A Conflict-Theatre Troupe Visits a Land of Strife (Columbia University)

The director and translator Bryan Doerries stood by the stage in Columbia University’s Miller Theatre the other night, watching an audience of students, faculty, and alumni file in. Since 2006, Doerries, who founded Theater of War Productions, has put on performances in locations riven by trauma and strife: military bases, prisons, gang-dominated neighborhoods, opioid-gripped towns. An Ivy League campus in 2024 was as volatile a venue as his troupe had encountered. Since October 7th, Columbia has been wrenched by protests, rage, and grief, with students, faculty, and alumni drawing rhetorical battle lines in support of either Israel or Palestine—yet Doerries expressed no trepidation. “In our form, the whole point is that the audience is the main character,” he said. “What Theater of War does for institutions is create conditions for dialogue that they couldn’t create for themselves.” Three hundred and forty people had R.S.V.P.’d. College I.D.s were checked at the door. Doerries had chosen to present two passages from ancient Greek literature: Book VI of the Iliad, when the doomed Trojan warrior Hector bids farewell to both his wife, Andromache, and his young son, Astyanax; and the climax of Euripides’ “The Trojan Women,” in which the freshly widowed Andromache is informed that a victorious Greek war council, led by Odysseus, has decided to execute her son, raze her city, and cart her off into slavery. The texts were Doerries’s translations. “If the dating is correct,” he said, “then the audience that originally watched ‘The Trojan Women’ would have been a militarized democracy that had just committed the kinds of atrocities, on the island of Melos, as the characters in the play.” After the performance, Doerries would lead a discussion. “We read something,” he said. “And then we break it open.” From his spot beside the stage, Doerries waved at Clémence Boulouque, a professor of Jewish and Israel studies, who had helped plan the performance. She took a seat in the auditorium. Boulouque is a member of the university’s task force on antisemitism; the group’s records are being sought by the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce. The […]

Click here to view original page at A Conflict-Theatre Troupe Visits a Land of Strife (Columbia University)

© 2024, wcadmin. All rights reserved, Writers Critique, LLC Unless otherwise noted, all posts remain copyright of their respective authors.