanchez: I can get a general to return my emails
and my phone calls, but there are a good number of artistic directors who don’t
have the time and ability to communicate well.
Doerries: Well, for what it’s worth, maybe the
general has more resources.
Sanchez: Yes, that’s a good point. One of my
favorite things that Anne Bogart [b. 1951; theatre and opera director; one of
the artistic directors of SITI Company] ever said to me was a little advice she
gave when I was becoming a director. She said, “You need to figure out if
you’re a person who’s round on the outside and square on the inside, or square
on the outside and round on the inside.” The military and medical and service
communities that we work with are very square on the outside. You get a
response—either, “No, thank you,” or, “We’d like your play at our base, please
advise.” Done. But in the world we traffic in, because of all of our
creativity, we’re round on the outside, so it’s more difficult to communicate,
to be hard when we need to be hard. Do you know what I mean?
Doerries: It’s actually been a big revelation
for me. Would I rather deal with academics, people in the theatre, foundation
people—or with people in the military to try to get something done? No question
who I’d want to work with. There’s something so remarkable about the
efficiency. There are a lot of inefficiencies, obviously, in the military, but
if you give people in the military two pieces of paper with a quick proposal,
and maybe one phone call later, it’s executed, usually flawlessly—maybe a
little too literally. If you work in the theatre or with academics, you have 20
phone calls. Maybe it’s part of the culture from the get-go, or maybe it’s just
when you’re facing life-and-death issues, you don’t have time for all the
bullshit. You attack problems more efficiently. There’s something deeply
refreshing about it.
Sanchez: Does it make you crazy when
well-intentioned people say, “You know, you should hook up with the USO”? That
makes me crazy!
Doerries: No. We did partner with the USO on a
quarter of a million dollar grant, and they were great partners, and they have
an enormous reach.
Sanchez: But it’s about, “Let’s entertain the
troops.”
Doerries: It’s different. So the other person
person that should be sitting at this table is Adam Driver [b. 1983; actor],
whose organization Arts in the Armed Forces, of which I’m on the board,
espouses that specific approach. He was in the military, the Marine Corps, he
went to Juilliard, he’s had a successful career, and he feels that people in
the military deserve not to be condescended to with what passes for entertainment.
They deserve to be uplifted and challenged, and so he doesn’t do plays that are
explicitly about the military—he does John Patrick Shanley [b. 1950;
playwright, theater director, and filmmaker], and he allows the audience to
have its own human response. They’re not about discussion, but they’re about
raising the bar and saying, you know, it is a form of service to go into these
communities and bring something that actually is challenging or uplifting,
rather than to you know, simply entertain.
[Arts in the Armed Forces
(AITAF) was a non-profit organization that brought arts programming to
active-duty service members, veterans, military support staff of the United
States, and their families around the world free of charge. It was founded by
actors Adam Driver and Joanne Tucker in 2006 and was dissolved in 2023.]
Sanchez: Yeah. Isn’t it cool now that we have a
tribe?
Doerries: Yeah, there’s a tribe.
Sanchez: You mentioned Adam, and there’s also
Paula Vogel [b. 1951; Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning playwright].
Doerries: Paula Vogel, and there’s a whole bunch
of others.
Sanchez: What’s so fascinating about her is that
early in her life, her day job was as a secretary for the Navy.
Sanchez: And now she’s offering herself to do
workshops whenever possible for veterans, to teach, to give them tools to write
their own plays.
Doerries: And she’s cultivating the talent of
this next generation of veteran writers—Maurice
Decaul [b. 1980; former Marine; poet, essayist, and playwright], all these
other writers she has taken a personal interest in. She’s created space within
TCG [Theatre Communications Group; non-profit service organization that
promotes professional non-profit theater in the United States; publisher of American
Theatre] for veterans, for theatres to come to a different orientation, to
what it would mean to actually do something that might move people socially
with regard to veterans. There are a lot of people in the space now, and as far
as I’m concerned, the more the merrier.
Sanchez: I agree.
[Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is an
arts journalist and the editor-in-chief of American Theatre. He was the founding
editor-in-chief of Back Stage West and writes about theater
for the New York Times, Time Out New York, and
the Los Angeles Times. He studied film at the University
of Southern California and is a composer member of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical
Theater Workshop.
[In addition to “Feud for
Thought,” in “Documentary
and Investigative Theater,” playwright Sanchez figures in “Real Talk About
Real Talk,” part 3 of “‘On
The Real: Documentary Theatre’” (21 September 2017).]
