Ten years ago, Bryan Doerries had a hunch that readings of ancient Greek war plays could communicate empowering messages to the military community. The first show, which was in San Diego, went from a scheduled 45-minute discussion to 3.5 hours.  

“It was clear at that moment that we’d stumbled across a really powerful tool, an ancient tool, for communalizing trauma and engaging people in tough conversations,” Doerries said.  

Fast forward 10 years and that hunch is now Theater of War Productions, an organization that exposes military communities across the country to ancient Greek texts translated by Doerries, the artistic director. The performances create a common vocabulary for having conversations about the mental and physical wounds of war, Doerries said. 

Theater of War Productions is bringing its signature project, called “Theater of War,” to Maxwell Auditorium at 6 p.m. Oct. 17, where scenes from Sophocles’ “Ajax” will be read and performed by three actors. Already, the play has been performed and exposed to hundreds of thousands of service members, veterans and their families. 

A training session will take place earlier in the day called “Veteran Cultural Competence Training,” which is open to locals interested in seeing the world from a veteran’s perspective. The trainings aim to help the public gain a better understanding before they see the performance. 

“It’s a hugely emotional experience where the actors are really throwing all their weight behind the words and coming at the audience with a great intensity,” said Doerries about the performances. 

The play tells the story of Ajax, a respected Greek warrior who, in the last year of the Trojan War, loses his best friend Achilles and is betrayed by his commanding officers. Ajax ends up taking his life after doing something that causes him great shame, despite the pleading of his family. 

Although the performance of the ancient Greek play is an important aspect of the event, Doerries said the main focus of the event is on the panel and discussion following the performance. 

“The entire structure of the event is to create the conditions where a conversation takes place that wouldn’t have happened had we not performed the ancient play,” Doerries said. 

Four members of the Syracuse community will speak on the panel, including two veterans, a veteran family member and a mental health and trauma expert, who is also an SU faculty member.  

Each individual will speak for three to four minutes about what they heard or saw in the play that spoke to them and touched their own experiences across time, Doerries said. Then, the discussion will open to the room. This, Doerries said, is when the most important part of the event begins. 

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“Everywhere we go, we hear the most powerful things spoken about these ancient stories by people who … know what these plays are about because they’ve lived the experiences described,” Doerries said. 

Chris Coffey, the facilitator and actor playing Ajax in the reading, will go out into the audience and ask a handful of questions that have been asked to over 450 audiences around the world. 

For veterans, this is an opportunity to connect to issues that others have faced, even thousands of years ago, Coffey said in an email. Oftentimes, topics of PTSD and suicide prevention are at the core of the conversations. 

Coffey added that the Greek playwright Sophocles was also a general in the Greek army and understood to tell stories that relate to issues soldiers face so that they wouldn’t feel isolated.  

A challenge for veterans, Doerries explained, is not that they don’t want to tell their stories, but that it takes a tremendous amount of energy to do so in front of people unaware of their experiences. In some ways, he said, the play is about giving the room some energy for those stories to be shared. 

Doerries recalled during the first “Theater of War” performance back in 2008, one of the first people to speak was the wife of a Navy SEAL. She said to the audience that her husband was sent off four times to war and each time he came back home, he would carry the trauma from the war with him, like Ajax does in the story.  

In addition to allowing members of the military community to connect by sharing their personal experiences and perspectives, the event also helps create a space for those who haven’t been in military conflict, he said. It allows them to learn by sitting alongside veterans and listening to their stories. 

Kenneth Marfilius, visiting professor in the School of Social Work at David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics and a U.S. Airforce Veteran, said that the “Theater of War” performance is not exclusively for the military community. Rather, one of its goals is to bridge the gap between veterans and civilian populations here on campus and around the world, he said. 

“I believe Syracuse University is extremely supportive of our veteran community,” Marfilius said. “Theater of War is just one unique way of bringing the local community together to foster compassion and understanding between diverse audiences.” 

Published on October 13, 2019 at 11:35 pm