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

Author:Bryan Doerries [Doerries, Bryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307959454
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-09-21T22:00:00+00:00

IV

When Jeff and Sheri Hall first heard about Theater of War and were invited to participate in the community panel at the army health conference in New Mexico, they went out and bought a copy of Sophocles’s Ajax at the local bookstore. One page into reading it, she turned to him and said, “This is the part of English literature that I hated in high school. I’m sorry. You read it.” He flipped quickly through a few more pages, glanced up at Sheri, and said, “We’re just going to have to wing it.”

When the reading began, and the performers started ripping into the material, screaming and wailing with anguish and desperation, the Halls’ mouths fell open in astonishment.

The actor playing Ajax turned red, the veins in his neck bulging, his eyes bottomless black holes, and began screaming at Tecmessa, “Will you not leave me alone? Will you not go?” Jeff and Sheri’s eyes met. “That was you,” she whispered in his ear, to which he replied, “That is me. That is me.”

And when Sheri heard the actress playing Tecmessa plead with her husband to think about the impact his death would have on their family, Sheri thought:

That’s me. I hid our kids away. I begged and pleaded for him to get help. And the only difference between her and me was I didn’t go to his soldiers. Believe you me, I’ve taken hits from them for that. But I was embarrassed. I didn’t want anyone to know that my hero was having a breakdown. But I said the same words. What can we do to fix this? I wanted to fix it. And when I think about the slaughtered animals, that was our family. Our children were innocent. They didn’t do anything. And they were getting stepped on. And I was letting it happen in my own home. I let it happen. It was completely eye-opening. I was like, “Holy cow, people gotta know about this.” And suddenly I wasn’t embarrassed to tell my story anymore.

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