Theater of War, Part 4

 

[This is the fourth installment in my series on Theater of War (Parts 1 through 3 were posted on 22, 25, and 28 June), the project co-founded by Bryan Doerries in 2009 to perform readings of classic plays in order to spark discussions of various social issues that have beset certain communities in the United States.

[I’ve been working my way through the company’s history in reverse chronological order with published articles from a number of different periodicals to demonstrate how ToW selects and adapts—Doerries, educated in the classics, translates and adjusts the plays and other texts the company uses—to address the different subjects and demographic groups.

[Part 4 is comprised of the final four articles of those I’ve selected, one from Forbes magazine from 2020, and three from the New York Times, covering readings (or other events) in 2017, 2009, and 2007.  If any reader is just joining this thread, I recommend going back to the earlier parts to see the development of ToW’s process and the response from 2020 to 2024.  (There’s a brief profile of Theater of War Productions in Part 1 and commentary throughout all three installments.] 

“THEATER OF WAR: USING GREEK TRAGEDY TO HELP
FRONTLINE MEDICAL WORKERS COPE DURING COVID-19”
by Robert Glatter, MD 

[Dr. Robert Glatter’s discussion of how Theater of War addressed medical first responders’ stress during the pandemic through readings of classic Greek tragedies, such as Sophocles’ Ajax, in Forbes appeared on the magazine’s website on 4 August 2020.  Glatter is, himself, a medical professional.]

During the Covid-19 pandemic, being a frontline healthcare worker has been one of the most difficult jobs, involving both personal and professional challenges which are truly unprecedented.

Many workers have suffered in silence, experiencing ongoing feelings of anger, fear and betrayal. And for some, the pandemic has led to suicide—a painful reminder of the fragility of life, and the ongoing toll of this crisis.

Confronting death on a daily basis and feeling unable to provide optimal care of patients—from inadequate inventory of personal protective equipment (PPE) to safely treat patients, making difficult decisions involving allocation of limited lifesaving resources, or having lack of adequate staffing itself—embodies the concept of “moral injury” which has been devastating to all healthcare providers.

Moral injury is distinct from “burnout” and was first offered as an explanation for military veterans [who] were not responding to treatment of PTSD. It refers to the emotional, physical and spiritual harm people experience after “perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs or expectations.” Simply put, repetitive episodes of moral injury, combined with physical and emotional exhaustion can lead [to] paralyzing anxiety, depression, PTSD and ultimately suicide.

Addressing such moral injury is challenging to say the least, but a unique collaboration between the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute For Bioethics, Johns Hopkins Programs in Art, Humanities, and Health and Theater of War Productions, a production company that presents dramatic readings of Greek tragedies to modern and contemporary works— aims to do just that. At its core, Theater of War for Frontline Medical Providers represents an innovative project that has the ability to reach all frontline medical workers—nurses, doctors, respiratory therapists, social workers and hospital staff— who may be struggling in isolation, providing them the opportunity to name and communalize their experiences, connect with colleagues, and access available resources.

But Bryan Doerries, artistic director, and co-founder of Theater of War Productions, realized that his approach—originally conceived to help veterans cope with intense emotional distress and the lingering effects of moral injury from combat—could be communalized to help health care workers who experience this similar injury on a daily basis.

“To be clear, Theater of War Productions’ approach is not medicine, nor is it therapy,” said Doerries. “The aim of our projects is to lift people out of isolation and into community. If there is one thing I have observed over the past twelve years of doing this work it is that trauma, loss, and moral distress all leave people feeling isolated and alone.”

Doerries ultimately views Theater of War for Frontline Medical Providers “as a public health campaign, and the message of the ancient stories we perform for medical providers is simply this: You are not alone in your community, not alone across the country and the world, not alone across time.”

“Through Theater of War for Frontline Medical Providers’ performances, clinicians of all types are invited to connect to the universal struggles embodied by the Greek tragedies and through them to connect to their own experiences during the pandemic,” said Cynda Rushton, PhD, RN, Professor of Clinical Ethics at the Berman Institute of Bioethics/School of Nursing, Johns Hopkins University, who leads the collaborative effort with Theater of War for Frontline Medical Providers.  “Through the performance and the panel that follows, it is possible to give words to feelings, thoughts and experiences that clinicians are carrying and in doing so to find some solace that they are not alone in their experiences and that they are neither failing or deficient because of their responses to these unprecedented circumstances. They learn that they are experiencing normal responses to an abnormal situation and by recognizing this, begin to restore their integrity by cultivating and strengthening their moral resilience.”

In a nutshell, Theater of War for Frontline Medical Providers’ current approach during the pandemic is this: harness the power and messaging of Greek Tragedy, and use it as a medium to explore moral dilemmas that frontline care providers confront on a daily basis via Zoom Webinars, followed by a de-brief that explores real-life issues which mirror the themes that are displayed during the actual production. After the performance, the actors are replaced by four panelists—a diverse group of front-line medical providers—who then respond to what they heard in the plays that melds with their own experiences of caring for patients during the pandemic.

[The Zoom webinars were a coronavirus-protection measure during the pandemic, when performances were also remote over Zoom.  Before and since the pandemic, the discussions, like the readings, were live before an in-person audience. Note Glatter’s remark below.]

After the panelists’ remarks, a facilitator encourages the audience to join the discussion with a series of questions encouraging reflection and dialogue about themes raised by the plays. The discussion provides an opportunity for the medical workers in the audience to take center stage, sharing the impact of COVID-19 on their lives and finding comfort and support in the community of their peers.

The sharing of common experiences and their desire to improve life after such emotional trauma creates a powerful bond, but also empowers workers to approach management with constructive criticism and potential solutions as they embark on their emotional recovery and healing. Prior to the pandemic, Theater of War held powerful stage performances, but Covid-19 changed all that, requiring an adaptation to the world of online Zoom theatre.

Late last month, Theater of War for Frontline Medical Providers performed “Ajax” [442 or 441 BCE; by Sophocles (497/496-406/405 BCE)], a famous Greek Tragedy set during the Trojan War [legendary, decade-long siege and sacking of Troy, a city in Asia Minor, by the Greeks in the 11th, 12th, or 13th century BCE], to enable EMS providers to draw parallels between their personal struggles during the pandemic to those experienced by a mythical Greek figure.  It explored the themes of anger, jealousy, revenge, misdirected rage, and guilt leading to suicide.

Presented on July 30th [2020], with over 900 Zoom viewers from over 18 countries, “Ajax” brought out feelings ranging from personal risk, betrayal, anger, sadness, abandonment, powerlessness, survivor’s guilt, along with remorse. In a post performance survey, 88% of respondents said that participating in Theater of War Frontline reduced their sense of isolation, while nearly 79% said that viewing made it more likely for them to use resources if needed, according to Doerries.

“When frontline medical providers, who may be reluctant to talk openly about the impact the pandemic has had upon them, their clinical practice, and their families, see their own struggles reflected back to them in ancient stories, it creates a non-threatening space in which it’s easier to talk about challenging topics, such as guilt, betrayal, deferred grief, personal risk, and deviations from standards of care, opening a door to pathways of healing, community, resilience, and moral repair,” added Doerries.

Communal activities via Greek Tragedy

Doerries further explains that the ancient Greeks realized that it wasn’t healthy for people to be “overwhelmed with emotion in the midst of violence, illness, and conflict. “But they also knew something that I think we’ve lost touch with as a society—that it is morally and emotionally toxic to defer and compartmentalize our emotions indefinitely. This is one of the factors that leads to burnout, depression, and even suicide,” he added.

“The Greeks knew that there had to be a time and place for people who had experienced violence and death to be given permission and empowered to acknowledge their emotions, collectively, as a community,” offered Doerries. “The word amphitheater in ancient Greek means ‘the place where we see in both directions.’ In the amphitheater, I see you and you see me. It is the place where we bear witness to the truth of our respective struggles.”

Doerries is “convinced that humans heal best in groups, and that isolation and betrayal are the wounds that cut the deepest. In this regard, and out of necessity, the Greeks developed tragedy as a tool to communalize the trauma of nearly 80 years of war and a pestilence that killed nearly one-third of the Athenian population [see my note on the Plague of Athens in Part 3, “Can Greek Tragedy Get Us Through the Pandemic?”].”

He qualifies that we are quite fortunate the process still works well. “It’s like an external hard drive that just needs to be plugged into the right audience: the ancient technology knows what to do, and so does the audience, as evidenced by the dynamic, powerful discussions that take place during our events.”

An article by Rushton, Doerries and colleagues published last month in the Lancet [C. Rushton, B. Doerries, J. Greene, G. Geller, et al., “Dramatic interventions in the tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Lancet, 23 July 2020] focuses on how their initiative is equipped to help medical providers, but especially in the setting of Covid-19. The authors write that “we have found that presenting scenes from ancient tragedies about complex ethical situations for frontline medical providers generates an open, non-threatening space in which health personnel can begin to process, interrogate, share, and bear witness to experiences of loss, betrayal, grief, and other forms of moral suffering during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

“A nearly universal response to moral suffering is that we feel alone; that we are the only one who is struggling; that everyone else is coping better than I am,” explains Rushton. “The design of Theater of War for Frontline Medical Providers creates a safe space for reflection, insight and wisdom by fostering a community of belonging: often clinicians are able to meet each other as human beings rather than their titles, roles or professions.”

“This dissolving of hierarchy allows us to connect to our shared vulnerability and to see the humanity in others and ourselves. It also allows clinicians to loosen the grip of unrealistic expectations and the disempowering narratives of powerlessness to see themselves as already having resources to meet the challenges they confront with the support of their community,” she added.

Dr. Loree Sutton, a retired Army Brigadier General, psychiatrist, and former Commissioner of Veterans Services in New York City, feels that Theater of War’s benefit may offer a form of deeper connection than we can gain from our virtual world which often seems relatively empty and fleeting.

“Theater of War for Frontline Medical Providers draws us in as active participants and engaged witnesses—the very opposite of what our social media world of tweets, clicks and ads is designed to elicit. In short, Theater of War for Frontline Medical Providers facilitates the experience of being human — eschewing titles depicting stature, hierarchy divulging status or expectations demanding performance or deliverables.”

“Participants, including medical providers, respond accordingly — with a renewed sense of purpose, engagement and connection to community, enjoined by Theater of War’s parting gift: the work serves to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable,”  she added.

Mental Health Legacies of Covid-19

But the broader issue is that we need to discuss the mental health legacies of Covid-19. Simply put, there is a wave of adverse mental health effects building, and the legacy we will write will be determined by how we handle this surge of health-related effects.

Yet, Doerries argues that Covid-19 is actually an extension of a pandemic that has largely been under appreciated. “There was a pandemic before the COVID-19 pandemic—of unaddressed trauma and mental health; poverty, substandard housing; homelessness; addiction; educational apartheid; and state-sanctioned violence against communities of color,” he said. “COVID-19, and the awakening that has accompanied it, has brought all of this into the light, showing the world how social justice and healthcare are inextricably connected and interdependent.”

“Given what we have seen and learned as a society over the past five months—things that are impossible to unsee and unlearn—there is seemingly infinite work now to be done to address the mental and physical wellbeing of people who have been systemically cut off from adequate healthcare, including mental health services and resources: in order to be successful in this effort we'll also need to break down the stigma associated with accessing mental healthcare in many communities, when it’s available,” Doerries offered.

“I think this needs to start within the field of medicine, with frank and open dialogue about the impact of the pandemic on frontline medical providers, and then radiate out into the general population, in larger, community-driven conversations. My hope is that the mental health legacy of COVID-19 will be an awakening and consciousness that leads to social and mental health justice,” he added.

Rushton concurs and adds a sense of reality: “I suspect that we will see a full range of physical, psychological and moral responses that will need targeted and sustained attention. What keeps me up at night is whether we will be able to sustain the healthcare workforce during and after the pandemic.  The level of exhaustion among clinicians across the country is profound.  The heroic response has now progressed to a phase of deep disillusionment and despair as the pandemic marches on without an end in sight.”

Theater of War’s Positive Legacy

Theater of War for Frontline Medical Providers premiered on May 24^th with 417 medical providers from the Baltimore area logging onto Zoom for a performance featuring Frances McDormand, Jesse Eisenberg, David Strathairn, and Frankie Faison. In a post-performance evaluation, 93% of respondents reported that the program offered new insights about their experience during COVID; 92% said the program made it easier to talk about difficult subjects related to COVID.

As a result of this success, the Arts in Health Initiative of the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund provided a grant to fund 10 performances of the project in New York City.

“We got to know Theater of War’s extraordinary work through prior projects, and when they came to us with the idea of a new project to help frontline medical providers, we immediately saw why it is so timely and important, said Laurie M. Tisch, President, Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund. “Theater of War Productions is stepping up to help heal the people who are caring for us through this terrible pandemic, and we are proud to be among the supporters making it possible.”

“We know from the organizations in our Arts in Health initiative that the arts are a particularly effective tool to address issues related to mental health challenges such as trauma, and they provide unique ways to combat the stigma that makes it difficult for people to seek help. These are issues that frontline healthcare providers are facing every day as they risk their lives and health to save ours,” added Tisch.

It’s also possible that Theater of War’s approach may serve as a means to tap into and alter neural networks which develop as a response to emotional trauma, quite distinct from more traditional approaches such as cognitive behavioral or group therapy.

“There is every reason to believe that this type of theatrical production is facilitating a powerful form of processing that we know from other research is a means to potentially mitigate against the negative outcome of trauma,” said Christine Moutier, M.D., Chief Medical Officer for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. “That it uses not only major talent portraying events and themes related to moral injury may be a way to engage different parts of the brain that likely connect experiences and memory with emotional and intellectual neurological processing.”

“This may make it unique from other forms of processing that primarily engage our intellectual mind—like facilitated groups and individual conversations between us and therapists, peers or mentors. One hope is that participants would continue the dialog in some way and even build on those gains in their relationships at work or at home,” she added.

Moutier also offered that “it engages a tactic of using ancient events to evoke people's humanity living through present challenges, which the ancient tragedies also did in their own time.”

[Robert Glatter, MD, is a contributor to Forbes magazine who covers breaking news in medicine, medical technology, and public health.  He’s an emergency physician on staff at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, where he has practiced for the past 15 years.  He also serves as an adviser and editor to Medscape Emergency Medicine, an educational portal for physicians, and an affiliate of WebMD.  Glatter’s other time is spent with his private house-call practice, DR911, providing medical care to both travelers and residents in Manhattan.  He has a keen interest in medical technology and public health education.] 

*  *  *  *
“ARTIST IN RESIDENCE FOR NEW YORK CITY”
by Jennifer Schuessler 

[Jennifer Schuessler’s report on Bryan Doerries’s being named an “artist in residence” in New York City ran in the New York Times of 3 March 2017.  While it is about Theater of War Productions, this article is about an honor bestowed on Doerries rather than the performance work of his company.]

Bryan Doerries, the artistic director of the Brooklyn-based group Theater of War Productions, has taken community-based performances based on ancient Greek tragedy and other classic texts to more than 600 military bases, prisons, hospitals and other venues around the world, where he has used them to spur conversations about violence, trauma and survival.

But in the next two years, Mr. Doerries will be sticking to a stage closer to home: the entire city of New York.

The city’s Department of Veterans Services and Department of Cultural Affairs has announced that Mr. Doerries is its newest public artist in residence. During his tenure, Theater of War will stage more than 60 free events in venues in all five boroughs, drawing on its repertory while developing new productions tailored to different communities.

“For the last nine years, we’ve been designing projects and then taking them out into red-state America, frankly: military bases, prisons, megachurches,” Mr. Doerries said in an interview. “We don’t want that work to end, but this will allow us to go deep into some of the same social issues in a more concentrated way here.”

Theater of War, founded in 2009, is based on the idea that Greek tragedy is “an ancient technology,” as Mr. Doerries likes to put it, that when plugged into the right audience can provoke an intense, cathartic response. Mr. Doerries also has help from a deep roster of prominent actors, who both bring in curious crowds and break through their defenses with no-holds-barred intensity of delivery.

“Hercules in Brooklyn,” a piece that had its premiere in October at the Brooklyn Public Library, featured Paul Giamatti, Jeffrey Wright and Ashanti, reading excerpts from Euripides’ [480-ca. 406 BCE] “The Madness of Hercules” [ca. 416 BCE] in an over-the-top-style — “Make them so uncomfortable they wish they hadn’t come,” is Mr. Doerries’s typical direction. It was followed by an hour of searching discussion about gun violence, which many audience members had experienced firsthand. (The library will be the co-producer of Mr. Doerries’s residency, which is being supported by a $1.365 million grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.)

The first presentation of Mr. Doerries’s residency will be a reading of Sophocles’ “Ajax” and “Philoctetes” [409 BCE] on March 20 [2017] at the Greene Space in Manhattan, featuring Mr. Giamatti, Frances McDormand, David Strathairn and Reg E. Cathey. That will be followed by a performance at the Crown Heights branch of the Brooklyn Public Library on April 6 and a bilingual presentation at the Pregones and Puerto Rican Traveling Theater in the Bronx on May 6.

[Jennifer Schuessler is a culture reporter for the New York Times, covering intellectual life and the world of ideas.  She’s based in New York. 

*  *  *  *
“THE ANGUISH OF WAR FOR TODAY’S SOLDIERS,
EXPLORED BY SOPHOCLES”
by Patrick Healy 

[The New York Times published Patrick Healy’s report on ToW’s readings of Ajax and Philoctetes for audiences of servicemen and -women on bases around the country on 12 November 2009.  These were among the company’s first performances after Bryan Doerries co-founded it that year.]

The ancient Greeks had a shorthand for the mental anguish of war, for post-traumatic stress disorder and even for outbursts of fratricidal bloodshed like last week’s shootings at Fort Hood. They would invoke the names of mythological military heroes who battled inner demons: Achilles, consumed by the deaths of his men; Philoctetes, hollowed out from betrayals by fellow officers; Ajax, warped with so much rage that he wanted to kill his comrades.

Now officials at the Defense Department are turning to the Greeks to explore the psychic impact of war.

The Pentagon has provided $3.7 million for an independent production company, Theater of War, to visit 50 military sites through at least next summer and stage readings from two plays by Sophocles, “Ajax” and “Philoctetes,” for service members. So far the group has performed at Fort Riley in Kansas; at the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, Md.; and at last week’s Warrior Resilience Conference in Norfolk, Va.

The scenes from “Ajax” show the title character plotting to murder Greek generals who have disgraced him. Under a trance by the goddess Athena, he ends up slaughtering farm animals he thinks are the officers. Ajax’s concubine is depicted as trying to bring him to his senses; the final scene shows Ajax in agony, committing suicide.

The “Philoctetes” segment portrays Greek military leaders plotting to trick the hero into leading an attack on Troy, and shows Philoctetes struggling with both physical and emotional pain.

A special performance was held on Monday night [16 November 2009] for dozens of service members, veterans, relatives and Pentagon officials at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan [Catholic hospital, closed in 2010]. The actors in the one-hour reading were David Strathairn, Jeffrey Wright, Gloria Reuben and Adam Driver, a former Marine.

The investigation of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 at Fort Hood in Texas [5 November 2009], loomed over the reading, though it was mentioned only a few times during the post-performance discussion. Still, there were echoes of Fort Hood, especially in the story of Ajax in the pain that soldiers and their loved ones faced then and now, and in the questions raised by the play about whether war can drive warriors to acts of evil.

“These plays are part of a 2,500-year history of mental and emotional pain for soldiers that run up to the present day,” said Mr. Strathairn, an Academy Award nominee for his portrayal of Edward R. Murrow in the 2005 film “Good Night, and Good Luck.”

Bryan Doerries, a writer and director who founded Theater of War, said the performances were not psychotherapy, noting, for instance, that the efficacy of his group’s work had not been studied in clinical trials. He described the effort as a public health project to help service members and relatives overcome stigmas about psychological injuries by showing that some of the bravest heroes suffered mentally from battle.

“Through theater we’re trying to offer some ideas and experiences for our troops and veterans to think about when they don’t feel comfortable opening up about their private thoughts,” said Mr. Doerries, whose work grew out of an earlier effort, the Philoctetes Project, that drew media attention for a performance at the Juilliard School last fall.

[The Philoctetes Project in 2008 was an early effort by Doerries that occurred before he co-founded Theatre of War Productions.  A small group of U.S. Military Academy cadets traveled to New York City to hear the reading at Juilliard.  The cast was made up of some illustrious names from the worlds of the stage and film, and alongside these was a Juilliard student who was also a former Marine.  His name was Adam Driver, and he went on to appear in several ToW readings after he became a successful professional actor.]  

“Sophocles was himself a general, and Athens during his time was at war for decades,” he continued. “These two plays were seen by thousands of citizen-soldiers. By performing these scenes, we’re hoping that our modern-day soldiers will see their difficulties in a larger historical context, and perhaps feel less alone.”

Film screenings and theater performances have long been staples of mental health and rehabilitation services, intended to provoke discussions among viewers who might dislike talk therapy but who can identify with characters or plot points.

For active-duty soldiers, stigmas about therapy can be even greater, psychologists say. Concerns that they might be passed over for promotion or regarded as weak have prevented some from seeking help from mental health professionals.                         

“There is good evidence that active-duty personnel worry about the stigma of post-traumatic stress disorder,” said Richard J. McNally, the director of clinical training in the psychology department of Harvard University.

Some troubled veterans do not seek help even after their service careers are over, said Dr. McNally, who has worked in the field of trauma and memory, especially with war veterans, since the mid-1980s but is not involved with Mr. Doerries’s project.

“If seeing the Theater of War can reduce stigma and help veterans seek these treatments, then that will be wonderful indeed,” he added.

Because of the Fort Hood shootings the Pentagon canceled an interview about the project with Brig. Gen. Loree Sutton, an Army psychiatrist and director of the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, which awarded the contract to Theater of War.

But General Sutton was on hand Monday night at St. Vincent’s, where she told the audience after the performance that Theater of War was an important vehicle for “sharing pain and the promise of learning and growing and healing.”

“We knew that never in the history of our republic have we placed so much on the shoulders of so few on behalf of so many,” she said.

The reading kept the audience rapt. As Ajax, Mr. Wright, who won an Emmy and a Tony playing Belize in “Angels in America” [1993-94], was by turns thundering and growling, and threatened to lash the back of his Greek enemy Odysseus “until it’s red with blood.” He implored a comrade, “Cut my throat right now.”

“I was the bravest in battle, never lost my wits,” Mr. Wright nearly screamed as his character faced his unraveling mental state. “What a joke my life has become.”

Ms. Reuben, as Tecmessa, who lived with Ajax as his wife, begged him to think of his loved ones before doing harm. “The stain of it will shame your family,” she said.

During the post-performance discussion with the audience, led by a panel of therapists and military personnel, veterans from the Vietnam War, Iraq and Afghanistan spoke about their own sleepless nights, drug addictions and isolation from family members. A Vietnam veteran described being homeless for 10 years, suffering breakdowns but at last “getting my dignity back” in part from mental health care.

A psychologist on the panel, Michael Kramer, said that combat stress for soldiers could “erode their personhood,” and he connected the ancient traumas with the modern-day pain that “we’re reading about in the papers.”

Tanya Weekes was among the audience members. As the evening concluded, her husband, Sgt. Daniel T. Weekes, who served in Iraq with the Army National Guard in 2004-5, slipped out into the hallway. He still struggles with memories of a particularly bloody bombing during his tour in Mosul, she said, though he has come a long way with psychotherapy. He found the scenes hard to watch at times, she added.

“And the play helped me, definitely, because I could relate to the characters,” Ms. Weekes said. “When soldiers come home from war, you never know what to expect. They might get violent. That was my biggest fear.

“We at home might not have been on the battlefield, but it sure feels like it.”

Sgt. First Class Tony Gonzalez, an Iraq combat veteran from Brooklyn who was on the panel, recalled that post-traumatic stress disorder was rarely discussed when he first joined the Army. He described his own pain after his platoon captain was killed and he went to pay respects to the man’s wife, also a friend and member of the military.

And he praised the use of theater to help put a spotlight on trauma.

“I’ve been Ajax,” he said. “I’ve spoken to Ajax.”

[Patrick Healy was a theater writer for the New York Times until 2015, when he shifted over to politics as the national political correspondent.  He became political editor in 2018 and is now Deputy Opinion Editor of the Times.] 

*  *  *  *
“THE DIFFICULT PATIENT, A PROBLEM
OLD AS HISTORY (OR OLDER)”
by Abigail Zuger 

[Dr. Abigail Zuger’s report on a reading of Philoctetes for medical students organized by Bryan Doerries at the request of a member of the faculty of Cornell University’s Weill Medical School ran in the New York Times of 6 March 2007.  It appears that this was the first such reading, a prototype of what Doerries would do when he established Theater of War Productions two years later.

[This article was referenced in Elif Batuman’s 2020 New Yorker article in Part 3 and I gave the bibliographic citation for it and the New York Times article by Patrick Healy above in a note in that post.]

The sick man was a misery to himself and to everyone around him. For one thing, his personal hygiene was horrific. He stank. And he was constantly in pain, moaning and groaning until you began to wonder if he was doing it just for effect. Worst of all, he was a mean old cuss, angry and embittered after years of illness. All he did was complain.

A few dozen medical students, most of them in their first year at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, listened with concern to a presentation about him a few weeks ago. Eventually, they knew, they would run into difficult patients like this one.

The sick man had been a mover and shaker once, with a place in high government circles. But then he had the accident. His wound became infected. It was all downhill from there. He quickly became unable to work, and his distress upset everyone around him. Finally, his business associates forced him into long-term residential care.

Some of the faculty members in the conference room nodded in recognition. It was a case right out of a chronic-care ward in a Veterans Administration hospital.

The patient stayed in his residence for years. Not a single visitor dropped by. He grew prematurely aged, a miserable, stinking, moaning wreck. The infection in his foot was untreatable and oozed foul pus. Pain medication helped only slightly. He became obsessed, focusing all his anger on the old crowd, the false friends who had abandoned him. He blamed them for everything.

The diagnosticians in the room suspected that the patient had a chronic osteomyelitis of the foot, with an anaerobic component accounting for the odor. Perhaps the infection had spread elsewhere through the bloodstream. And then there were his psychiatric diagnoses: reactive depression with psychotic features, possibly an underlying character disorder. He had certainly been a little narcissistic way back when.

Nine years after the sick man’s admission, a stranger came knocking at his door. The visitor was a young man, just a kid, really. He knew the sick man’s history, but the sight and sound and smell were overwhelming anyway. The kid was filled with pity and revulsion in equal measure. He wanted to help, but had been advised by his supervisor to be dignified and professional, to do his business and leave. Still, the patient was so miserable. Every time the young man tried to leave, the sick man pleaded with him to stay. “Don’t go!” the sick man cried. “Please. Stay with me.”

The visitor was torn. What should he do? He could have been a medical student on his first clinical clerkship, transfixed by the misery of a patient everyone else had labeled a miserable old crock years before. He tried to reassure the sick man, but the usual platitudes sounded hollow, and the man became only more agitated, almost incoherent, pain and fury all garbled together.

Fortunately, at this juncture the demigod Heracles showed up to straighten everything out. The medical students breathed a sigh of relief and clapped heartily.

These students and this patient will, of course, never meet; that would require a giant warp in the fabric of time and history. The sick man with the infected foot, Philoctetes, was marooned by his comrades on a deserted Greek island back in the mists of ancient myth. The rest of the crowd all headed off to sack Troy, but the kid, Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, was sent back to steal Philoctetes’s magic bow and arrows (without which the Greeks could not prevail). The wily Odysseus was waiting on the beach for the kid to get the goods. It was all only a footnote to the bloody saga of the Trojan war.

But to Dr. Lyuba Konopasek, a pediatrician who directs the medical school’s first-year course in Medicine, Patients and Society, Sophocles’s play, from the fifth century B.C., had so much to say to medical students and doctors that she invited Bryan Doerries, a classicist and director, to stage a reading for her course.

After the actors finished, students and faculty members talked for a long time about how students often feel helpless in the hospital, torn between befriending patients with incurable illness and sticking to a professional script. Sophocles somehow got that tenuous position just right, just as he knew that sick people, isolated and transformed by chronic disease, dread being alone and forgotten more than they dread pain or even death.

“We have created a subclass of patients like Philoctetes with modern medicine,” Mr. Doerries said. “They are abandoned on their islands to live long, but have we risen to the challenge of taking emotional care of them?”

Dr. Edith Langner, an internist, said, “Philoctetes’ horror was the horror of abandonment.” And yet, she continued, as Sophocles accurately pointed out, it can take so little from doctors to turn that around: a daily visit, a few minutes of friendly conversation, or sometimes just a new young ear to hear the old story all over again.

[Abigail Zuger is a medical doctor who works in New York City as an infectious disease specialist and writes on medical issues for the New York Times.  She’s the author of Strong Shadows: Scenes from an Inner City AIDS Clinic (W. H. Freeman Inc., 1995).]

Theater of War, Part 3

 

[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.]