Sophocles was a writer, but he was also a soldier. His plays deal with “the need to find a way to bring veterans back to civilian life,” the theatre director Bryan Doerries said last night at St. Vincent’s Trauma and Wellness Center, in Greenwich Village. For the past fifteen months, with a rotating ensemble of four actors, Doerries has been taking scenes from his adaptations of Sophocles’ “Ajax” and “Philoctetes” to military bases across the country. “Presenting these plays to military audiences has been a complete revelation,” Doerries says in the promo video above. “It’s as if they were written in a code that the military had to explain to us.”
Last night, at St. Vincent’s, the audience included dozens of soldiers, one of them in a wheelchair and many others with less obvious wounds. They seemed to identify most with the part of Ajax, a great soldier driven mad by rage, read by Jeffrey Wright.
“I’ve been Ajax; I’ve spoken to Ajax,” Sergeant Tony Gonzalez told the crowd during a panel discussion after the reading. But Gonzalez also felt for Ajax’s wife, who is unable to ease her husband’s shame or keep him from taking his own life. “The family members feel it the most,” Gonzalez said. “They go through things you wouldn’t believe.” He’s been deployed twice to Iraq, but the hardest thing he’s ever done, he said, was in Brooklyn, when he had to tell a soldier’s wife and mother that the soldier had been killed.
The character Philoctetes, read by David Strathairn, is stricken with wrenching wounds that his fellow soldiers don’t know how to cure, and his army abandons him on a remote island. “I am wretched if men do not know my story,” he cries. Another panelist, Michael Kramer, suggested that Philoctetes’ pain and bitterness would be familiar to any soldier who suffers alone after coming home. “I’d rather have been spit on than ignored,” a soldier once told Kramer, who is the director of the Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy Program at the midtown V.A. (Last year, Sue Halpern wrote in this magazine about similar therapy programs.)
After the readings and the panel, the veterans in the audience had a chance to talk. Some reacted to the Greek drama, but most just wanted to get something off their chests. Only one had a question. How, he asked the clinicians on the panel, do you protect your own mental health when you spend so much time hearing about so much pain? He used the term “vicarious trauma.”
Kramer frowned. “We’re going to hear a lot about this over the next days and weeks, depending on how things at Fort Hood unfold,” he said. “It’s going to be one of those terms that’s going to be coöpted by the large media.”
Kramer’s warning against easy parallels was well taken, but hearing the story of Ajax, “his mind infected by divine madness,” the carnage he visited on his comrades, and the outrage and horror that followed, it was difficult not to think of Major Nidal Hasan. It seemed that Sophocles was asking us to find empathy even for Hasan, the betrayer of his fellow soldiers, his countrymen, and his religious brethren. While Jeffrey Wright was reading, it almost seemed possible.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/11/theater-of-war.html
