The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today by Bryan Doerries (review)

Bryan Doerries’s The Theater of War is a jargon-free and perceptive account of why ancient Greek tragedies can help communities heal after suffering and loss. The book’s scope is surprisingly expansive. Two early chapters discuss the effects of staging classical war tragedies for American combat veterans, while the last two sections study the audience responses of corrections officers and palliative care workers. The author stresses he is not an academic; he never uses terms like “applied theatre” or “marginalized communities” to describe his work with groups whose labor is undervalued or contested. Nevertheless, Doerries is a director and formidable translator of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. To learn Hebrew in college, he took a three-year, independent study with Dr. Eugen Kullman, who required him to connect “the ancient mythological past to the morning’s headlines.”

Like Anne Carson, the writer and translator, Doerries modernizes ancient Greek texts, unearthing etymologies that compound the meanings of words and exhuming aspects of classical staging that illuminate contemporary concerns. During America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Doerries intuited that Sophocles’ Ajax could shed light on rising homicide and suicide rates among returning veterans. After several failed attempts on Doerries’s part to collaborate with the Army, a mental health coordinator for the U.S. Marines finally invited his company, Under the Wire, to present at a 2008 conference on Combat Operational Stress Control. A brief reading from Ajax struck deep chords with Marines and their spouses. Ajax was a war hero whose best friend, Achilles, perished in battle. Worse was the betrayal Ajax felt when his commanders awarded Achilles’ armor to Odysseus, an eloquent rival. Physically powerful but unable to voice his sense of injustice, even to his wife, Ajax went mad and slaughtered a herd of cattle, mistaking them for the leaders who had devalued his service. Overwhelmed, he subsequently killed himself.

Using quotes from post-show discussions, Doerries recounts how Marines opened up about their own experiences of feeling let down or forgotten. In 2009, the Department of Defense recognized the efficacy of Doerries’s public forum approach and sponsored him to present a multi-city, hundred-show tour called Theater of War. A Marine’s teenage daughter told Doerries that her parents’ ongoing involvement with his project (first as audience members and later as readers of the Ajax and Tecmessa roles) ultimately “saved her family.”

Next, Doerries turns to American prisons. By presenting Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, a play about a god “placed in solitary confinement,” Doerries hopes to build sympathy for inmates. Yet many guards unexpectedly identify with the drama’s protagonist. “I’m Prometheus,” says one: “The only difference is that I serve time eight hours a day.” Employed in dangerous settings that force them to hide their compassion, corrections officers find it hard to remove the “hateful, cynical attitude” they cultivate at work: “I can’t tell you the number of times my first wife told me to quit talking to her like a convict.” Ironically, acknowledging their isolating work leads some officers to realize how little divides them from inmates: they often grew up in the same neighborhoods, attended the same schools, and now “serve time” together, but remain very much apart.

A chapter entitled “Heracles in Hospice” takes up Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, in which the terminally ill Heracles pleads with his son to set him on fire. Presenting this scene to hospice workers and caregivers generates a gripping dialogue about the stigmas and values of assisted death. The chapter’s strength lies in Doerries’s self-positioning: not as an expert who empowers others, but as a non-judgmental listener who has endured the painful deaths of his father and his fiancée. Theater of War ultimately defines theatre as a forum for witnessing and exchange. In each context (post-war, prison, and end-of-life care), Doerries tangibly demonstrates how lives can change for the better when people...