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In ancient fifth-century Athens, if you had something of vital importance to say, you wrote a play. The most consequential utterances on the Attic tragic stage, commentary encompassing all manner of life and death issues, very often came from the mouths of characters and choruses created by soldierplaywrights such as Aeschylus and Sophocles. During a century in which Athens found itself at war for over eight decades, one of the most pressing preoccupations of soldier-playwrights was the urgent, existential need to investigate the human toll of Athen's military adventures.
Fast forward two millennia to an embattled twenty-first-century America. In early 2008, an unknown, thirty-something theater director and translator of ancient Greek drama named Bryan Doerries runs head-on into a slew of articles detailing the devastating mental health problems and vexing reintegration challenges that significant numbers of troops find themselves facing upon return from America's recent wars. Doerries begins asking complex questions about the costs and consequences of America's protracted overseas conflicts.
In response to these troubling newspaper accounts, Doerries does not try his hand at writing his own modern-day tragedies. Instead, he sets about the translator's task by not only giving the ancient wisdom of Aeschylus and Sophocles an afterlife in translation, but also finding a viable way to share these tragedians' insights into loss, grief, shame, and suffering with military audiences. Hence, the birth in 2008 of Doerries' Brooklyn-based theater project called Theater of War. A self-described "evangelist" for classical literature, Doerries formed Theater of War based on the hunch that intense, hard-driving performances of his clipped, precision-tuned versions of Greek tragedy could spark vital conversation about the psychological and physical wounds inflicted upon warriors by war. His intuition was spot on. WLA recently connected with Doerries to discuss how he transformed that hunch into the phenomenal success story that Theater of War and Doerries' numerous other social impact theater spin-offs have become.
Doerries details various aspects of that story as well as the larger narrative of tragic theater's origin in two new books-a memoir, The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedy Can Teach Us Today, and a collection of translations, All That You've Seen Here is God: New Versions of Four Greek Tragedies. We asked Doerries to take time out from an...