"Theater of War' at the Penn Museum

We are at war. We have been at war uninterruptedly for the past ten years, and in each of the last eight decades.

That amounts to a lot of veterans. Iraq, America's most expensive recent war, has produced roughly 4,400 American deaths and 40,000 casualties, as well as millions of troop rotations.

We have a great number of returning soldiers, far more of them maimed in mind and spirit than in body, although quite enough of the latter too. They can be found in the next office, the neighborhood bar or the trauma wards of military hospitals where you don't see them at all. They've lived experiences incomprehensible to most of us, and they're rarely invited to share them. In effect they constitute our underground republic.

Theater of War, the brainchild of its artistic director, Bryan Doerries, is an attempt to bring the civilian public together with veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Since most of us shy from such an encounter, Doerries hit upon the idea of a mediating device: theater, specifically the theater of ancient Greece's great tragic playwright, Sophocles.

Sophocles as soldier

The Greeks had no separation between civilians and warriors, because theirs was a civilian army, and Sophocles himself had experience as a commander. Even when drawing upon mythological or at least legendary themes, as in his Ajax and Philoctetes, Sophocles presented the facts of war as his audience directly knew them.

Doerries has adapted scenes from each of these dramas for reading, and they are as it were the hook for his own modern audiences. After each reading, veterans, spouses and/or therapists replace the actors, recounting their unscripted personal experience of war. The audience is then invited to respond.

The format works; the production given at the Penn Museum auditorium on April 2 was the 150th presented nationwide. The play on this day was the Ajax, Sophocles's telling of the great Greek warrior's betrayal, madness and disgrace outside the walls of Troy.

Cheated of his prize

The story is simple and timeless. By the rules of war, Ajax inherits the armor of Achilles after the latter's death, but he is cheated of his prize by scheming officers. When Ajax refuses to accept this dishonor, he is maddened by the goddess Athena, and in taking what he believes to be his revenge is duped into slaughtering a herd of cattle. This act compounds his dishonor, and leaves him no morally acceptable choice but suicide.

This tale holds obvious relevance to the experience of Iraq and Afghan vets. In these wars, soldiers have been "maddened" into losing the ability to distinguish between friend and foe, and made to take the fall for superiors when, as at Abu Ghraib, abuse or atrocity results.

The Afghan war had its symbolic Ajax in Pat Tillman, the National Football League star whose killing by friendly fire was spun as a heroic battlefield death by his superiors up a chain of command reaching to General Stanley McChrystal. Like the Greek generals at Troy, McChrystal was unpunished for his perversion of honor; indeed, he was subsequently promoted to overall command of the Afghanistan war.

Strathairn's emotional depth

The Ajax scenes were performed in a reading by a company of five, including three members of the People's Light & Theatre Company, Lou Ferguson, Melanye Finister, and Graham Smith; Michael Stewart Allen, a former company member of the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey; and David Strathairn, one of America's most distinguished actors. Strathairn performed both Ajax and his deceitful commander Agamemnon with great insight and vocal range, and, for Ajax, emotional depth. His colleagues, particularly Finister, ably supported him, but Strathairn was really the show.

The performers were followed by the four panelists, who each recounted personal experiences, many of them (including an attempted suicide) harrowing. Doerries then opened the event to audience discussion, but not without putting his own questions to us for response, and editorializing freely throughout. His style seemed more suited to a preacher than a moderator (indeed, Doerries describes himself as an "evangelist"), though what the subject matter of his gospel is was unclear.

Doerries has made a career of using drama to address therapeutic questions, including public health, end of life issues, and political violence. War, though, is an inherently controversial subject, and America's current wars are particularly so.

Excessively political?

Personally, I think the U.S. lost the moral right to wage war with the atomic bombs it dropped on Japan, and, with due respect to the panelists, I said so in my own comment. Doerries found this and several other audience remarks excessively "political." But the Ajax is a thoroughly political text, and it trivializes the issues it raises to treat it merely as a device to build empathy for American veterans.

I yield to none in my disgust at the horror show of Walter Reed Army Hospital, or the spectacle of soldiers coming home to find their homes foreclosed by banks. But that doesn't justify the wars they have fought in.

Theater of War is an attempt to connect the general public with the reality of wars that engage, as Doerries pointed out, less than one per cent of America's population. As such, that's a worthy enough endeavor. But any attempt to separate warriors from the wars they fight, particularly in the case of wars in progress, is, whether intentionally or not, a use of the former to justify the latter.

The name for such an effect is propaganda. The sense of it, for this participant, hung palpably over the occasion.♦


To read a response, click here.