The launch party for this book featured a reading from the Greek tragedy Ajax by Sophocles. Emmy-winning actor Reg E. Cathey played the tragic hero, brought to despair by his feeling that the Athenian military leadership had betrayed him, and by his sense of revulsion for an atrocity he had committed while in a fit of rage. He stared down at his sword and contemplated killing himself.
But I shall miss / the light of day / and the sacred / fields of Salamis, / where I played as / a boy, and great / Athens, and all / my friends.
The regretful words strike a chord in listeners because, with few alterations, they could be spoken today by a person in distress. That is the point of The Theater of War, and the reason its author founded a theater company that performs Greek tragedies at military bases across the country. When they encounter tragedy, Bryan Doerries writes, “Audience members are, in a way, healed by the realization that they are not alone in their communities, not alone in the world, and not alone across time.”
Doerries is a somewhat unusual candidate for the role he now plays in military communities. He is a New York-based theater director with no military background, no family ties to the armed forces—and an outlook on politics that is typical of such individuals. But Doerries is well educated in the classics and in human suffering, which has opened his eyes to the therapeutic potential of art. He describes his father’s slow descent into madness from diabetes and how, at the end of his life, he thought he was being watched over by black crows—persecuting Furies who had come to carry out his fate, largely the result of his own life choices. Doerries likewise describes the slow death of his girlfriend from cystic fibrosis, which was preceded by a double lung transplant, bacterial infections, and the ultimate rejection of the donor organs by her body. He saw from these trials that there is a universal, timeless element to suffering, the psychological dimension of which can be alleviated through drama.
As it relates to war, this psychological dimension he calls “moral injury,” a syndrome that occurs when a soldier perpetrates or witnesses “acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations” on the battlefield, as the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay has written. These are the psychological injuries portrayed so vividly in dramas like Ajax. Doerries hypothesizes that such plays are not just expressions of a great culture but tools used by the Athenians to heal and commune during dark times.
His hypothesis is supported by the tragic history of Athens. At the height of its cultural output, Athens was not only in the midst of a long and brutal war with Sparta but also a devastating plague that killed thousands. Athenian tragedies were not originally staged for small audiences of cultural elites, as they tend to be today; rather, they were performed for over 10,000 Athenians at a time. Present were generals and citizen-soldier hoplites—young men coming of age and facing the prospect of military service. Doerries notes that Sophocles, in addition to being the commander of an Athenian fleet, was a member of the healing cult of Asclepius. He also notes the proximity of the Theater of Dionysus to a temple where invalids gathered to be healed as evidence that drama performed a major healing function in a society with rudimentary medical knowledge.
Judging from Doerries’s anecdotes, The Theater of War seems to be having some success in binding moral injuries not responsive to medicine, a cathartic experience that has contributed to the resiliency of military families. Doerries devotes a chapter to recounting the experience of one such family whose veteran father had sunk into a suicidal depression. He sought treatment after he identified with the plight of Ajax during a performance of Sophocles’ tragedy.
If there is a problem here, it is the author’s tendency to write as though there is an Ajax inside all soldiers—as though service to the country is, somehow, a uniformly damaging experience. Doerries knows that this is not the case—he states, at one point, that “a majority” of soldiers who speak after performances have been “made stronger by their war-related experiences,” an observation that comports with the traditional view of returning veterans as good citizens and leaders—but readers are left with the impression that soldiers are, as a class, wounded. This is due, in part, to Doerries’s emphasis on tragedies.
But what might veterans gain from other forms of art valued by the Greeks—epics, for example? The
Odyssey opens with this invocation: Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero who traveled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Such works may contain impolitic lessons, but their talk of heroism might also complement the tragic offerings of The Theater of War.
Blake Seitz is a media analyst at the Washington Free Beacon.
