The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today

This 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. For years, theater director Bryan Doerries has led an innovative public health project that produces ancient tragedies for current and returned soldiers, addicts, tornado and hurricane survivors, and a wide range of other at-risk people in society.

Drawing on these extraordinary firsthand experiences, Doerries clearly and powerfully illustrates the redemptive and therapeutic potential of this classical, timeless art: how, for example, Ajax can help soldiers and their loved ones better understand and grapple with PTSD, or how Prometheus Bound provides new insights into the modern penal system. These plays are revivified not just in how Doerries applies them to communal problems of today, but in the way he translates them himself from the ancient Greek, deftly and expertly rendering enduring truths in contemporary and striking English.

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. 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.

"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 Guantánamo 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. Agent: Zoe Pagnamenta, Zoe Pagnamenta Agency. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

"The Theater of War is an enthralling, gracefully written, and urgently important examination of the vital, ongoing relationship between past and present, between story and human experience, and between what the ancients had to report about warfare and human values and the desperate moral and psychological struggles that soldiers still undergo today. Bryan Doerries has given us a gift to be treasured." Tim O'Brien

"Bryan Doerries's The Theater of War is a testament both to the enduring power of the classics and to the vital role art can play in our communal understanding of war and suffering." Phil Klay, author of Redeployment, recipient of 2014 National Book Award

"One has the feeling we are being watched by our ancestors, that they continually call out to us, bestow us with gifts of their wisdom, warn us about habitual traps and foibles common to all humans. We rarely have the presence to listen to, to receive that wisdom. Bryan Doerries asks: what lessons will we finally take to heart from these ancients? In this riveting narrative, simply but elegantly told, Doerries movingly resurrects the inner life of a people who lived 2,500 years ago, but whose struggles evoke our own familiar and damaged present, now endowed by this wonderful book with more drama, more tragedy, more compassion, more possibility. Here is the proof at last: our future depends on the gifts of the past." Ken Burns

BRYAN DOERRIES is a writer, director, and translator. A self-described "evangelist" for classical literature and its relevance to our lives today, Doerries uses age-old approaches to help individuals and communities heal after suffering and loss. He is the founder of Theater of War, a project that presents readings of ancient Greek plays to service members, veterans, and their families to help them initiate conversations about the visible and invisible wounds of war. He is also the co-founder of Outside the Wire, a social-impact company that uses theater and a variety of other media to address pressing public health and social issues.