The Art of Manliness - #660： How Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Heal the Soul

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast when you think

00:00:11.260 about ancient greek tragedies you probably think about people in togas spouting stilted

00:00:14.600 archaic language stories written by stuffy playwrights to be watched by snooty audiences

00:00:18.580 my guest today argues that this common conception of greek tragedies misses the power of plays that

00:00:22.680 were in fact created by warriors for warriors and which represent a technology of healing that's

00:00:26.580 just as relevant today as it was two millennia ago his name is brian dorries he's the author of the

00:00:30.940 book the theater of war as well as the artistic director of an organization of the same name

00:00:34.700 that performs dramatic readings of ancient tragedies for the military and other communities brian and i

00:00:38.700 begin our conversation with what tragedies are what this civic religious and artistic form of

00:00:42.340 storytelling was supposed to do how it was created by war veterans for war veterans and how a civilian

00:00:46.460 classicist ended up putting on these plays for current and former members of our modern military

00:00:50.360 we discuss how the ancient greek tragedies depicted the depth and spectrum of human suffering the

00:00:54.440 intersection of fate and personal responsibility characters who belatedly discover their mistakes

00:00:58.500 and the fleeting chance of changing behavior in light of such realizations brian also explains how

00:01:02.440 the tragedies may have been a form of training for young people on how to grapple with the moral

00:01:05.920 ambiguities that marked adulthood and throughout the show we dig into how tragedies by showing people

00:01:10.340 they're not alone getting to confront uncomfortable realities together and bridging divides can serve as a

00:01:14.960 transformative technology for collective healing not only for military veterans but for anyone who's dealt with

00:01:19.340 trauma loss and the general confusion and hardships of the human experience after the show's over check out our

00:01:24.080 show notes at aom.is theater of war

00:01:26.460 brian dorries welcome to the show no thanks so much so you're the founder of a production company called

00:01:40.840 theater of war where you put on and perform ancient greek tragedies but you also wrote about the experience

00:01:47.080 in a book called the theater of war what ancient tragedies can teach us today let's talk about your

00:01:51.720 history with tragedies when did you discover that you would be performing tragedies for different

00:01:56.940 groups of people soldiers addicts prisoners how did you figure that out well it was a gradual process

00:02:04.020 i studied classics as a student undergraduate at kenyan college in ohio and when i left school i

00:02:13.380 knew that there was a larger audience for these plays than the rarefied few of us who had the privilege

00:02:19.060 of studying them and had always believed that those who had lived the extremities of life even if they'd

00:02:28.420 never heard of these plays might have something to say about them and i got to test that theory out

00:02:33.220 back in 2007 when i directed a series of readings of plays by sophocles in hospitals and it became pretty

00:02:44.280 apparent after the first performance when we engaged the audience of doctors and medical students and

00:02:50.480 patients in a discussion that they in fact knew more about the play than i did even though i translated

00:02:57.100 it from ancient greek and that was the first major revelation that set us the company on this path

00:03:03.480 the first major revelation that you know opened the door to the work that we've been doing now this

00:03:09.500 core value that the audience with skin in the game the audience that has loved and lost and been

00:03:16.460 betrayed and knows sacrifice that has witnessed suffering and death has more to teach us about

00:03:22.500 these ancient greek plays than we to teach them so we started in hospitals and it was an avocation then

00:03:29.540 something i was doing on the side of my professional life and then in 2007 the walter reed scandal broke

00:03:38.340 you may recall that was when our nation's flagship medical army hospital military hospital was sort of

00:03:44.700 exposed in a washington post story that showed how grossly underfunded and under-resourced it was to

00:03:53.280 receive our troops returning from iraq and afghanistan and on every you know paragraph and every part of

00:04:01.900 that article i saw themes in the ancient plays that we'd already been performing in hospitals and just got

00:04:09.020 this idea that if i could simply put ancient war plays about the trojan war that dealt with many of the

00:04:16.060 themes i know that are or i had a hunch that our service members and veterans were struggling with

00:04:21.780 that if i could put those ancient war plays in front of contemporary warriors that something would

00:04:26.980 happen i didn't know what it was and it was that hunch that led us to start seeking a military audience

00:04:34.320 and um i didn't know anyone in the military when we got started i didn't know how to talk to people in

00:04:40.300 the military i'd grown up in a military town in newport news virginia but i didn't um know anyone active

00:04:46.540 duty and to be frank i'd protested against the invasion of iraq in the streets of new york and

00:04:52.200 it felt pretty ineffective and it just it struck me that in in reading this story in the in the

00:05:00.120 washington post about veterans returning to substandard conditions at walter reed that if we were

00:05:07.020 complicit in the suffering of our veterans if we ignored their suffering that we would not have learned

00:05:13.700 any of the lessons that our country had to learn during the vietnam conflict and it you one couldn't

00:05:22.300 simply protest against the war and then sit on one's hands when faced with the suffering of veterans

00:05:28.480 the only thing to do was to try to engage with them and help and all i had was greek and latin

00:05:34.860 and a hunch but it turned out it was it was that we had stumbled across a very powerful ancient tool

00:05:41.440 that was designed by warriors for warriors to do the very thing that we ended up doing with it

00:05:47.880 we'll dig deeper into that experience and then how you've also branched out to other areas as well

00:05:53.020 the other groups but before we do let's talk about tragedies in general because i'm sure a lot of our

00:05:56.880 audience they probably had to read one or two tragedies in high school greek tragedies yeah but

00:06:02.180 just get big picture overview like who were the great i guess they're what are they called tragedy

00:06:06.400 writers tragedians tragedians tragedians what do you say tragedians is what you would say yeah there

00:06:12.620 were three great tragic writers in fifth century athens there were others as well but the main ones

00:06:17.400 were aeschylus known as the father of greek tragedy sophocles and euripides and during the fifth century bc

00:06:26.420 alongside the rise of democracy in the western world arose a form of storytelling that at its core is

00:06:37.460 inextricably democratic as well and tragedies involve stories about people with somewhat noble intentions

00:06:49.380 learning too late of their own mistakes or blindness to the very thing in front of them

00:06:56.420 that if they had known they certainly wouldn't have done and unfortunately usually milliseconds too late

00:07:02.820 they learn of their mistakes and end up destroying themselves and generations to come

00:07:08.660 that's what happens on the stage in greek tragedy but one of the contentions of our work is that there's a

00:07:15.620 big difference between what happens in the plays and what the plays evoke in audiences and i would

00:07:22.840 contend that ancient greek tragedy is a form of storytelling that was designed to do several

00:07:28.260 really important things one to communalize trauma so the greeks saw nearly 80 years of war during the

00:07:35.260 fifth century bc and the audience would have been made of citizens and the citizens were by virtue of 100

00:07:40.920 percent compulsory service they were also soldiers and so there was no one in the audience when

00:07:47.240 presented with stories about the trojan war that would have missed the themes the real life life and

00:07:54.720 death stakes of the themes that were being performed for them and there's a theory that you know the

00:08:00.860 audience was seated according to tribe which is your military unit you fight with your community

00:08:05.780 and according to rank with the generals in the front row the strategoi and the hoplite cadets and the

00:08:12.300 nosebleed section in the very back and that 17 000 people would sit in this outdoor amphitheater

00:08:18.820 on the south slope of the acropolis every spring and for three days they would watch these tragic plays

00:08:26.140 by the three authors i mentioned and others one after the other depicting trauma and loss and grief

00:08:34.200 and betrayal and suffering and and characters as i mentioned learning too late and then discovering

00:08:43.940 in the sort of final moments of the plays how they've erred and the mistakes they've made and the

00:08:50.540 habits they've formed that have accrued to become essentially what we now call fate and so this is what

00:08:58.760 the what happened in the fifth century and i think what we've missed about it is this isn't a form of

00:09:03.060 storytelling that was simply born to entertain it was inextricably civic religious there was a huge

00:09:10.080 religious ceremony that was enacted at the beginning of every city dionysia theater festival each spring

00:09:16.780 it was uh legal this is the same theater where where people saw plays it was a place where people went to

00:09:23.320 hear the rhetorical arguments of lawyers and politicians it was a theater for warriors and those who'd

00:09:30.760 experienced war it was inextricably all these things and more and when we see a greek play

00:09:37.960 unfortunately i think most of the time we think togas and sandals and sheets and people worshiping gods

00:09:44.700 that no longer exist and sort of people often using translations that are from the 19th century or at least

00:09:51.160 sound like they're from the 19th century filled with antiquated language but these greek plays were direct

00:09:57.760 direct efficacious experiences for those who watched them in the fifth century and i would argue that

00:10:03.680 the stakes of watching them were of life and death for those who were there because the greeks knew

00:10:10.600 that there had to be a time there had to be a place where those who'd experienced war and trauma

00:10:16.580 and even at the end of the fifth century a plague a pestilence like we're living through today that killed

00:10:22.000 one-third of the athenian population there had to be a time and a place to collectively acknowledge

00:10:28.220 the impact of violence and of trauma and of loss on individuals but also on the community and so

00:10:35.480 greek plays these ancient tragedies weren't simply expressions of fatalism or grief on the part of the

00:10:44.360 greeks who were living through these experiences they were gestures that were meant to acknowledge the

00:10:50.400 collective toll these experiences had and to provide people the opportunity to see their own struggles

00:10:56.360 reflected in ancient stories the greeks were up to the same thing we're up to now they were telling

00:11:02.060 stories about the trojan war which was as distant in their memory collectively and their consciousness as

00:11:08.560 they are to us today so you said like a tragedy happens when a character realizes something it's called

00:11:13.420 i guess that's peripatia right where they ragnorasis yeah when they discover something too late

00:11:18.240 and they they do something that causes their downfall like sort of the stereotypical

00:11:21.940 like i guess platonic form of tragedy a lot of people point to is oedipus rex or oedipus rex if

00:11:28.020 you're from england pronounce it that way yeah uh but yeah so like oedipus he had a temper ended up

00:11:32.720 killing his father and sleeping with his mother and he does he realized it when it was too late

00:11:37.620 yeah i mean it's so actually it's not platonic it's the aristotelian so plato threw out all of the

00:11:43.880 poets from the ideal republic yeah plato didn't yeah he thought they corrupted the corrupted people

00:11:47.820 he believes yes and this is an important point he believed that or his his his character socrates

00:11:55.040 based on the historical figure argued that the reason the poet shouldn't be in in the republic

00:12:01.120 they should be banned is because they have the capacity to sway our emotions and make us do things

00:12:05.540 we shouldn't do or don't want to do and while everything from ancient theater to contemporary

00:12:11.440 advertising certainly plays upon those principles i think there was something hugely missed in that

00:12:18.140 gesture and that's that we can have the ethical conversations all day all night about in the

00:12:23.280 policy conversation but unless we're grounded in the emotional and spiritual consequences of our

00:12:29.440 ethical decisions and our policy decisions i think it's easy to lose touch with what we're really

00:12:35.080 talking about and that's what the greek plays did watching characters suffer on stage because of

00:12:40.880 decisions they make in front of us brings us into a consciousness of our own choices and their

00:12:49.240 consequences as well as the fleeting possibility of making a change before it's too late so aristotle

00:12:57.260 says yes the i mean again aristotle has a bunch of words that have been filtered down to us through

00:13:03.820 high school english teachers mostly and with all due respect to them i unfortunately for most of us

00:13:09.760 we were kind of poisoned to greek tragedy by those lessons and you know the ones you mentioned

00:13:15.300 peripatea and anagorasis are recognition and reversal right so this idea that um when you're watching

00:13:24.900 a greek tragedy you watch characters learn something and then change their behavior but often too late

00:13:32.820 and in the case of oedipus yes he learns over the span of the play that he is the source of the

00:13:41.120 contagion the very plague that's killing the people of thieves because yes he has fulfilled a prophecy that

00:13:48.720 he sought to escape that he would one day marry his mother and kill his father those things happened

00:13:54.580 before the play began so the real action of the play is the discovery of the thing that he was blind to

00:14:00.000 all along in the greek i am the contagion but the interesting thing about tragedy you mentioned

00:14:05.740 it explores this idea of fate but also like you know personal responsibility like the intersection

00:14:11.240 between the two because a lot of times the stuff that happens like to the person that's like the

00:14:15.580 tragic hero or tragic character like they didn't have like it just sort of like they got dealt a bad

00:14:20.520 hand like you know oedipus like there was some prophecy he had no control over that and he had no clue

00:14:25.800 that the things he was doing was fulfilling this prophecy yeah yet he was still responsible for it

00:14:30.900 so what was going on there yeah so aristotle takes for some reason oedipus and uses it as the ultimate

00:14:37.760 example of greek tragedy again this these aristotle's poetics which is what we're really talking about

00:14:43.700 right now we're like a pocket notebook of aristotle's with lecture notes scrawled into it not a book

00:14:50.740 not a study not an essay but just some notes he had written and somehow they've been sort of codified

00:14:56.500 and just frame our understanding like words like catharsis which to me mean absolutely nothing

00:15:01.600 become the key words we use to talk about greek tragedy and fate is another one of those words and

00:15:09.040 tragic flaw is the other one which i try to talk about in my book i think you're really right to point

00:15:14.320 out that the greek plays are very much about agency and they're also about forces at work in our lives

00:15:21.420 that are bigger than us that we don't necessarily understand until it's too late we have lots of

00:15:28.100 forces working upon us every day you know gods governments luck chance diseases weather and uh you know

00:15:37.820 are we as human beings conscious of all those forces and their impact upon us all the time

00:15:44.140 of course not um but we still have agency we're still responsible for our choices and i think the

00:15:50.600 thing that oedipus actually suffered from that he didn't deserve is not the prophecy he ran from the

00:15:58.180 prophecy and by virtue of running from it he fulfilled it and there's something in that it's actually the

00:16:04.560 fact that he was exposed or aborted as a child his name oedipus means pierced foot or pierced

00:16:13.980 feet it also means i know feet and because in greek the past tense of i have seen is i know i have known

00:16:24.540 foot so oedipus has is named after the very act by which he was aborted exposed on the side of a

00:16:33.940 mountain on account of a prophecy that his parents had received that king lias his father would be killed

00:16:40.360 by his own offspring and that early childhood trauma ends up defining his life and it isn't until the

00:16:50.080 very last seconds of the play when he realizes that his own mother had given him away and his father

00:16:59.600 had tried to kill him on the side of a mountain and then on the side of a road and that oedipus responded

00:17:08.280 at that moment with overwhelming force and violence and killed the person who was trying to kill him

00:17:14.020 but everything in his life that he wasn't really conscious of

00:17:17.580 had led him to this place where he would react with such violence and i think there's an insight in

00:17:23.760 of course freud uncovers this and plays with it and you know whole dissertations and books have been

00:17:31.320 written about this notion that how we are treated as children by our parents in some ways is the

00:17:38.340 intergenerational curse that gets passed down from generation to generation and we performed oedipus a

00:17:44.700 few years ago in a super max prison at eastern correctional facility where i taught a class on

00:17:50.320 tragedy with 27 inmates who were all doing 25 years to life for mostly violent crimes and

00:17:57.060 they wanted to talk about when they heard and saw the play in the prison the sins of the father

00:18:03.860 they wanted to talk about lias and how oedipus's father's violence toward him as a child and as an

00:18:11.700 adult shaped who oedipus was but even so they wanted to talk about personal responsibility for their

00:18:18.840 own crimes many of them were abused as children and yet that didn't excuse the violence that they had

00:18:26.000 committed in their lives and therein lies i think what's so powerful about greek tragedy it's not

00:18:32.500 about morals it's not about lessons it is about ambiguity it is about the moral grayness in which

00:18:41.060 we're all living are we responsible for our actions absolutely are we sometimes victims of forces that are

00:18:48.460 well beyond our understanding of course so how do we how do we reconcile those two things especially

00:18:55.340 when it comes to things like violent crimes and so that's one of the core themes of the play

00:19:00.160 no i mean if you read all the tragedy that seems like to be that that ambiguity is the the reoccurring

00:19:06.240 theme and you and a lot of them like you see this moment where the character the the main character

00:19:11.280 of the play like basically ask and they're asking the chorus basically what am i supposed to do like

00:19:16.540 what am i supposed to do now and i think and that's why there's so that's why there's so like

00:19:21.040 people resonate because we've all had those experiences in our lives like what am i supposed

00:19:25.320 to do now because like you weren't dealt you were dealt this rotten hand but you're still responsible

00:19:29.880 and you're clueless about what to do that's right and maybe that's the human that's that's what it

00:19:34.760 means to be human or maybe that's what it means to be an adult to be sort of almost conscious of

00:19:41.240 these forces that are work at work upon us almost able to surpass them but ultimately you know it's

00:19:50.480 a crapshoot and yet we're still held responsible for what we end up doing so you know i think there's

00:19:55.920 another theory i really like by this guy jack winkler who was a princeton classicist who asserted

00:20:01.620 this idea that greek tragedy was a form of training for young adults for sort of late adolescence

00:20:07.880 called a phoebs uh there were 19 year olds who were matriculating into military service

00:20:12.860 but also into civic life and that's why according to this theory so many of the greek plays feature

00:20:18.780 characters who are young the adolescents antigone orestes electra ismene neoptolemus hillus list goes on

00:20:27.400 and on thrust into ethically impossible situations for which there are no right answers and by which they

00:20:36.000 will be haunted for the rest of their lives no matter what they decide to do this theory about

00:20:41.760 a phoebs or young people being the centerpiece of greek tragedy even goes so far as to assert that the

00:20:47.260 chorus itself may have been performed by late adolescence so that the framing of how you heard

00:20:53.800 the play and that exchange about what i should do would be seen through the lens of young people

00:20:59.020 wrestling with these issues you know i don't think we as a society have a vehicle for training people

00:21:05.360 for the moral ambiguity of adult life but the greeks convened one third of their athenian population

00:21:12.120 each spring to watch all these plays if you follow this theory to train young people for what it means

00:21:19.480 to be an adult and that means facing down ambiguity well can we talk about that the dynamic between the

00:21:26.540 chorus and the characters so like the the tragedy like one thing that makes me unique about tragedy is

00:21:31.080 that it's all action right like the tragedy doesn't happen unless something happens it's not like a

00:21:36.060 novel where there's like internal dialogue and there's character development like something has

00:21:40.760 to happen and then it seems like the chorus is there to provide context for the action yeah i think

00:21:47.140 well there's a number of functions of the chorus but what i like about theater and what i like about

00:21:51.300 tragedy in particular is you're right it's it is action there is no other thing the action is the thing

00:21:55.680 and that's why plays don't mean anything they do something that's why tragedies do something and

00:22:01.040 even the word drama comes from drao in greek means to do to act so you don't describe a character you

00:22:09.360 learn about a character through their choices oedipus makes a series of choices on stage and off and

00:22:14.480 that's what forms the character or your impression of who the character is and i think that's you know

00:22:19.860 that's become a sort of unwritten rule of character development anyway that action is the most powerful

00:22:25.080 tool for understanding a character you know of course in novelistic forms other forms you have

00:22:30.640 other tools as well the chorus is this amazing intermediary this bridge between the world of the

00:22:36.840 audience and the world of the play and so yes the characters in the plays in the scenes often sort of

00:22:43.920 turn out to the chorus and then these sort of ethically complex situations and say what do i do you

00:22:50.060 know in the one of the plays we recently performed there's a character named hillis who's been

00:22:54.820 asked by his dying father heracles to essentially kill him by euthanizing him and burning him

00:23:00.740 alive because he knows he's been poisoned and he wants to die a specific way and hillis's response

00:23:06.600 is if i'm loyal to you then i am disloyal to myself and my sense of what is right is that the

00:23:12.820 lesson that i am to learn and he's saying it to heracles but he's also saying it publicly for a

00:23:19.880 chorus to hear and respond to and that's where i think we get the model of communalization this idea

00:23:25.900 that like you know sometimes when you're in the military or you you are a protester or you work

00:23:32.840 in a hospital or you're a caregiver for someone who's dying you find yourself in a position where

00:23:38.100 you feel you're the only person who's ever felt this alone or this much anguish at a choice that you

00:23:45.720 have to make and what greek tragedy does is it sort of lifts those choices up out of isolation and

00:23:51.300 places them in the company of other people who then in terms of the chorus but then the audience

00:23:56.800 that's watching that the chorus is sort of the stand-in for have to wrestle and collectively shoulder

00:24:01.940 the burden of the consequences of the choice that the character ultimately makes there are scenes in

00:24:09.040 which through dramatic irony the audience and the chorus are both sort of complicit in the suffering

00:24:15.120 of a character they're aware that they're sort of consuming the suffering of a character and

00:24:22.500 that raises all kinds of questions about our relationship to suffering and i think

00:24:26.580 you follow the logic of the chorus as a proxy for the larger audience all the way out into the world of

00:24:33.320 the 17 000 citizen soldiers who are sitting in the theater of dionysus and all of a sudden

00:24:37.940 tragedy appears not to be a just a art form where people are telling stories um it actually

00:24:45.920 is a technology for collective healing where the message is if there were a message um hey you know

00:24:55.740 you don't have to shoulder the burden of these decisions alone you know for a military we sent you

00:25:02.320 to war so you soldier you don't have to shoulder share the pollution of the moral ambiguity of what

00:25:08.860 you did on behalf of our country with us we'll sit here and we'll bear witness to the truth of that

00:25:15.360 moral ambiguity not by having you have to narrate it to us up on stage but by these stories that make

00:25:20.580 it easier for all of us to relate to the challenges you faced and so all of a sudden you know when we

00:25:26.420 perform for very diverse and mixed audiences one sees that audience members are relieved to discover

00:25:33.540 that they're not the only people on the planet to have felt this alone and i think that's the forest

00:25:38.960 folk the the the i think that's the purpose of the the chorus in greek tragedy so that these things

00:25:44.400 don't happen in a vacuum and so that the characters can sort of you know share the burden and the

00:25:50.600 pollution of what they're facing with other people we're gonna take a quick break for your words from our

00:25:55.460 sponsors and now back to the show well this idea that tragedies are a technology of healing you make

00:26:02.780 this point that oftentimes the amphitheater was connected to i guess we call like the doctor's

00:26:07.900 office or like the temple where you'd go to get healed physically yeah like there was they they saw

00:26:12.280 the connection there definitely i mean look i don't i'm not speaking as an academic or a scholar when i say

00:26:18.480 that but there are other people who've made this argument and some terrific articles and books about the

00:26:24.100 subject you know when i went to the theater of dionysus for the first time i stood in the temple

00:26:29.080 of asclepius which is the very place where people went to get healed and by the way the temple of

00:26:33.020 asclepius was moved in the late 5th century directly adjacent to the theater of dionysus so that when

00:26:39.380 you're standing in the temple the ruins of the temple where people the clinic where people went to be

00:26:44.080 healed you can hear because of the architecture uh with the clarity of you know bose noise canceling

00:26:52.400 headphones what someone's saying on the absolute other side of the amphitheater uh as if they even

00:26:58.320 if they're whispering and that's not an exaggeration if you know the architecture of of amphitheaters

00:27:04.200 amphitheater in greek means the place where we go to see in both directions the amphi in both directions

00:27:12.000 theatron seeing place and it's where i go to see you and you go to see me and where we go to see

00:27:19.120 ourselves reflected in the characters and where we go to see our own struggles reflected in ancient

00:27:24.160 stories and where by virtue of the mediation of storytelling we can see ourselves and see each

00:27:32.240 other and that that was directly adjacent to the very place where individuals went to get healed

00:27:37.720 i mean i don't need more of an argument than the work that we are already are doing but it just

00:27:42.960 seems that greek tragedy is as refined a technology and advancement as greek architecture or greek philosophy

00:27:50.860 or the other huge advancements of the classical period in almost every field and you know the the

00:27:58.960 power and the sort of proof of what i'm saying is that i can take a greek tragedy dust it off

00:28:06.320 you know translated into a vernacular that feels more direct than most translations put it in front

00:28:12.740 of just about any audience from any culture and it has this that audience almost predictably has the

00:28:20.200 same response and so it is a technology it is a tool that like an external hard drive once you plug

00:28:28.600 it into the right audience it knows what to do and the audience does as well so what do you think is

00:28:35.140 going on with the healing process i think you mentioned earlier like this idea i think a lot

00:28:38.380 of people this idea that the tragedies were healing because you get catharsis you watch this really sad

00:28:42.940 play you see someone you have a downfall and you cry you feel pity you feel fear you sort of like

00:28:48.440 puke out all your emotions have have like a really like a really set like a big big like messy cry

00:28:55.520 and then you can go on your life and do your thing you don't think that's what's going on

00:28:59.500 i just think catharsis is one of those dime store words that doesn't really mean anything and we all

00:29:04.440 sort of have different definitions of it it's sort of it's sort of a new age word that really has

00:29:10.620 taken hold in the 20th 21st century i don't think it means much i'm not really interested in catharsis

00:29:16.440 i don't know what it means so i don't even know how to be interested in it i i hear that definition

00:29:21.320 that it's again in aristotle's note lecture notes he wrote that the aim of tragedy was catharsis he

00:29:27.580 was writing 150 years after the fifth century dramas that i was talking about were performed in

00:29:32.660 athens so again he didn't have direct contact with the sophocles euripides and aeschylus and what was

00:29:38.300 actually happening he's speculating 150 years later and he's saying the aim is catharsis and that's a

00:29:44.580 purgation of pity and fear of a pure or a purification of emotion so either it means that you throw them

00:29:52.420 up as you said and and then all of a sudden you've you've purged yourself of those or that there's

00:29:58.220 sort of a healthy balance to carry around of those emotions pity and fear are not necessarily negative

00:30:03.740 emotions but they have to be sort of purified to this process of collectively engaging with these

00:30:09.640 stories that's kind of interesting but i actually think just from experience and and practical

00:30:15.560 experience in terms of what we do i'm less interested in catharsis and way more interested in something else

00:30:21.160 which is um in the early days i thought that performing these ancient plays for people who

00:30:28.160 had experienced trauma whether it was military or prison or sexual assault or people who you know

00:30:34.440 experienced death and dying or natural disasters or addiction that what we were after by performing

00:30:40.760 the plays was empathy and that's another sort of dime store you know nickel word it's not it's not

00:30:47.800 really doesn't mean much it's an invention of the late 19th century what i think is critical about

00:30:52.520 it is i i went thinking that the objective was empathy and later learned that actually well empathy is a

00:31:00.020 byproduct of performing these these really extreme stories of people suffering and learning too late

00:31:05.860 that in fact the most productive thing that we do is make people uncomfortable and if the actors

00:31:13.980 committed to the actual level of emotion that's required of these by these ancient plays they

00:31:22.260 would do things that really weren't acceptable in the commercial or non-profit theater and film and

00:31:27.440 television they do something that wasn't ultimately consumable or even appropriate in most places

00:31:33.300 they would express a sort of form of suffering that was you know be unclear whether they were suffering

00:31:40.020 or the character was suffering um they would do something that would make not only people

00:31:46.060 uncomfortable but cause us all to sort of scan for the exits and so the note that i give actors before

00:31:52.440 they go on stage when they're performing greek tragedies for audiences that have experienced

00:31:56.620 trauma and loss is make them wish they'd never come and i know that sounds sort of ridiculous and

00:32:05.100 counterintuitive i don't i don't mean like bore them to death or cause them to leave because they're

00:32:10.600 you know feel disconnected from the material but what i really mean is push the performance to such a place

00:32:16.300 where we're all so uncomfortable that we want to leave and then with our model and this didn't happen

00:32:22.760 in the ancient world at least not in the same direct way we we stop the performance and we have a

00:32:28.000 conversation in the theater of war model that lasts just as long as the performance sometimes we'll only do a

00:32:33.140 and we'll sort of just break the play and then we'll interrogate it but if we are pushed as an

00:32:38.800 audience to a place of total discomfort and this is really helpful in our current environment this

00:32:44.820 sort of politically divisive possibly violent environment we're living in right now no matter

00:32:50.560 what divides us at least we can share in that discomfort we can acknowledge that we were all

00:32:56.640 uncomfortable and then in the discussion that follows in our model we can interrogate well why are we

00:33:01.000 so uncomfortable what's so frightening or makes us so uncomfortable about these these these things

00:33:06.620 that have been portrayed to us in the play and you know with our model we're not saying to the audience

00:33:12.520 this is you we're performing these ancient texts that seem quite strange i think to most people

00:33:16.940 we're just creating a space where people can reflect on what do you see of yourself in this

00:33:21.840 and when people are asked and invited into that process of sort of seeing themselves in an ancient

00:33:29.260 story they open up and they connect in ways that i mean look when we first got started it was seen as

00:33:37.700 a career-ending gesture in the u.s military to raise your hand and say i'm struggling with an invisible

00:33:41.980 wound people just wouldn't do it i mean congress had appropriated billions of dollars to address the

00:33:47.180 the mental health epidemic on their hands and yet no one was availing themselves of the resources

00:33:53.040 but we could get a room full of a thousand marines just returned from haraq or afghanistan to open up

00:33:59.000 and short of giving those marines a psychotropic drug i really doubt you're going to get a thousand

00:34:04.100 marines to open up in that way and so one has to then reckon with the fact that when i say greek tragedy

00:34:11.160 was a technology i mean it it it is a psychotropic mind-altering experience when actors commit to

00:34:20.700 these the sort of psychic anguish to performing the psychic anguish that these characters are in

00:34:28.480 it changes our our cognition it opens us in ways that i think very few things can and that's the thing

00:34:35.740 that we've lost touch with as a culture because we've commodified storytelling stories are to be

00:34:41.440 consumed in our culture but what we're trying to create with theater of war is something that can't

00:34:45.960 be consumed and that makes us incredibly uncomfortable well speaking of doing this

00:34:51.520 performance for for veterans the play you guys you did several plays for them the one that you that

00:34:56.820 you talk about in the book is sophocles's ajax for those aren't familiar like what's the big picture

00:35:02.180 story of ajax and like what what did you think that story would resonate with veterans so sophocles

00:35:08.700 ajax is a play about a decorated warrior named ajax who in the ninth year of the trojan war after

00:35:17.560 endless fighting after losing many of his men after the sheer exhaustion of all these years of fighting

00:35:26.560 loses his best friend achilles in battle and then is betrayed by his commanding officers when they give

00:35:35.200 achilles armor to odysseus to another man and it's the combination of exhaustion and trauma and loss and grief

00:35:47.040 and then i think the final straw betrayal that causes ajax to break and ajax is called unbendable in the greek

00:35:58.060 sort of unbreakable he's known to be the strongest of all greek warriors and now all of a sudden in this

00:36:05.580 story the strongest of all greek warriors snaps and he goes and tries to kill his commanding officers while they

00:36:12.760 sleep and he's visited by a kind of dissociative berserk madness that's brought upon him by athena

00:36:20.160 and he mistakes animals in the surrounding fields for the enemy for for the people he came to kill his

00:36:27.940 the generals and he he slaughters this field full of animals with the precision of a great trained warrior

00:36:33.480 and in so doing he enters deeper into this into this dissociative and berserk state and we he actually

00:36:39.600 begins to believe the animals he's killing are really the men he came to kill and he drags them back to

00:36:44.200 his house and tortures them in front of his wife and his son and and the play is about what happens when

00:36:49.760 he wakes up from this madness from this break with reality that's come from all of these this accrual of

00:36:58.380 all these conditions in which he's been living and trying to survive and so in the play ajax is confronted

00:37:06.740 by his family who can tell that as he's coming to consciousness of what he's done he's thinking

00:37:12.500 about taking his own life and he they bring in his troops and they confront him and try to stop him and

00:37:17.500 and in spite of all their efforts to sort of mount this intervention to keep ajax from harming himself

00:37:23.380 he convinces everyone that he's okay and he slips away with his weapon which he was given by his enemy

00:37:30.780 hector sort of hector and he goes down to the salt marshes by the sea and he impales himself on his

00:37:37.460 enemy sword and you know this is the only instance in extant greek tragedy where someone takes their

00:37:44.760 life in this way on stage violence typically takes place in greek tragedy off stage and then you know

00:37:51.660 something something is wheeled on you know the scene is brought out but in this instance ajax this great

00:37:58.340 warrior played by an actor who would have been a combat veteran because everyone served takes his

00:38:04.520 own life on stage impaling himself on a sword calling out for the deaths of the generals who

00:38:11.100 betrayed him and does it only feet from the generals who are sitting in the front row of the theater of

00:38:17.480 dionysus and the second half of the play is about what happens after he kills himself and the impact it

00:38:22.760 has on his family and his troops and his chain of command on his brother who arrives milliseconds

00:38:27.920 too late and whether he should be buried or not and that becomes the central sort of struggle and

00:38:33.660 theme of the play and i gotta say you know we we knew it resonate we knew that it would touch upon

00:38:38.280 themes that the military you know had experienced we got our first opportunity to find out what would

00:38:44.560 happen when we were invited back in 2008 to perform ajax for 400 marines and their spouses in san diego and

00:38:52.540 brought some well-known actors from new york and la to perform david sir theron and jesse eisenberg and

00:38:59.540 this wonderful iraqi american actress named heather rafo and a just monster of an actor new york actor named

00:39:07.300 bill camp and we performed at breakneck speed and scheduled a 45 minute discussion afterwards and the discussion

00:39:14.500 lasted three and a half hours and had to be cut off at midnight and people in that audience stood up

00:39:22.540 and recited lines from sophocles ajax from memory as if they'd known the play their entire lives and

00:39:28.720 related what they had heard in the play to harrowing stories they had never shared in private let alone

00:39:36.340 in front of 400 of their peers in this environment in which it was seen as career-ending to do so

00:39:41.320 and you know one point i look back and there were 50 people waiting to speak at the mic and we realized

00:39:49.200 at that point that we had stumbled across a very powerful ancient military

00:39:55.000 tool sophocles was a general sophocles was a general in the athenian army was elected general twice i i doubt he got

00:40:02.900 elected for writing plays but who knows and the audience was military in the ancient world it was citizen

00:40:08.940 soldiers and they were seeing they were they'd seen 80 years of war over a single century and here is a play that so

00:40:15.060 explicitly speaks to the moral suffering of veterans when all of these things accrue and we've come up

00:40:23.940 you know it's taken us it's taken us 2 500 years to come up with an acronym like ptsd which

00:40:30.220 you know barely scratches the surface of the moral and psychological and spiritual complexity of what

00:40:38.520 veterans return from war and struggle with but the plays somehow get at it without the jargon of medicine

00:40:47.240 and without the psychoanalytic you know blah blah and that opens audiences up and you know the invitation

00:40:54.860 that we give to military audiences is you know talk about the play we don't ask them to talk about

00:40:59.320 themselves but and everyone can have a valid interpretation of the play even if we radically

00:41:03.960 disagree about what that interpretation is and that creates this environment where people really

00:41:08.780 come forth and they say things like the first person who spoke said she was a military spouse

00:41:14.920 that night and she said hello my name is marcel i'm the proud mother of a marine the wife of a navy seal and

00:41:22.740 my husband went away four times to war and each time he came back just like ajax dragging invisible bodies

00:41:29.940 into our house and to quote from the play our home is a slaughterhouse and when she did that in front

00:41:36.560 of 400 marines and their spouses she gave all the spouses in the room permission to voice their hidden

00:41:45.180 anguish and pain by way of the play and that's in fact what happened and what happens every single

00:41:50.300 time we perform ajax for people who've experienced the extremities not just of war but of violence and

00:41:58.080 trauma it works every time yeah and that's a great example because like war is one of those things

00:42:04.480 where you know obviously you don't like war but if you're a soldier is what you signed up to do

00:42:09.560 and there's these these costs that come with it that you know you have there's like that intersection

00:42:15.480 of fate and personal responsibility and that's that's a that's a heavy heavy you're put in all

00:42:21.300 these situations like what am i supposed to do what's the right thing to do and the tragedy it sounds

00:42:27.100 like gives them like lets them know like they're not alone in this like that's right 2500 years ago

00:42:32.460 sophocles felt it greek soldiers felt it this is nothing new and there's some comfort in that i guess

00:42:38.480 right i mean that's that's the thing if i've observed one thing over you know close to 1800 performances

00:42:44.820 across the last more than 12 years it's that people who've experienced loss and trauma universally

00:42:52.420 feel alone like no one could possibly understand my pain and you hear veterans say that all the time

00:43:00.940 no one can understand what i've been through except the people who are in the exact place i was in at

00:43:05.560 the exact time when this traumatic thing happened and that is a totally understandable position to take

00:43:11.540 but i think what greek tragedy can show us is that well maybe we won't understand we can never know

00:43:17.740 the material circumstances that led to your trauma many people have experienced things in their lives

00:43:24.180 that have led them to feel the same type of isolation and in that isolation they can understand

00:43:32.740 something deeper than just the material circumstances that led you to this place and so we've had people

00:43:39.840 you know in our performances especially for diverse audiences people on the receiving end of war

00:43:44.340 middle eastern people stand up and talk about their experience we've had people who've experienced

00:43:47.640 sexual trauma people have experienced been kidnapped people who have lost family members in accidents

00:43:54.780 people who have been abused and all of a sudden in the discussion you see that all these different

00:44:01.700 communities of trauma are actually one community it's it's all co-centric circles rippling out of the

00:44:09.200 same sort of point of impact and we're all within those circles even if the thing that led us to feel

00:44:16.920 so alone was was different and and i think that's really the power it's it's actually you can say

00:44:23.440 you're not alone that's sort of a pithy thing people say all the time you know you're not alone

00:44:27.000 and then that you can also there's a big difference to being told you're not alone and actually realizing

00:44:35.840 that in this amphitheater where i'm seeing you and you're seeing me and we're seeing ourselves reflected

00:44:40.500 in these stories you know i'm not the only person in the room who who feels this way

00:44:46.120 and i think that's you know that's what greek tragedy has to offer it's not the only form of

00:44:53.900 storytelling that can do this there are many other ancient cultures that were after very similar ends

00:44:59.600 and it's just that the greeks spent a great deal of resources in the fifth century bc as they were

00:45:06.360 building their democracy and as they were prosecuting enormous wars they spent a great

00:45:13.300 deal of their resources developing this this technology you know so we talked about i mean

00:45:18.320 so if you're a veteran you know go see ajax performed so you'll probably resonate but like

00:45:23.280 even if you're not a veteran there's there's a there's a tragedy probably out there that you

00:45:28.560 would resonate with like one that connected with me that you talk about in the book is that you

00:45:32.720 mentioned earlier the scene with heracles and his son i think it's from woman of trachis or trachies

00:45:36.920 where you know heracles asked to be like son kill me now this is all about end-of-life stuff now let's

00:45:43.940 set aside the idea of like active euthanasia and assisted suicide but family members are faced with

00:45:49.340 that situation what to do let's say you have a family member a dad partner child they're on assisted

00:45:55.740 feeding respiration and you have to make that decision like do i pull the plug or do i not like

00:46:02.660 and you know there's like no right answer you don't know what to do and that that scene from

00:46:08.700 that tragedy like they experience that same feeling yeah we you know we did a performance yesterday of

00:46:14.480 that very scene for doctors without borders which is i'm sure you know as an organization that has

00:46:18.440 doctors all over the world inside countries where sometimes it's hard to penetrate offering free

00:46:24.500 medical care and during covid it's been especially sort of instrumental as an organization and

00:46:30.360 one of the doctors in the discussion really honed in on this idea that that scene really is about

00:46:38.680 the moral suffering and distress of being asked to end someone's life or to help them to aid them

00:46:45.000 in dying in in in the greek heracles says to his son am i asking you to be my iater my doctor

00:46:52.360 by burning me alive and so in a profession where people swear an oath a hippocratic oath to do no

00:47:01.120 harm many doctors and nurses and other types of medical professionals find themselves in positions as

00:47:07.760 as we do as family members and caregivers where we're being asked to do something or be complicit in

00:47:13.900 something that we've been trained not to do or that our moral framework you know tells us not to do

00:47:20.740 and yet something in us tells us that it's the right thing to do and that struggle that internal

00:47:27.640 struggle is is one that i experienced as someone when i was in my early mid-20s when i lost my

00:47:32.800 girlfriend to cystic fibrosis and was her principal caregiver over about a six-month period in the east

00:47:39.720 village in new york city and she'd had a double lung transplant and it was failing and she had dozens of

00:47:47.220 surgeries during that time and experienced a level of pain and anguish that i just didn't know was

00:47:52.840 possible i didn't know that it was possible for life to be prolonged in such a miserable way for so

00:47:59.960 long and yet in spite of that she transcended those circumstances over and over again and found

00:48:05.300 light and life and a way of living in spite of it and as a caregiver in my early 20s i was just sort of

00:48:12.960 ill prepared for what i was being asked to do which was not just you know i mean when you look on

00:48:21.220 helplessly while someone is suffering it's impossible unless you're a psychopath to not feel

00:48:28.000 like you're complicit in that suffering we all want to you know help people who are suffering especially

00:48:33.800 when they're in our presence well this scene in the women of trachis is as much about the conflict

00:48:39.660 that young person feels being asked to help his father die as it is the conflict of the person

00:48:46.180 who's suffering in this case heracles who describes and voices in his suffering almost equally a will to

00:48:55.540 live and a will to die at the same time he wants to die as much as he wishes to live and that was

00:49:02.080 something we talked about with doctors that borders yesterday that that's possible that um one can both

00:49:07.740 wish to die and wish to live as forcefully as the other in the in the same moment like almost like

00:49:14.180 a cord of feelings that are contradictory and again here we are back in that incredibly ambiguous gray

00:49:21.800 morally complex place that i would say characterizes adult life that that's what it is that's where we live

00:49:30.840 that's where we're currently living and to reiterate i think we've kind of hit this but i want to make

00:49:35.480 make this clear the point that you make that these you can't read these plays and expect to find an

00:49:39.620 answer to these problems no the answer is it it's not in the play the answer is in the audience and

00:49:46.800 that's to say the answer is in the collective act of bearing witness to war or to trauma or to loss

00:49:54.360 the answer is in the act of staying in the room no matter how comfortable uncomfortable it gets

00:50:00.280 the answer the answer the action of the audience is not passively to listen but to in our model but i

00:50:07.760 think in the ancient model too to bear witness and to offer their interpretations and their truths and

00:50:13.360 perspectives even if they're radically different i think that it's not coincidental that the center of

00:50:19.620 athenian democracy is a form that continues to reinforce over and over again our interdependence as

00:50:26.540 human beings and i think that's also at the heart of it the plays depict situations that i you know

00:50:32.980 frankly are pretty dispiriting and hopeless and fatalistic but that's not the end of the story

00:50:38.720 the end of the story resides in what the audience chooses to do about it and i think in each story

00:50:45.180 there's a fleeting possibility of making a change but what the greeks knew and what people have been to

00:50:53.000 war know and what people who've experienced loss know is that that possibility is not guaranteed and

00:50:59.460 it is fragile as fragile as human happiness or our existence and that we have to work really hard to

00:51:06.880 remain conscious enough to take advantage of that opportunity to make a change before it's too late

00:51:12.980 and if we're not awake if we're asleep at the wheel we'll miss it and we'll be like the characters in

00:51:17.700 greek tragedies learning too late and then having to feel complicit not just in our own suffering but

00:51:24.520 of generations to come so people can read the tragedies but as you said these were made to be

00:51:31.320 performed do you have any recommendations like on performances that people could watch or listen to

00:51:36.280 to help them get an idea yeah so to be clear yeah we don't we don't release recorded versions of what

00:51:41.440 we do because as you probably gleaned from this conversation what happens in the theater is about

00:51:46.620 being present in the moment with other people so it's the simultaneity of the experience and the risk

00:51:52.960 proposition the actors take the risk of performing greek tragedy you know with minimal rehearsal in

00:51:59.040 front of an audience that's been in the military for instance made to watch it you know and then they

00:52:03.860 call voluntold in the greek i mean in the military voluntold in the military to watch the play and

00:52:08.540 you can actively see people um thinking about how they could do us harm in the first five minutes but

00:52:15.740 but 45 minutes in people are sharing their stories and they've taken ownership of the

00:52:20.280 the exchange of the ancient play and something transformative occurs so we moved to a zoom-based

00:52:26.660 model in may of 2020 because of the pandemic our first performance was oedipus the king and we had

00:52:33.180 15 000 people tune in from 48 countries and since then we've presented 14 15 other performances on

00:52:41.320 zoom across a whole series of tragedies from greek tragedy to shakespearean tragedy to the book of job

00:52:46.400 from the old testament and we continue to do so we have performances next week and whenever this airs

00:52:52.940 there will be performances that week as well if you simply go to our website theaterofwar.com spelled

00:52:59.080 the american way er theaterofwar.com and you go on our schedule you'll find all the upcoming events

00:53:05.120 all of our work is free but our work takes place in the moment it's not to be consumed so you can't

00:53:11.780 stream it or download it you have to make the commitment of being present with other people who

00:53:16.360 are experiencing it at the same time you are and i recommend coming to see our work because we have an

00:53:21.500 incredible cast of over 250 well-known actors who are at the top of their craft who weekly join our ranks

00:53:28.800 to try their hand at these incredibly powerful and challenging plays and to learn from audiences

00:53:35.800 who always know more than we do about what these plays are really about well brian this has been a

00:53:42.880 great conversation thanks for your time it's been a pleasure thank you so much brad i really appreciate

00:53:47.240 the opportunity thanks for helping us spread the word and for taking a deeper dive into the book i

00:53:51.140 really appreciate it my guest today was brian dorries he's the author of the book the theater of war it's

00:53:55.520 available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you can find out more information about his work

00:53:59.000 at his website theaterofwar.com also check out our show notes at aom.is theater of war where you can

00:54:04.440 find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic

00:54:06.780 well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast check out our website at

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00:54:47.700 reminding you not only listen they went podcast but put what you've heard into action

The Art of Manliness - November 11, 2020

#660： How Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Heal the Soul

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