The Daily Stoic - Bryan Doerries On the Power of Greek Tragedy and Seneca’s Plays

Episode Date: February 3, 2021

On today’s episode, Ryan speaks to writer Bryan Doerries about his work in familiarizing service members and veterans with ancient Greek plays, the military history of Greek playwrights, how the performance of theatre can be a useful tool for healing, and more.Bryan Doerries is the founder of Theater of War, a project that presents readings of ancient Greek plays to service members, veterans, and their families. He has written several books including The Theater of War: What Ancient Tragedies Can Teach Us Today.This episode is brought to you by LMNT, the maker of electrolyte drink mixes that help you stay active at home, work, the gym, or anywhere else. Electrolytes are a key part of a happy, healthy body. Right now you can receive a free LMNT Sample Pack for only $5 for shipping. To claim this exclusive deal you must go to drinkLMNT.com/dailystoic. This deal is only valid for the month of January. Get your FREE Sample Pack now. If you don’t love it, they will refund your $5 no questions asked.This episode is also brought to you by stamps.com, a secure Internet mailing solution to print postage using your computer. Stamps.com allows you to mail and ship anytime, anywhere right from your computer. Send letters, ship packages, and pay a lot less with discounted rates from USPS, UPS, and more. There’s NO risk. Use the promo code, STOIC, to get a special offer that includes a 4-week trial PLUS free postage and a digital scale. No long-term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click on the Microphone at the TOP of the homepage and type in STOIC.This episode is also brought to you by Literati Kids, a subscription book club that sends 5 beautiful children’s books to your door each month, handpicked by experts. Literati Kids has book clubs for children ages 0 to 12, and each club has age-appropriate selections tailored to what your child needs. Every Literati Kids book in your child’s box is hand-picked by experts and guaranteed to spark their curiosity, intellect, and spirit of discovery. Go to literati.com/stoic to get 25% off your first two orders and receive 5 incredible kids books, curated by experts, delivered to your door every month.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Bryan Doerries:Homepage: https://theaterofwar.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheaterofWarInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/theaterofwarFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheaterOfWar/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom every day life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2000 year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more you can visit us at theaelistode.com. Hey there listeners! While we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduke Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Cotopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve

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an entrepreneur, and a Virgo, just the name of you. Now I've held so many occupations over the years that my fans lovingly nicknamed me Kiki Keep a Bag Palmer. And trust me, just the name of you. Now I've held so many occupations over the years that my fans lovingly nicknamed me Kiki Kiki Pabag Palmer. And trust me, I keep a bad glove. But if you ask me, I'm just getting started. And there's so much I still want to do. So I decided I want to be a podcast host. I'm proud to introduce you to the baby

this is Kiki Palmer podcast. I'm putting my friends, family, and some of the dopest experts in the hot seat to ask them the questions that have been burning in my mind. What will former child stars be if they weren't actors? What happened to sitcoms? It's only fans, only bad. I want to know.

So I asked my mom about it. These are the questions that keep me up at night. But I'm taking these questions out of my head and I'm bringing them to you. Because on Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, no topic is off limits. Follow Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, whatever you get your podcast. Hey, prime members, you can listen early and app-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Hey, this is Ryan Holiday.

Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stone Podcast. Man, I'm recording this intro right after I finished my interview with today's guest. I gotta say, I'm like so pumped. I think this may be the best interview that I've done. It's certainly one of the ones I was most excited about. I didn't know how it was gonna go. My guest today is Brian Dory. He's a writer, director,

sort of a theater company, operator. He created this project called Theater of War that presents the ancient Greek plays to military veterans. He's done hundreds of military bases all over the United States. He speaks in prisons to gang members, refugees, survivors of genocide. He's been like everywhere. And he puts on plays by Sophocles, Escalus, Euripides, Shakespeare, even texts from speeches from Frederick Douglass or Martin Luther King. And the idea is that these plays, these works of art were not intended for mere entertainment, but to teach profound moral lessons and to heal communities, to heal people, particularly as we talk

about, veterans of war or victims of trauma, as, you know, plague-ridden Athens would have been or Athens during the Peloponnesian war or Athens. You know, Eskilis was a veteran of the Battle of Marathon. So this is, I think you're going to love this interview. You can check out his book, The Theater of War, What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Is Today. I have a copy. If you've never read any Greek plays, he has a collection of translations of some of the ancient Greek tragedies, which might be a good place to start, called All That You've

See Here Is God, what a title. And you can check out the theater of war at theaterofwar.com. It is a great organization. This is what I'm trying to do here at Daily Stoke is take these ancient ideas, make them practical and real, help them impact actual people's real lives. And that's what Brian's doing. Check out his books, check out theater of war.com. And seriously, I think you're gonna love this interview.

I should probably say upfront, I'm gonna butcher all of the playwright's names. I have, and actually that might be somewhere to start, which is like, some of these works can feel so intimidating right down to the fact that we don't know how to pronounce their names. What do you say to people who, you know, they go like this fancy ancient stuff's not for me? Well, first of all, nobody knows how to pronounce the names. I studied Ancient Greek and I had

three different professors and I had to pronounce Ancient Greek differently with each of them. Whether they were from Germany, Oxford or American in their training. And so the rule of thumb for theater of war productions, do I tell the actors is let's go for the least pretentious sounding pronunciation. And then during the discussions that unfold from our performances, And during the discussions that unfold from our performances, I will never correct pronunciation because to do so would be, first of all, arrogant and active condescension. But second of all, it really doesn't matter. So one of the main characters in the plays that we perform as this character Phil Octetis, a lot of people have trouble saying his name. So I'll just say, hey, let's just call him Phil.

And then we move on in the conversation. You know, one time we were at a performance for Marines down in New Orleans and at the Marine Reserve base. And this Marine said to my question, why did Sophocles write this place? I think when I Socily's wrote the play and I was like, oh, I saw Socily's, but I didn't correct him because I knew what he meant. Right. It's totally irrelevant. So the reason people see these plays and these ancient works is not for them. And I'm sure this connects with your work on many levels. Is that they were completely and wholly appropriated by colonialist powers in Europe that made them

a passageway through to class and they became a tool of separating. So even the word classics holds within it, the etymology of class. The reason they feel pretentious, the reason they feel like they're not for everyone is because that's how it's been structured. The one's access to the ancient world

is actually predicated on privilege and power and class. And a lot of the work that I do and my company does is about actually re-centering the question, whose stories are these? Who has a proprietary right to be speaking about them? Whose pronunciation is almost the least relevant thing we're trying to address because we don't give a shit. Who, how people pronounce the names. We want people to feel empowered to take ownership of these stories,

not because they studied them, but because they've lived them and are living them. And they're accessible in that way. Well, I have a bunch of thoughts on that. The first, the first being is not only did none of your professors pronounce the name all the same, but we don't know. It's like what color were the dinosaurs? Like they're dead. We can't tell. You know, like it's not like they left phonetic spellings

of these names either. They might have been one of those people. It's like, you know, you see there, like I remember I was at a book signing once and for a camp, what it was some, it was some, you know, normal name like Steve and and and like I was like, oh, can you make it out to Steve? And I was like, uh, sure. And he's like, you know, with a Y, you know, like, like I would have of course known that that the name

would have a Y in the middle. It's like, uh, Sophocles could have said, oh, the asset at the beginning is silent. So you have no idea. Indeed. I mean, I just discovered recently in reading the Harry Potter series to my daughter that JK Rowling says, Voldemort. But I'm not going to say Voldemort, because my daughter thinks it's Voldemort. So it doesn't really matter at the end of the day.

Also, the principal exercise of what theater of world productions is about is this fundamental idea that the audience was skin in the game, the audience that's lived the extremities of life, whether that's various types of trauma or loss or betrayal or no matter whether they've ever heard of Sophocles before, has more to teach us than we to teach them about what Sophocles is saying. Even things that I studied when I was translating the plays from Greek, I couldn't have known until I heard audiences that had lived the experience of war or had been incarcerated or had lost someone they loved, explained to me, translate to me what these words are actually about.

Yeah, and I think also on the pronunciation side, I saw this great meme many years ago that was like, never make fun of someone for pronouncing a word wrong. It means they learned it reading. And so as like a person who I really didn't get any of these classic texts in school and I dropped out of college, I've gone through and read all of them. So like the way I pronounce uh, europeeties is is based on however I made up in my head alone reading it in bed. I never I never even heard a college professor say it to me. And so when it's like, I think people should be careful when you feel that sort of condescension creep in,

what you're doing is shutting the door on an earnest outreach towards this thing that we both claim to care about. Yeah, I mean, like, I, you know, the most condescending thing I heard recently at a performance, we had a huge audience of gang-affiliated youth listening to a play by your, as we say, Euripides. But I think Euripides is better. Euripides, I'm a PDs, it really doesn't matter.

It's really, as long as we're talking about the same basic premise and these gang affiliated youth had some really profound things to say about this play, about the madness of Hercules or Hercules. And at the end, well, that's just the Latin Greek. But then afterwards, this guy comes up to me, whom I know, and goes unnamed, but he's wealthy and acculturated and educated and older. And he said, well, they sure, they made that under a

studet. They may not have understood it, but they sure related to it. And I was like, no, actually, that's the same thing. I think also, I think, you know, maybe you relate to it and they understood it. Like if we're going to make that binary, I mean, it's a false one as you point out, but, you know, one as you point out. But you know, this is these these questions of pronunciation are just a tactic of centering privilege and education over life experience. And what I'm interested in is a different hierarchy of knowledge. And I think the Greeks were too. That you know, it's one predicated on proximity to suffering, not one predicated on how many years of college. And so what I've learned, because a normal week for us has been performing

in a homeless shelter, in a prison, in a jail, in a Title I school, in a NYTN, a housing project in New York City, the closer people are in proximity to suffering, the more they have to say that's of insight about these ancient stories. And so if you follow the logic of that out, then in fact education and privilege might be an impediment, the understanding of these ancient texts.

It might actually, it might be something, it might be a great advantage to have dropped out of college. Maybe I should have dropped out of college, you know, I keep thinking to myself as I listen to the insights of these audience. I battle that with my work, which is people have this sort of preconception of what philosophy is, right? It almost feels as if there is nothing like I joked in the intro to one of my books that the phrase stoic philosophy, there is not a more unappealing phrase in the English language, right? Philosophy, abstract, pointless, academic, stoic, no emotions, you know, no feeling. And so there's this, it's ironic, as you're saying with place, it's the same thing. The whole purpose of philosophy was to be practical and accessible and real and to address

the suffering of life. And somehow, just as if we, just as how we've twisted Epicurian to mean the opposite of what it meant, plays and philosophy represent the two people, the exact opposite of what they were intended to be by their creators. Yeah, and I think let me look. I think we have all this baggage of that sort of colonialist past as well.

I can't tell you the number of truly just soul-deadening productions I've seen of Greek plays. I happen to be interested in Greek plays, so I've seen a lot. Since I was a kid, people rolling around on the stage and sheets, sandals and calling out to gods that no longer exist and speaking in a kind of 19th century diction that isn't the how the Greek spoke, but it's actually a reflection of the lexicon, the dictionary that we all learned Greek from, which was codified in the 19th century. So, you know, I get criticized for my translations for being too colloquial or too plain or too direct. I eye that there's not enough nobility or poetry. And people who often say that don't know Greek

and have no idea what they're talking about. But they're just, they're lording the social capital of having gone to college over other people as if that has given them some secret access to these plays. Just because you spent four years or to philosophy, you know, spent four years in a totally privileged, safe setting, having conversations doesn't give you any more access than anyone else. You know, it's like it's just you had the luxury of that time.

I love how timeless that is though, right? Epic Titus, who's a slave,turned teacher, is he has this line in the Incaridian where he's saying he's talking about how some of his students are congratulating themselves, proud of themselves for being able to master the works of Cresipis, who is, and I'll get back to Cresipis, but one of the more obscure

difficult to understand Stoics, and he goes, you know, if Crasipus had been a better writer, you'd have less to be proud of. Which, you know, and so I think that goes to your point is, we sort of congratulate ourselves on having mastered, you know, some of these ancient writers, or the, you know, I actually know what's happening in this, you know, some of these ancient writers, or the, you know, I actually know what's happening in this, you know, Greek play or Shakespeare or whatever. And what you're really congratulating yourself on is that you had the time to wade through something that frankly shouldn't be so difficult to get through. And then when it was made, it was, you know, Shakespeare's plays were for the poor and the masses.

Like it was not supposed to be cultured and pretentious. I mean, there's that element. And there is beauty and depth there, but it's not supposed to be confusing. It's supposed to be straightforward. It works on every level. And Shakespeare knew, as I think really great people of the theater know that you have to put the people who are closest in proximity to the suffering and to the loss and the love and all things you're portraying on the stage to the stage itself. And, you know, we now have a consumer-based, late capitalist, commercial theater system where the price to enter the theater is actually too much for anybody who has proximity, direct proximity. And, of course, the Athenian model was, if you couldn't pay the fee to get into the theater,

the state would sponsor you, and the jails were emptied. And people, all political activity ceased. And one third of the Athenian population, roughly 17,000 people are sitting on the South Slow for the Cropolis, shoulder to shoulder, for three or four days every spring, watching four plays over the span of a day. And this was part of the sort of lifeblood of Athenian life, but also inextricably connected

to Athenian democracy and rise and ultimate fall. When you read, whether you're reading Montenna or there's this precipice to go back to him. Yes, sure. He was, he once wrote this work and someone joked that he quoted Medea so much that they were like, you have the whole book in here and he said, this is precipice is Medea, like basically that he had it memorized and he, and that's something, bring something to mind for me, which is like these, these couldn't

have been one off pretentious things that people went to as a social obligation. That the way that they are quoting these things, oftentimes we can tell from memory, they must have watched them over and over again in the way that I might quote, this is like that episode of Seinfeld where Kramer, you know, starts stockpiling blood in his own refrigerator. You know, like there, it must have been not lower class, but I think it must have been referencing shared entertainment in a way that we, we don't think of it today. You know, it was definitely part of the popular culture.

And by the end of the fifth century, entering the 4th century, a lot of the plays that had been performed in the 5th century, went to kind of repritory, at least some of the more popular ones. So you would see things repeated. And also there were theaters all over Greece, and then all over the sort of Mediterranean, and then they spread all over the world where some of these plays were in repritory, and there were Roman emperors like Nero who not only loved them and attended them but also performed in them and and of course they reach Seneca you know another famous stoic who ends up not just he writes his own media yeah and it's hard to square at least for me the historic person of Seneca the philosophies of stoicism,

the plays that we've inherited, and I've, we've performed several of them. I've translated the Fadre and the Thiastes, which we're using different contexts. And now also the immense wealth at one point, Sanica is the second wealthiest person in Rome. And, but it's all these contradictions, I think, that bear out the complexity of

things that just get flattened in the cultural imagination. I can't tell you the number of times, I'm sure you've spent more than you need to time interrogate this on your show, but I hear and see in military settings and other settings, the ideas of stoicism just totally appropriated and flattened. In the same way that I hear Epicurianism, I heard an artistic director speaking about our audiences are Epicurian, meaning they just sample freely from these different delights. And that's like, in fact, that says more about you than anything. It's like, so the Epicuris would be like, what the fuck are you talking about? Yeah, shut the fuck up.

But anyway, I feel like, you know, this comes back to this central democratizing principle at the center of theater of war productions work, but also I think at the center of Athenian drama. And I imagine at the center of Greek philosophy, which is, it's really, and I think it's the center of Athenian drama. And I imagine at the center of Greek philosophy, which is, it's really, and I think it's in the center of Shakespeare, too, it's actually a gross act of sort of indecency, appropriation, of condescension, of imperialism, to affix a meaning to any of these things, to say, I know what these things mean.

Sure. What happens in the amphitheater, what happens with the performance as we do is we honor the infinite possibility of interpretation in the room and acknowledge that we don't have to agree with each other's interpretations, but we are all entitled to an interpretation. And that is not, you know, that is, I mean, you do learn that in a sort of certain types

of liberal art settings in a sort of seminar structure. We're sitting around a table and you're talking, but that's not really how information is disseminated and the rest of our culture. The idea is, you know, there is an interpretation, there's a way of understanding this, you know, and once you've acquired that knowledge, you have access to something that other people

don't have access to. Right. No, and I wanna nerd out about Senaq in the second, but, Sure, yeah, please. One of the things that struck me about sort of the role these plays can play in our life, and I don't remember how I came across it, but I watched it, I watched it, but maybe it's so vivid,

I only read about it. But when Robert F. Kennedy finds out that Martin Luther King is to be assassinated, I'm sure you know the story, but maybe the listeners don't. Finds out that Martin Luther King has been assassinated, there's fear that this sort of riot is gonna break out. It's called to address this crowd. And he gets up and he recites some lines from Escalus. Maybe you know, maybe do you know what they were? Well, the sort of the suffering drop by drop that sort of invades our dreams.

And then this notion that we learned through suffering, I think is the center of what he quotes. Yeah, I think it's like we suffer our way to knowledge. Yeah, yeah. And it's through Edith Hamilton, I think, that she starts her study of Greek mythology or Greek culture with that quote. So I don't know if it was from an in-depth relationship

with Escalus, but an interest in Greek culture and the Kennedys seem like the contemporary analog in many ways for the House of Atreus and intergenerational curses are the sort of parlance of their story. But I'm really moved by that because I think it actually that incident where he, you know, according to the story, incident where he, you know, according to the story, quells a riot, you know, that people that are about to sort of, it seemingly is going to tip the scales toward violence. And simply by

quoting one small section of an ancient tragedy creates an opportunity for the communalization of suffering and of trauma and loss, which is to me, a validation of what these plays actually are about, they don't mean anything, they do something. And what they do, even a piece of them, when plugged into the right audience, the audience was

something at stake, the audience was getting the game, is they create an opportunity for people to communalize their loss and trauma. And whether that's the the audience with skin in the game is they create an opportunity for people to communalize their loss and trauma. And whether that's the war veteran, that's the person who's died in the Athenian plague or lost people in 430, or it's um, you know, people have experienced systemic oppression and the assassination of one of their leaders, because the public health message of that quote, and of Greek tragedy is, you're not the first or the last person to have ever felt

this immense grief or this overwhelming feeling of loss. And the one thing that we've seen in our work over and over and over again, from people who've experienced trauma and loss is the sort of most common response to trauma and loss is I am the only person who has ever felt this much pain. I am the only person who has ever felt this love. Well, that's the Baldwin quote, right? You think your suffering is so unique and special to you. And then he says, and then you read. Yeah. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. And I think that's true. You read history, but then there's something about,

there's something about these plays where you read them and you go, oh, humans are exactly the same and have been exactly the same. Like Kennedy's talking to that crowd, talking them down off the ledge. Paracles could have quoted the exact same line in the almost the exact same scenario or Mark Antony could have done it after the death of Caesar. You know, like, like just how, you know, the Stokes kind of talk about life and history being

the same thing happening over and over again, almost that idea of eternal recurrence, and that if a play or a piece of art really captures something, then it will play a role over and over again. It will be appropriate in situations over and over again, even as it's hundreds and then thousands and then thousands and thousands of years old. Yeah, it strikes me that that may be the one of the NSMago back to Senaika, but like one of the deep connections between the form of tragedy in particular and and stoke philosophy, there is a perspective that's afforded by seeing one's own suffering in a larger continuum. And by virtue of that, having some perspective,

that is almost obliterated when one is acutely suffering, especially from a sort of spiritual or moral anguish, it just is so all consuming that it's impossible to see out of. And we need the mediation. And this is where I think there are other people who have written about this extensively, but this is at the center of the stuff we've been doing. The Greek theater in particular was not entertainment,

was not something to be consumed. It was inext of necessity within this democracy to create the conditions where people could interrogate the roles they were playing. And, you know, for me, the definition of tragedy, there's several, but one is watching a play in which everyone believes they're right. Oh.

And someone is gonna die, poor suffer, and usually destroy their families for generations to come. And that's not the Aristotelian definition of tragedy, but for me that that's really brought to a head and soft at least plays. It's a, you know, critic and theorist Michael Bactine writes about this or polyphonic novel by Dusty Eskies, this is a supreme example, the novel in which all the characters are so fully fleshed, all their perspectives are so clear that

they're, when broadened, sort of, opposition to one another, it's like a symphony, because they're all pursuing what they believe to be just or right or important in their lives. And now you're watching what happens when people pursue and bear out those objectives. And in Greek drama, it's the same thing. It's polyphonic, it's like a symphony. It's these characters who all are fully fleshed. They believe what they're doing is right, and someone's going to get sacrificed or die consequently. And so when we perform them for people who have experienced police violence in Ferguson, Missouri, or we perform them for people of experienced domestic violence or gun violence or whatever, you know, it is. It just, and the audience is composed of not just activists, but police, not just concerned citizens, but people who've been on the receiving end of the violence.

It just creates an opportunity where people can step back from the roles they're playing and see their suffering and see their struggle in a larger continuum. I think by virtue of that, a certain consciousness is raised. So when people think about tragedy, they think about people screaming and moaning and suffering and loss, and that's what happens on stage. But what we've missed for millennia is the impact watching those stories of people learning to lay milliseconds to lay and destroying their families and generations to come. What that,

the impact that is has on us, not just individually, but as part of a community that's acknowledging it and watching it. And I do think it's a form of philosophy. It elevates a certain type of consciousness that wouldn't occur otherwise. The philosophy is the saying and the theater is the showing, right? You know, show don't tell. I think there's an element where and there that's got to be the reason that these that these these philosophers, whether it's Marcus Relius or Seneca or or Monten, are ref that it's they're

trying to say something. And then they have almost the intellectual humility to go, I can't say this as well as Escalus said it. So I'm just going to quote him. Do you know what I mean? Like, or I'm just going to quote him. Do you know what I mean? Like, or I'm going to illustrate this in a way with this sort of beautiful line that's going to evoke a sort of an imagery that it would take me pages to detail in prose. Yeah. Again, the word dramas to do, draw draw in Greek, it's an embodiment, an enactment, and it's not simply about ideas.

Ideas are part of it. But again, I hold that the plays don't mean anything, they really do something. And I imagine the best philosophy one could say the same. It's actually about the attainment of a certain type of consciousness and action that's based on an understanding. It's not about simply a theory and a sort of dialogic, you know, in the head. Well, on my first book, my editor said something to me.

I was sort of, here's what I want the book to be like. And, you know, here, I was sort of, I was in my own head on it. And she's like, it's not what a book is, it's what a book does. Yeah. And and so when I decided to write about Stoke philosophy, I thought, look, all these brilliant people have already explained what it is. You can read that if you want. I decided I would illustrate these themes and stories from literature, history, or whatever. And I think if we can understand that the purpose of literature and of plays is to illustrate the themes, to teach the lessons on stage. And I think we're also seeing that too now.

It's like now that like, look, some people learn from podcasts, some people learn from books, some people learn from YouTube videos. Like, it's also understanding, like, some people can read a text of philosophy and go, I totally get this. I know exactly what this means and what this will look like in real life. Other people need to see it played out. There's different ways to learn different things. And I think there's also a pretentiousness of people who learn well from books thinking everyone should learn from books. And we're sort of back to the same power structures we were talking about before.

You know, the Aristotle argues in the poetics that the place should be equally powerful as red, like, you know, silently as they are performed. But for my perspective, there's no, there's no way you could compete. Sure. Even if you had the rich, richest imagination with the, just what incredibly committed group of actors in a space with an audience can bring to sort of the heightening of the experience of one of these plays. And so I think in some ways, theater is the most democratized way of communicating there is. And it creates, if you let it, and that's again, what our work is about, if you sort of follow it all the way through, it creates a kind of, it breaks down hierarchy.

It creates a kind of, it breaks down hierarchy. Just like Robert Kennedy, in a certain sense, by quoting sort of this passage, that acknowledges the ubiquity and the sort of intergenerational and cross-cultural nature of suffering that affects everyone and that, even though we can't understand the material circumstances that led to each other's suffering, even though we weren't there necessarily,

we can understand each other's sense of isolation, we can understand our each other's sense of loss, we can understand feeling alone or abandoned or betrayed because there's so many paths to those experiences and tragedy sort of plays that out in this in this form that anyone, you know, anyone can understand. And that's why I love it. It's a, it's a, I think, unfortunately, as we started off this conversation, it's got probably the worst rap, I mean, maybe philosophy, too, but, you know, of being a great tragedy of being this like, rarefied and pretentious thing. And that's because it requires imagination to make it happen in the present world and have it work.

But as you say, there are timeless questions. There are questions about what, about our fundamental humanity, even though our technologies have radically changed, hasn't changed that anyone can understand. Something that punctured that for me was learning that Escalus's tombstone says nothing about him is a playwright. It's about his heroism at the Battle of Marathon. You go, oh, and same too, it's like Socrates, his philosophical reputation was made, you know, basically on his reputation as a recopulate.

And you're like, oh, these were duers who also did plays. These were duers who's part of their identity was inextricably related to their military service in the century in which they saw nearly 80 years of war as a culture, as Athenians. And so one, I don't think there's any way to extrapolate Greek philosophy or tragedy from the cauldron,

the crucible of almost non-stop military conflict at a 100% compulsory participation by every citizen in that democracy. And face to face brutal conflict. Real conflict, but also out of necessity, the same people who are killing each other in combat have to return and be functional members of their society. The very fabric of Athenian society hangs on the poorest boundary that that warrior must cross between killing and then returning into a code of ethics, where killing is wrong.

And over and over and over again, where the operational tempo actually dwarfs that of even say our special forces today, because everyone's doing it and it's, it's happening all the time. And so at a necessity, I think, and this is not my argument. I mean, there's so many others, Tom Pillai, my Johnson, Che, other people who made this really forceful argument. I mean, there are so many others, Tom Plymouth, Johnson Shay, other people who've made this really forceful argument. That storytelling in the Western world wasn't born from the need to entertain or consume

suffering. All things that's ended up being. It was born from a need to hear and tell the veteran story. Because if there isn't a place to communalize that trauma, that pollution that comes back from killing and seeing your friends killed and having your own life threatened and the sheer exhaustion of the experience, then the very society itself that's sending those people to war in a 100% compulsory situation will collapse. And so we see, I don't see theater as anything other than it's fundamental in the ancient world as a tool. That that's why our name of our company's theater war. Without war,

there is no theater in the way that we think of it in the contemporary, but mostly in the ancient world. The thing that all of us is based upon. What's to make that slightly more accessible? I think what we also might say, and this gets us back to Senaika, you could say that what theater is, or art is, is a way to speak about the unspeakable. And so where I square theasties, or Senaika's medial, or these dark, twisted plays that almost feel antistolic is that it was a way, I mean, this guy's essentially trapped in Nero's administration. There is no freedom of speech.

There's no therapy that he's going to. How does he, how does he speak about the horrendous things that he's seen, the blood guilt that he must feel for being implicated in it, I think he's channeling it into these twisted fucked up plays. Yeah, I like that reading a lot actually. I've never heard someone say it. It makes a lot of sense. The, for those who don't know Senna Kuz plays, you know, the violence in Seneca's plays is exponentially more graphic than in the Greek tragedies. The violence isn't staged on stage in Greek drama. Usually it happens offstage and then someone messenger comes on and describes it.

In Seneca's Medea, Medea kills her first child to lure Jason to come home and then just so he can see it happen in real time in front of him. She then slaughters her second child in front of Jason. And that's a, that's a, uh, that's a kind of, uh, brutality, or maybe even psychopathology, that I think it's hard to understand outside the context of Neuro's Rome. But I think what you're saying really makes a lot of sense. He watched multiple attempts of Neuro trying to kill his own mother. Like, you know, or, I mean, there's the in fiestes, it's about a guy feeding his nephews to his brother

and then stealing his kingdom. And it's like, yeah. If you told someone that Nero did that, it'd be like, oh, I didn't know. But it sounds, you know, like I think there's a level of depravity that Senaiko was seeing in real life, that that is plays kind of hint at in a way that he couldn't have, he could not have spoken about what Nero was doing. There's a moment at the end of the Thiastes, and I don't remember exactly the lines, but where this banquet that you've referenced has occurred, and one brother is consumed his own children,

and it's an atrocity. We've been performing it for countries, people who've been survived in their expats of countries where there's been brutal civil war, where those types of atrocities actually don't feel extreme. They feel like, you know, if not common, you know, maybe just, you know, at the very least, things that people have seen and experienced before. And it creates a pretext, well, if you can hear that, then you can hear this. And it becomes, takes less energy to talk about things that people have seen and experienced before. And it creates a pretext. Well, if you can hear that, then you can hear this. And it takes less energy to talk about things

that in play society, one usually doesn't talk about. But at the end of the play, after this dinner banquet, there's this line at the end about how the sky holds at stars. There's no more cosmos to be seen. And that sort of global perspective of certain acts of violence being so atrocious that they have an impact on the entire sort of fabric of the universe. And while that's a sort of construction,

I suppose that must have something to do with sort of stochastic philosophy in terms of how interrelated the world was seen to be, like it's one sort of holistic sort of animated force or being so you couldn't do something like feed your brother, his children without it having an impact in some even objective way on the rest of the universe. And there's two lines in that play from Senuka that struck me as being subtle commentaries about his life. He says those who indulge those who end, who endolge empty fears, bring themselves real fears. And I saw that as sort of a commentary on Neuros descent into insanity. And then the one that really struck me more on Seneca's life, he says something like, it is a vast kingdom

to be able to cope without a kingdom. I think they're both in the SD's. But it was like, oh, yes, soon enough, Sennaka loses everything and ends up sort of broken and bloodied and has nothing to show for it. And I think it's, I was reading ones that they were saying, scholars had trouble for a long time, even believing that Sennaka, the playwright and Sennaka, the philosopher politician were the same person. To me, it makes total sense because I see all the subtle commentary. But then it also, I think it goes to the point we're talking about with Eskolas where it's like, only today do we think that writers are these sort of like a feat, you know, academic people who can't exist in the real world and have a day job, you know,

what I mean? Like the idea that Seneca is also Rome's greatest playwright and its most powerful politician, it's like, yeah, people can be good at more than one thing. Right? Yeah, we don't like that in the United States, especially people in our mythology can't be good at more than one thing, or they get attacked if they if they show prowess. But I the there's something I was thinking about when you were talking about. You know, Seneca is also if if we believe and I I'm a little bit more skeptical in terms of like the historical account of both Nero's life and Seneca's life. I can be of three sources. Everyone was motivated to turn Nero into the anti-Christ, including the Christians.

So, you know, this, you know, how do you square Nero and his love of Greek tragedy and humanities and philosophy with the great violence he perpetrated? You know, I mean, that's a larger question that we can apply to our American Academy as well. You know, there's something we're missing in all this. And we don't have the full story. But if I were to speculate, and you know, that's the beauty of not being an academic, because I can speculate all day, and I don't get held to it, because no one really is listening to me as a sort of authority.

I'm not a scholar is, you know, there's this thing we've learned about in, in contemporary psychology, it's, it's actually come to the fore over the last 20 plus years of conflict in the Middle East and around the world, and it's called moral injury. I did bad things. I saw bad things. Something happened on my watch that went against the grain of my moral compass and I couldn't stop it. And it turns out that that notion that again, the Jonathan Shay talks about in the Kiles and Vietnam, the betrayal of what's right. One's betrayal of one's own moral principles is the wound that cuts the deepest. And so while psychologists have been treating veterans for, you know, I did this idea of PTSD is this kind of neurophysiological response to trauma, it turns out there's actually a moral and spiritual dimension to these wounds that the clinical world is really afraid of.

And finally, because science has no way to sort of address it. And, you know, we're already at the sort of fringes of what we know is sort of based on evidence is helpful with talk-based therapy, with cognitive therapy and other types of things, kind of behavioral therapy. But this idea that the wound that cuts the deepest is betrayal, the betrayal of what's right in oneself, whether intentionally or just by being complicit in relationship to a power structure that makes you do things or witness things or not stop things. And I can only imagine that by being Neuros Tudor and being complicit and having sort of created this potential monster.

And then of being afforded immense wealth and power by virtue of that relationship, that if Santa was the stoic philosopher that, you know, his writing seemed to indicate he was, his moral injury must have been on a scale that very few have ever had. And then if one follows that logic out, then the plays are an expression of that, that, that anguish at being complicit.

Yeah, and something so fundamentally against the grain of his moral principles. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. It's really a shame that Seneca hasn't been sort of rendered well in fiction because he is the most, he is Shakespearean, as you said, at, the contradictions he was forced to embody and was rewarded for embodying. And the guilt he must have felt.

And then the, the, you know, I, I, when I wrote my thing about Santa Claus and lives of the Stoics, I quoted that up in Sinclair line of, you know, you can't, it's hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him, not understanding it. So the selective ignorance of it, I mean, it's, it's, James Rom has a beautiful book called Dying Everyday. Yes, I've read it. Yeah.

And I think that's the closest to capturing, but even then he, I think he ends up sort of frustrated and disappointed with Sennaka in a way that that I think maybe gets it a little bit wrong because I, maybe it goes to your point about veterans where it's like, I imagine Senaqat at the end of his life would tell himself, I did what I had to do. And but what I had to do was horrible. And there is no way to square those things. And it's just painful.

Yeah, the first reading of my first translation of a Senate can draw on which is the phage, which is affiliated. I mean, sorry, it's a, sorry, not not phage. That was the first one I ever did. The second one was Octavia, which is, you know, people say it was Senate, but this con conjecture whether it was or not, but I love it as a play, because it tells, it's like metath theatrical, historical drama that tells, the partially the story of Seneca attempting to kill his mother and his, sort of half sister,

and all of these different, I'm sorry, Nero trying to kill these people on. But we did the first reading of that at Jamie Roms house of the Bard College and had like, you know, the entire Bard classics faculty involved in the reading and students and it was exciting to sort of interrogate the play just by reading it and and then talking about it with some some of these folks who were so steeped in and these questions. But what I like about the book and is that it really is swinging for the bleachers of a really hard question. And sort of working out on it too at this moment, obviously still.

You know, Sennake, as I'm sure you also know, is the path through which Greek drama makes it to Shakespeare. So, because Shakespeare doesn't have direct access to the Greek plays, and so it's interesting to think about and compelling to think about how Seneca's love of Greek tragedy becomes this gateway into the Elizabethan and early modern period. The violence of Seneca and the violence of some of Shakespeare's plays and the violence of what his plays were competing with, like bear baiting and execution and things

that are happening around them. What I like most about Sanica's plays is this thing that I'm searching for and all of the work that we do by performing in prisons and for military bases and in mega churches and places where no one should be trusting us, but we're there and we're trying to affect change, is that none of the words in Seneca's plays could have been set out loud

without the very people who said them being executed for having performed them. The analogies were so clearly things that, you know, there were people who had written things at that time who were executed for writing them that were far less on the nose than what Senaiko was writing. And I, to me, whether they were performed or not, and that's something that, like, people debate, to me, it's that that's what makes it so exhilarating and exciting that every word was of such stake at such significance that you could be killed for having said those words. And that's a different type of theater than we think of. Yeah, that idea of if it's a way to speak the unspeakable,

I actually think the best to nerd out about another book. I think the best book written during the Trump administration, the most sort of co-jet political analysis of our time, was Stephen Greenblot's book, Tyrant, which looks at all the tyrannical, populist, demagogic characters of Shakespeare, clearly obviously 100% a commentary on today, but he never once mentions anything

that's happening in the world. And that is the same with Shakespeare. It's like, I think he says at the beginning of the book, Shakespeare made one overt political play and people got executed and he was like never again. And then he started talking about the Greeks and the Romans for years. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think that's, and certainly there are other parts of the world where performances of Greek plays in particular, but other types of plays, in autocratic situations or in apartheid South Africa, where Nelson Mandela played Hayman on a production of Antigone on Robin Island for fame, prison. Will I say Inca does the Bach guy in Nigeria as a rehearsal for revolution where you're not explicitly talking about what's about to happen, but it's very clear from the text. There are lots of situations where the stakes are that high. It's just that in our late capitalist notions of theater and what its role is in our society,

by and large, it's something to be consumed. You go and you pay for it and you check the box and you have the experience and now we've had it, but we quickly lose touch with the fact that in fact this is this is This is a tool that has accomplished it can accomplish things that very few other things can accomplish. Which would make it so exciting for us. I think that's right. And it's some ways being indirect as the plays are is the best way to be direct. It's more direct. I mean, the first time we did theater of war, which is our presentation of plays bysophically about war, for those who've been to war was for 400 Marines in a high at ballroom in San Diego back in 2008.

It was seen as a career ending gesture to raise your hand and say, I'm struggling with an invisible wound. And then we performed the play, six scenes from two plays, by Sophocles, we scheduled a 45 minute discussion. We had to cut it off three and a half hours. And people were quoting the plays from memory the way you described.

And they didn't have to see a repetition of the play because they knew the play, because they'd lived the play. So you don't I'm not sure you call it memorization. What is it when someone Something reflects your inner struggle and such a profoundly clear way that you don't have to like Reach into your short-term memory to find it again because it's emblazoned in you to begin with it Just it's activated. It's acknowledged. It's validated And all of a sudden, these Marines were quoting Sophocles as if they'd known these two obscure plays their entire lives.

It's like giving a name to a face or something. I mean, how can I say the unsustainable? How can I say something that should never be spoken as one of the lines of the characters in Ajax? His wife says, how can I say something that should never be spoken? You would rather die than hear what I'm about to say. And that is in fact true for when dealing with some of these types of issues. It's a, you know, to say I'm struggling with an invisible wound in 2008 in the US military,

not only ends your career, ends your ability to provide for your family, X communicates you from your own community, you know, the military handbook up until the late 2000s for the US Army essentially said that if you attempted suicide in a combat zone, you would be a court martial for having done that. So you'd have all your medical benefits taken away from you from the very cry for help that you would have perpetrated

by attempting suicide. And the culture has changed quite a bit, but I keep going back, you know, short of giving everyone in that room a psychotropic substance. Tell me another way you're going to get 400 Marines in that setting to open up and start sharing their feelings. That's because theater isn't just, again, this intellectual, it's exercise, it's biochemical. Something is happening at a profound neurological level that has predictable results every time we do it,

especially with tragedy. And to miss that, I think just as to miss what an advancement like tragedy was as great as architecture of the century, as great as philosophy, as great as democracy and political advancement, rhetorical, legal advancement. And, you know, and that's why it's such a profound shame. I guess we're on different soap boxes, but, but, you know, that so that when

people think of Greek drama, they think of people rolling around the ground, sandals and sheets and pouring candle wax on their hands and screaming out to like gods that no longer exist in like British accents. It's a shame. No, no, I love the passion. So that would almost be a perfect place, so powerful to end. But one thing I wanted to ask you is I was reading about theater of war. And I think this goes to the point that it's about catharsis, and it's

about turning pain and suffering into wisdom. Walk me through the genesis of the company because it came, and this is a sort of a stoic idea, this idea of momentum, worry, meditation on death, the philosophies to learn how to die to come to terms with death. This whole journey you're on came from a place of real tragedy in your life, right? Yeah, so I, theater of war was born essentially from the death of my girlfriend in 2003. Her name was Laura Rothenberg and she had cystic fibrosis and had a double lung transplant

and then over a number of months had countless surgeries. And I got the privilege of sort of caring for her as her principal caregiver during the last months of her life. And after she died and after I'd experienced all kinds of things in my early 20s, I just couldn't have been prepared for until I experienced them, like watching helplessly as someone you love,

suffers and dies of air hunger or meeting the limits of your own compassion, which is something I didn't understand until I experienced it, or the sheer exhaustion that renders you in capable of actually doing the thing you should be doing. Or all these things, these sort of morally complicated re-ass responses we have to human suffering. I went back to the plays that I had studied in college. And like you, I mean, I think like you, I always believed that these plays had an audience well beyond the ivory tower in which I had the privilege of studying them.

And in fact, I just knew in my gut, even in 18, I wrote an essay about this sort of saying that people who had never heard of the plays. And I wouldn't say necessarily about philosophy, but about performed text. People who'd never heard of them might have more insight into them than those who'd studied them and those rarefied few of us who cared about them at all. And so after Laura died, I started looking for an audience because the plays had provided solace for me all of a sudden. It's as if they've been written for me or about me

and my own moral suffering. And they laid my concerns that I was a terrible person or that I was the only person who had ever felt this anguish. And they lifted me up out of the isolation of that feeling. And I got this thought that if I could simply put these ancient plays in front of audiences that had also experienced loss and grief and trauma, that it would have a similar impact on them. And so the first performances of Cedar War were in hospitals, which is not coincidence, because I'd spent a lot of time in hospitals. And there was a famous hospital called Walter Reed, that American military hospital in Bethesda that was exposed in 2007 for having really substandard conditions.

And I had marched against the invasion of the war in Iraq and the streets in New York. And in fact, the invasion started the night that Laura died, Marchth, 2003, which is also the Vernil Equinox, and it all felt very pointed and like the world was coming to an end, subjectively for me, when that occurred, I also felt totally ineffective in marching. And when I read about veterans returning from the conflicts that we had in the audacity as a country to send them to, that seem totally inappropriate and unnecessary. Returning to substandard care, mold, black mold, and, you know,

leaking ceilings and real place for their families to stay, it became clear to me that, you know, we were on the precipice of doing what we'd already done to the Vietnam generation, and why did we pass through the crucible of criminalizing our volunteer military class, and those who got drafted, and then damaging them more than they were already damaged? Why can't we pass through that crucible, come out the other side, send people to war, and then have the audacity to repeat that impulse of like. And so the only thing I had was Greek and Latin.

I mean, I'm the son of two psychologists, the oldest closure. So and the first play I was ever in was Euripides Medea when I was nine. So my father's college. So this has all been swirling around for some time. And if you take those things, being the son of two psychologists and having been in Medea at age nine and growing up in a military town in Virginia and Hampton Ridge, Virginia surrounded by the military, but knowing no one in the military. You basically have the project, Theater of War.

And that's the sort of origin story. It took a year and a half of trying to talk to people in the military to convince them that it was a good idea to perform plays biceocles for military audiences, but turns out, and this is part of the sort of Trojan horse, the secret weapon here, is Sophocles was a general, and he was elected general twice, and there's a contingent of the military brass in the United States that still has a huge reverence for Thucydides, and they still studied in war strategy classes. And so it wasn't a strategy in the Marine Corps

fashions itself on the symbology of Sparta and a kind of warrior ethos that's connected to the ancient world. So there was a kind of bridge that's already there. And luckily for me, since I think the beginning of the US military, theater has been a tool that's been used, George Washington staged Kato's tragedy. I never just was talking about that

with the guests earlier this week. Yeah, at Valley Forge, to morally instruct his troops that there were causes worth dying for as they were freezing to death. And there's been a long tradition of doing theater and other types of social programming in the US military to address all kinds of things that the rest of our society doesn't address. So we wrote in on that structure and then had no idea what would happen.

And what happened was just being the right people, the right place, with the right tool at the right time. And between that first performance I described and what happened next, I quit my day job. And in the first year alone, we did 100 performances on military bases all over the world of Sophocles' place. And learning more and more and more about what these plays were actually saying

from people who'd lived them, not from books or academics. It was, the Stokes would say it was all faded to be, or you just went, you just went where the universe pulled you. Does feel like it was a calling or at the very least it was a way of making meaning out of my own suffering. And by virtue of that, defining a kind of equilibrium and a healing for myself. And that's the, I don't believe in much, but the one thing that I've, like with any certainty,

but the one thing I've seen is that there was this reciprocity between telling your story and helping others to heal and that when people key into that impulse and they see that their own words are having a positive impact even though they're hard to say and other people, there's this incredible sort of virtuous cycle that is initiated. And I think that's what the ancients were up to. As Seventhe says, we learn as we teach. That's right. And who's the teacher and who's the student is constantly changing? Who's the shaman and who's the initiate? And this back to the beginning of our conversation,

who's the shaman and who's the initiate. And this back to the beginning of our conversation, who has the proprietary right to be talking at all. And from who or should the doers, the ones who dropped out of college. And I greatly admire that. But I could have gained a lot more traction. I just had a really wonderful, wonderful, wonderful teacher when I was in school that I did a lot

of work with that put me on this path. If the number one- If it had been any different, it couldn't have been any different. The number one requirement of that teacher who knew 25 languages and came out of the German sort of good nauseam system was that no matter what we were reading in Greek, Latin, or Hebrew, or Arabic, or German at any given day, we had to find ways to relate it to stories that were in that day's New York Times. And so part of the exercise of every day, which is probably not radically different from your podcast, was about sowing and threading those

connections between the ancient world and the present moment back and forth, back and forth, line by line, as we read through these texts. And that's how it all happened. Brian, this is amazing. One of my favorite conversations I've ever had on the show. I'm so excited. I have your translations of the tragedies coming and I'm gonna reread them. That's one of the things I've been doing

is sort of rereading things that struck me the first time and I've just now got a base of knowledge enough that I feel not reckless rereading a play I've already read. You know, I feel like I didn't have the base before. So I'm very excited and maybe let's do this again once I've finished doing it again. I'm gonna be publishing my own vintage. It's gonna be publishing my EDIPIS trilogy next year.

Oh, fantastic. So, I'm going to be thinking about when that happens and we can talk about those places. You send me a note and we will 100% do that. Sounds great. We'll do. All right, thanks. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoke Podcast.

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