The Theater of War
What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
For years theater director Bryan Doerries has been producing ancient Greek tragedies for a wide range of at-risk people in society. His is the personal and deeply passionate story of a life devoted to reclaiming the timeless power of an ancient artistic tradition to comfort the afflicted.
Doerries leads an innovative public health project—Theater of War—that produces ancient dramas for current and returned soldiers, people in recovery from alcohol and substance abuse, tornado and hurricane survivors, and more. Tracing a path that links the personal to the artistic to the social and back again, Doerries shows us how suffering and healing are part of a timeless process in which dialogue and empathy are inextricably linked.
The originality and generosity of Doerries’s work is startling, and The Theater of War—wholly unsentimental, but intensely felt and emotionally engaging—is a humane, knowledgeable, and accessible book that will both inspire and enlighten.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this moving and personal volume, Doerries shows how performances of Sophocles and Aeschylus can salve the mental wounds of soldiers with PTSD, as well as prison inmates and guards, terminally ill patients, and hospice workers. Doerries's Theater of War project, which stages professional performances of classical tragedy for both active-service and returning soldiers, is his personal crusade to help others and revive the classics. It is the suffering of Ajax, who slaughters a field of animals in blind rage, that resonates most with the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom share the character's sense of having been betrayed by his superiors. Doerries also uses the tale of Prometheus to represent themes of excessive incarceration and martyrdom for prisoners in solitary confinement and guards at the Guant namo Bay detention camp. Families and physicians facing end-of-life decisions, meanwhile, see a mirror to their experiences in Heracles's anguish and death in Sophocles's Women of Trachis. Doerries's potent memoir reveals that the enduring power of Greek dramas lies in their ability to help us understand the present.
