“My first week as a freshman at Kenyon, I met with my adviser-who just happened to be a classics professor assigned to me-and decided to take ancient Greek. He was an indifferent high school student who bloomed in college. And I remember the sort of wonderment, the sense of awe, of limitless possibilities that the theater presented and associating that with Greek tragedy at a very early age.” “I was one of the children who were killed by their pathologically jealous mother-and I still remember my lines and the experience of screaming them, belting them backstage while a couple of college students pretended to bludgeon me and my friend. He’ll tell you it was a seminal experience. A smart kid in a smart household, he appeared in his first Greek play at the age of 8, as one of the children in Euripides’ Medea.
The play is just the vehicle they’ll use to get there.Ī self-described classics nerd, Doerries was born and raised in Newport News, Virginia. He promises that the important work of discovery and empathy will begin during the discussion following the reading. As he sometimes does, he will read the role of the chorus, too. It is the wrenching story of the famed Greek warrior Ajax, betrayed and humiliated by his own generals, exhausted by war, undone by violence and pride and fate and hopelessness until at last, seeing no way forward, he takes his own life.ĭoerries, 41, slim and earnest, energetic, explains all this to the audience that night. It was part of the spring City Dionysia, the dramatic festival of Athens at which the great tragedies and comedies of the age were performed for every citizen. Sophocles wrote the play 2,500 years ago, during a century of war and plague in Greece. The scream came from Gloria Reuben, the actress playing Tecmessa, Ajax’s wife.
The creation of director and co-founder Bryan Doerries, Brooklyn-based Theater of War Productions bills itself as “an innovative public health project that presents readings of ancient Greek plays, including Sophocles’ Ajax, as a catalyst for town hall discussions about the challenges faced by service men and women, veterans, their families, caregivers and communities.”įor Doerries, ancient plays allow veterans “to bear witness to the experience of war.”Īnd tonight in the Milbank Chapel of Teachers College at Columbia University, they’ve done just that, performing Ajax for a roomful of veterans and mental health professionals. “That reading, that particular night, broke open a lot of people. “I don’t know what happened,” the actress will say in a few days. This is the moment the director wanted, the moment of maximum discomfort. The audience shifts uncomfortably in their seats. It is the sound not only of shock and of loss but of every shock and of every loss, of a grief beyond language understood everywhere by everyone. It is a terrifying sound, not because it is inhuman, but because it is too human. Late afternoon light angles across the floor.Īn hour later from the stage her terrible howl rises over the audience to the ceiling, ringing against the walls and out the doors and down the stairs rises from somewhere inside her to fill the building and the streets and the sky with her pain and her anger and her sadness. She makes a mark in her script next to the stage direction:Īnd they go on rehearsing. Make them wish they’d never come, the director says, almost absently.
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