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

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.)