Latest / New Thinking for a New World / Greek Classics—Modern Life

Transcript

Greek Classics—Modern Life · New Thinking for a New World

• 0:02
  Speaker 0: Welcome to New Thinking for a New World, a Tilburg Foundation podcast.
• 0:06
  Speaker 0: I am Alan Stoga, your host.
• 0:09
  Speaker 0: Each week I bring you conversations with people who think differently about the great issues that are shaping our world.
• 0:15
  Speaker 0: Geopolitics, disruptive tech, mass migration, the changing climate, culture wars, all of it is grist for our mill.
• 0:24
  Speaker 0: I hope you enjoy listening.
• 0:26
  Speaker 0: I also hope you will let me know what you think.
• 0:28
  Speaker 0: and that you join the conversation at telbergfoundation.org.
• 0:33
  Speaker 0: And now for today's episode of New Thinking for a New World.
• 0:43
  Speaker 0: The results could be amazing, healing, entertaining, educational, partly by stripping away what we think is so special about our time, focusing instead on what makes us human.
• 1:15
  Speaker 0: I'm not trying to wax poetic because I'm a lousy poet.
• 1:18
  Speaker 0: Rather, I'm trying to describe the genius of what Theater of War, Brian Dorey's, and a host of actors have been doing with global audiences over the past sixteen years.
• 1:29
  Speaker 0: Six months ago, I recorded this podcast with Brian, who co-founded Theatre of War and serves today as its artistic
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: director.
• 1:38
  Speaker 0: We shared again in recognition that Brian Dorey's has recently been selected as a winner of the Telberg SNF Eliason Global Leadership Prize.
• 1:47
  Speaker 0: The jury honored him for creating brave spaces where art, empathy, and dialogue aim to restore human connection.
• 1:54
  Speaker 0: Reimagining the role of culture in public life.
• 1:58
  Speaker 0: Listen, and I hope you will agree.
• 2:01
  Speaker 0: Welcome, Brian.
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Alan.
• 2:03
  Speaker 0: Let me do a quick setup.
• 2:05
  Speaker 0: Theatre of War Productions, which you co-founded and of which you are the artistic director, works with leading actors to present dramatic readings of seminal plays followed by town hall discussions, those sort of the key elements.
• 2:18
  Speaker 0: I know it works because I've been privileged to be in a few of those audiences, but I'd like you to share the origin story.
• 2:24
  Speaker 0: You're a classicist.
• 2:25
  Speaker 0: But how did you connect the dots from a four hundred B.C.
• 2:28
  Speaker 0: to real people and real issues in the twenty-first century?
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: Oh, thanks.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: That's a great question.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: So I, yeah, I started this journey studying Greek and Latin and Hebrew at Kenyon College in rural Ohio and graduated with this hunch that I wanted to pursue these plays, these ancient Greek tragedies.
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: I studied further.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: But I didn't know how or when, and it wasn't until they spoke directly to me that I saw the path forward.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: And the way that happened was I lost someone I loved, a girlfriend who died of cystic fibrosis.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: When she was twenty-two years old, I was her principal caregiver for about five months toward the end of her life, and I was twenty-four, twenty-five at the time.
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: And being a caregiver for someone who was terminally ill in my mid-twenties, brought me into direct contact with some of the extreme human experiences described in plays by Sophocles, Euripides, and Escalus.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: And all of a sudden, caring for someone I loved, not being able to stop her suffering, feeling complicit at times in her suffering, facing questions of life and death, and losing someone I loved, I... The place all of a sudden that I studied as a student in college were no longer academic.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: It was as if they were written like letters from the ancient world to me or for me or about me.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: And they brought me solace and relief to know that I wasn't the only person who'd felt, you know, fill in the blank.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: This is a shame, this alone, this cut off from one's community, this isolated.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: And I got this hunch, this sort of desire and hunch that maybe if I put these ancient plays in front of other people who'd lived through these extreme human experiences that we all get the chance to experience at some point over the course of our lives, that they could bring relief and solace and hope and connection to those people as well.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: So that's how it all started.
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: And the short version is I... I started directing readings of my own translations of ancient Greek plays in hospitals in New York City for doctors and patients and caregivers and nurses.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: And what I saw in those exchanges with those audiences in hospitals is that although I translated the plays from Greek and thought I was pretty clever in doing so, the audience was something at stake.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: The audience was skin in the game.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: the audience who'd lived these extreme human experiences knew more than I did about the play.
• 5:27
  Speaker 0: But they knew more about the play through their own experiences.
• 5:32
  Speaker 0: They did.
• 5:33
  Speaker 0: They knew the experience.
• 5:34
  Speaker 0: They
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: never heard of the play, but they knew more about the play than I did.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: And I say that not with hyperbole or exaggeration, that was the principal observation and lesson for me.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: that started this journey, which is a question.
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: What new things are possible when we approach audiences who may or may not be formally educated with reverence and humility for what they might know by virtue of their own life experiences that we don't know, that no amount of training or academic learning could ever afford or extend?
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: And so that's what led me on this ecstatic journey from first to hospitals then to the military bases and from military bases to prisons and prisons to homeless shelters.
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: and the list goes on and on, you know, natural disasters, racialized police violence, domestic violence, gun violence, rival gang territories, you know, you name it, in search of audiences with something at stake for whom the words of these ancient plays were not academic.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: And they weren't to be consumed either.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: They weren't cultural.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: They were direct.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: And the other thing I came to see and understand over this last eighteen years is that sometimes formal education can be an impediment to the direct, efficacious experience of a story.
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: So that's been the... So it's not so much for me what these plays can teach audiences.
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: That was sort of how I started.
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: It was sort of a didactic notion of how culture worked.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: It's become, and it was immediately in that hospital auditorium, what audiences with something at stake can reveal about these plays, but also about what it means to be human.
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: that hasn't changed over thousands of years.
• 7:32
  Speaker 0: So I'm trying to imagine how the first time you got in front of a group of Marine combat
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: guys
• 7:41
  Speaker 0: who are already experiencing the horrors of war, and tried to persuade them to sit still for a little bit while they listened to a reading of whether it was Antigone or whatever play you wanted them to listen to.
• 7:58
  Speaker 0: I suspect it required some officers saying, you're going to sit in these seats, but I don't... The first question is, get him in the room and bet what happened in that room, whatever that first room was.
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: Well, part of the origin story of the work and the project Theater of War, which is our first project, really in the namesake of the company.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: Our military project is that I, my girlfriend died on March, Twentieth, two thousand three, which was the night we invaded Iraq.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: And I remember listening on the radio to the invasion and thinking, these two things are happening and they're not related, but in some deep level, they feel connected.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: I had protested in the streets against the invasion of Iraq and felt very ineffective in having done so.
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: But when stories started to come back, and the main one was in the Washington Post in two thousand seven, the Walter Reed scandal, when that broke, where our nation's flagship military medical facility was seen to be offering substandard care, black mold in the ceilings, leaking, you know, faucets, you know, just retrograde conditions.
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: for veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I just felt like no matter how I felt about the invasion or our foreign policy decisions, I couldn't sit on my hands and watch the United States criminalize its own military, volunteer military class, or treat them the way the Vietnam veterans have been treated.
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: And so all I had was Greek and Latin, and these plays about the Trojan War that I had this hunch having come out of these hospital readings that I was mentioning to you might speak to military audiences because they described warriors struggling under the weight of their service to maintain their dignity and honor in really extreme conditions after losing friends and loved ones after being betrayed by their own commanding officers.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: And I had this thought that maybe this hunch, this formless hunch is the great director Peter Brook used to say.
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: If I could put these ancient war plays in front of contemporary warriors, something would happen.
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: I didn't know what it was.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: I didn't know a single person active duty in the military when I had this idea.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: So to answer your question, it took a year and a half to get an audience of Marines to watch.
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: And it took me sitting in a lot of smoke filled rooms, drinking stale coffee, listening to veterans tell their stories for me to begin to even understand their language.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: which I didn't know how to speak.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: But that also informed my translation, because one of the questions I'm asking as a translator and a director is, for whom are we telling the story?
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: And that informs all of the sort of artistic choices that are being made.
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: This is a theater that where the audience is the teacher, where the audience is the master, not the other way around.
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: So anyway, the short version of that is that I, through reading The New York Times, discovered there was a Navy psychiatrist named William P. Nash.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: who was quoted The New York Times in a story about violence returning to our shores from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the form of veterans killing other people on our shores and also committing, taking their own lives.
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: Nash said, I begin every conversation I have about combat stress with Marine Corps, with Marines, with the ancient story of Sophocles Ajax.
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: And so I just... wrote and speed dialed until I could get Nash.
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: and twenty four hours later, he said, I don't know about getting you onto a military base, but how about four hundred Marines in a high ballroom in San Diego at a conference on combat stress?
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: So the answer to your question is they were already going to be at this conference and they had a choice between free tickets to a San Diego's Padres game that night at this conference or watching a Greek play and talking about their feelings.
• 12:03
  Speaker 0: And
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: I'd like, you know, I don't know.
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: We had a government sort of per diem bar and sort of buffet in the back of the room.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: So there was like a meal included that was paid for the conference.
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: And we had several actors that people might have known.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: David Sturther and Jesse Eisenberg and an Iraqi American actress named Heather Raffo and Bill Kamp.
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: And we didn't know what was going to happen, but I just want to.
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: to clarify something about the level of attention I saw in the room.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: I don't think it was mandatory for them to be there because they could have been in a sporting event.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: And what I saw at that first military performance is something I'll never forget, which is here we are from New York performing in San Diego for an audience of Marines and their spouses.
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: The Marines have just returned from war within weeks of this event.
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: It's August of two thousand eight.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: And it's seen as a career-ending gesture in the military to raise your hand and say, I'm struggling with an invisible wound.
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: And we start performing these scenes from Sophocles Ajax and Philoctetes, these two relatively obscure Greek plays about the Trojan War.
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: And not only are they listening, but they're leaning forward in their seats.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: Some are wiping away tears.
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: Some are, like, looking through their fingers.
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: Some are holding their heads in their hands.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: And they are... Staring at the actors with a level of Intention and attention and consciousness that I have never seen in the commercial or nonprofit theater ever before.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: sentence Which told you it worked?
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: Well, I didn't know if it was right.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: I didn't know what it was.
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: Were they being polite?
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: I didn't know anyone.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: in this culture I like
• 13:47
  Speaker 0: brains aren't polite.
• 13:48
  Speaker 0: brains don't have a point.
• 13:49
  Speaker 0: But
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: after it was over they gave us a standing ovation.
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: I thought oh, you know that maybe they're just you know glad that we're trying to do something for them.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: or you know, it's a night out or whatever, whatever.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: And I'm going to schedule a forty-five minute discussion after the performance and I ask the question.
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: I often ask audiences, you know, what resonated with you.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: And the discussion had to be cut off more than three hours later.
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: And we heard from dozens and dozens of Marines from every rank.
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: This is really important to me to convey because what also happened that night, what I saw for the first time is that a powerful performance of an emotionally charged text can briefly dissolve the hierarchy in the room.
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: And if the currency in the conversation isn't power or money or education or access or privilege, but it's lived experience, well, then the Lance Corporal has as important a thing to offer, if not more than the gent.
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: And we heard from the Lance Corporals and this command sergeant majors and the spouses and the, you know, every rank, the captains and the majors and the generals' wives.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: And they quoted lines from memory from the play without notes as if they'd known these ancient Greek plays their entire lives.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: And I couldn't figure... All I knew is I barely apprehended what was happening in the room.
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: I could see something was happening.
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: I could tell that I was privileged to be there to witness it.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: And yet I felt like maybe... I disappeared.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: And that's the other thing I'll say about our work.
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: If it really works, two things happen.
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: One is, it's a disappearing act.
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: It's like we were never there.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: The community we've engaged all of a sudden starts talking about something they've never been able to discuss in accordance with their own values on their own terms.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: And we've just started the dance.
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: It just happens.
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: And the other thing is, and this is also back to what I've said earlier, I know it's working.
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: when the least powerful person in the room is speaking.
• 15:59
  Speaker 0: Well, let me pull on two threads.
• 16:00
  Speaker 0: They're so important to what you do.
• 16:02
  Speaker 0: One, you've talked about already, which is the discussion.
• 16:05
  Speaker 0: This is about the performance or it's about the discussion.
• 16:09
  Speaker 0: That's
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: right.
• 16:11
  Speaker 0: And that's the genius of this whole approach.
• 16:15
  Speaker 0: The other, though, is that you have both in that situation you just described, but throughout the years, been able to attract world-class actors from the theater, from movies, from TV, and that degree of professionalism honors the audience.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: That's right.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: I think it's validating.
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: It
• 16:36
  Speaker 0: validates what you're doing.
• 16:38
  Speaker 0: It gets people in the room, but it's even more than that.
• 16:42
  Speaker 0: It makes it serious.
• 16:44
  Speaker 0: How did you imagine you could get the Bill Camps and the Bill Murrays and the others to do this stuff?
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: Well, I didn't at first I I didn't.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: at first I was just any.
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: it wasn't any old actor But I I was pulling in actors who were my friends who were not at the top of the game necessarily either in terms of their abilities or their Fan.
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: it wasn't.
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: I wasn't how it started in the first few readings I was mentioning even before these hospital readings as I was starting to get the idea.
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: Then someone came to me to one of my readings and they said that was great.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: Let me give you a piece of advice.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: You should work with the best actors on the planet.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: You should not compromise on what you're doing in any way.
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: So go for it.
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: Go do that.
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: So I didn't know how to go about doing that, but the first one was a cold call.
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: I heard that David Strathairn, an actor who's been with us for all eighteen years, has done hundreds of events all over the world with us.
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: I heard David's wife had worked with kids with autism and horses.
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: and maybe had been a nurse at some point.
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: And so I called the director I knew and said, could you give me David Sir Theron's phone number?
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: And I called David on the cell phone and I said, I'm gonna be doing these readings in hospitals.
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: I understand your wife might have done this, this or this.
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: And I just thought maybe you might be interested in joining us.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: And of course he said yes.
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: And then David did it and he recommended Paul Giamatti and Paul Giamatti did it and he recommended his brand.
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: and the list goes, now we have over two hundred and fifty actors, many of them Oscar, Tony, Emmy, BAFTA award-winning actors who all do this regularly.
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: We don't work with agents or managers or just, you know, text.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: We don't contract them either so they can pull out the last minute.
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: But then there's always the opportunity for someone just as great to step in and save the day and it's become this community.
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: And I'll say the short answer is at her.
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: first, it was hard.
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: Like it was just the awkwardness of asking people.
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: But then it became iterative, like you said earlier, and And then I think the core reason why we have so many who are so dedicated, so many great actors.
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: I mean, short of working, I don't think it's even short.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: Like we're working with the Marlon Brandos and the Joanne Woodwards and the Paul Newman's of our day.
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: We're working with the Sidney Poitiers.
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: Like this is, these are the best actors on the planet as far as I'm concerned.
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: And not just here, we work with great actors in the Netherlands.
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: We work with amazing actors in London.
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: We just came back from doing Theater of War with Damien Lewis in London last week or two week in Africa.
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: People want to do this.
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: And the reason they want to do it, I would argue, they're too, is that it's very rare in their profession to feel like they're doing something that's actually of service with their craft.
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: Sometimes with their celebrity, they can do things that are of service.
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: But to know that how I perform this line in Sophocles or Shakespeare or Ibsen or O'Neill could actually have the impact on the trajectory of a single human life.
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: who then raises their hand in the discussion and says, I now see that I need help or I understand my parents for the first time because of the way you read that line or whatever it is, and it's palpable and it's direct and it's in the room.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: And if you told me, eighteen years ago, nineteen years ago, that reading a play for an audience of people who have something at stake who might be at risk in some way could save lives, I'd say that sounds self-congratulatory.
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: It does still, but it's real.
• 20:23
  Speaker 0: But it's true.
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: But once the actors have a taste for doing something of service with their craft, I think they don't give up working for Steven Spielberg, although some have actually passed on commercial work to do our projects, because they report that it in some way works on them as well, that it's nutritious.
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: It nurtures them.
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: It gives them something that the business takes away.
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: And that's how it works.
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: I want to
• 21:13
  Speaker 0: fast forward to Antigone and Ferguson.
• 21:18
  Speaker 0: I had the privilege of watching a performance of it in Athens in twenty seventeen and I know the backstory but but but tell the story because it is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen and consequential things I've ever experienced.
• 21:37
  Speaker 0: How did you get the idea that after that horrible tragedy in twenty fourteen that you could have a role to play in not in solving, but in healing that community, which was obviously so badly rent.
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: Well, and taking in Ferguson as a project, which happened for us in twenty sixteen.
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: So it's a good eight years after starting this work was the first time for a theater of war productions where we didn't just swoop into a community with professional actors and perform a text to then start a conversation.
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: which has its own value and merits.
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: We did something new and that is we brought the community into the performance alongside our professional actors.
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: We've been doing a lot of work in Missouri over the years and leading up to that.
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: We've done work in their prison system with our project Prometheus in prison and the state prisons in Missouri.
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: We've been in the Children's Hospital in St.
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: Louis doing end-of-life care performances and work with parents and nurses.
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: We did work at Fort Leonard Wood, the military base, and one of the bases in Missouri.
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: So we've been in Missouri quite a bit, and we did a project in Joplin, Missouri, where we did readings of the Book of Job on the one-year anniversary of the tornado in Joplin that leveled the city with Paul Giamatti playing Job in a mega church for twenty-five hundred fundamentalist Christians.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: And so we, and the governor at the time, J. Nixon, came to that performance.
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: Someone from the governor's office who'd seen our work, who attended a black church in St.
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: Louis, knew the power of our model, and then reading a story that was written about us in Harper's Magazine, kind of inspired to reach out and said, I don't know what it is you could do, but I think I have the connections here in the faith community to help you do something in response to the depth of Michael Brown and to the uprising and to just the polarization of this community.
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: And that was it, the question of polarization.
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: We don't ask people to agree in our model.
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: We just ask people to stay in the room and hear each other's interpretations of a story.
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: And that's an act of mediation that has created a tent big enough to include members of a squad, Leticia James, Jomani Williams, you know, very far left politician, and then Republican governor, mayors who performed in our projects.
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: members of the Republican National Committee and a MAGA stronghold in Ohio all in the same group, you know, like the full spectrum gang members alongside climate activists alongside deeply conservative people.
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: And the reason, again, is that we're not asking people to agree.
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: We're just asking people to hear each other's interpretations of the story.
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: So the idea of entertaining Ferguson is could we create a Greek chorus that could not preach to itself by design?
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: and used that as a model for bringing people together in a way that would facilitate dialogue.
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: So for that Greek chorus, we set about to find people who wouldn't necessarily agree or whose wounds were still very fresh with regard to the death of Michael Brown.
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: Michael Brown's friends, his teachers, members of the community around Normandy High School, which he attended, faith community members, Black Lives Matter activists, and then I think most critically, law enforcement.
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: from St.
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: Louis, police officers who'd responded to the uprising.
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: And could we get them all in the same room, give them the lines of Sophocles' Antigone's chorus, the Phoebe and elders, set it to music written by someone in St.
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: Louis, and then see what would happen if we invited audiences that were as diverse as the chorus to come into the room and hear this music and hear these interpretations and join us in dialogue.
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: So the brief version of that is that we premiered the project on the stage that Michael Brown graduated from at Normandy High School in twenty sixteen.
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: that fall, two years after his death.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: And it took off.
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: I mean, we traveled the country and the world.
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: We took it to Greece where you saw it and back for many of the chorus members.
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: It was their first time out of the country.
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: I was with Michael Brown's teacher, his drama teacher.
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: when he stepped into the theater of Dionysus in Greece for the first time and how overwhelmed he was by being in that place.
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: And we ran it off Broadway for fifteen weeks here in New York City and Harlem and Brooklyn at a church that we put the help of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: I'm in Deer for ten weeks and the project only iterated and grew.
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: and now this model of the chorus that can't preach to itself by design.
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: has become standard in theater of war productions.
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: It's one of our other strategies.
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: It's one of the other layers of our work.
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: So our most recent iteration of that was we were commissioned by Columbia University to develop a project to address the unrest on campus and bring people together and sit them at the table.
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: And so we did readings from the Iliad and the Trojan women with a chorus that included Palestinians, Israelis, IDF veterans, Lebanese Christians, protesters.
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: you name it.
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: And again, the objective wasn't to ask them to agree.
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: It wasn't a group hug.
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: We weren't going to resolve Middle Eastern war or conflicts.
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: But we could create the conditions where people could maybe hear and acknowledge each other's tragedies by way of the mediation of an ancient story.
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: So that's how Ed Tickney Ferguson continues to reverberate through our work.
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: engage in more and more polarizing topics by using the idea of the model of the Greek chorus as the thing that can bring people together.
• 27:46
  Speaker 0: As you've described at Theatre War Productions has very much evolved over these almost two decades.
• 27:52
  Speaker 0: One of the things I've seen you do recently is tackle long-form journalism, which I find enormously fun.
• 28:02
  Speaker 0: and using articles from the Atlantic and other sources and have, again, great readers read them, read them with enthusiasm and style and professionalism, and then open conversations about it.
• 28:16
  Speaker 0: And that's been about the pandemic.
• 28:18
  Speaker 0: It's been about all sorts of topics.
• 28:21
  Speaker 0: And it is fascinating to watch models evolve.
• 28:25
  Speaker 0: This one surprises me.
• 28:26
  Speaker 0: Well,
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: it surprised me, too.
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: It was my colleague, Marjeline Goldsmith, who's our company manager.
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: She's an actor.
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: company as well.
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: And also designed all of our work on Zoom during the pandemic, which was a major iteration for us.
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: Our first event on Zoom was for fifteen thousand people from forty two countries on May seven, twenty twenty with Oscar Isaac and Francis McDormand performing Oedipus the King.
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: And it was a whole new ball game for us because of Marjolene's innovations that we could we could bring people in the dialogue cross borders and boundaries without the intervention of corporations or countries or advertisers.
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: and have pluralistic exchanges.
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: And that hasn't stopped for us.
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: Our work is hybrid, it's ecstatic.
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: We have hyper-local conversations in the oldest black church in America, or the football stadium, the University of Notre Dame on the field, or a bar in Toronto that are hyper-local, and also global in scope, people participating all over the world.
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: But Margellent turned to me and said, you know, we kept talking about how most renderings, audio renderings of long-form journalism, and I would even argue audio books too.
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: For the most part, either sound like AI or are AI.
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: And I still don't fully understand why that is.
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: Partly on the journalism side, I think it has to do with the sort of false notion that the dispassion of the reporter or the writer has to extend to the actor who's reading the piece.
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: And what it does is it sort of Negates the role the actor can play.
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: the other thing is that I think we've become numb and you are cut off From how we should be feeling about the news we consume every day and it has something to do with the one-way direction of the media through which we consume it.
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: It's great that we've democratized these media in some ways.
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: It's also problematic, but We have access to information.
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: It's just that we don't have access to forms where we can exchange our feelings, our ideas, our interpretations of that information very readily, except in these very flattened manners like Twitter and, you know, TikTok.
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: And so one of the things that we're interested in is can we build a social medium that's capacious enough to hold the emotions and the ethics that are required of us in discourse about what's happening in the news?
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: So we thought we'd partner with a radio station.
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: And this is one experiment at WNYC.
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: We went to WNYC in New York City, the largest NPR affiliate.
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: And we said, we'd like to do readings of long form journalism.
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: We got a grant from the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund and their Arts and Health Initiative.
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: So the focus of these first six episodes is public health, very largely and broadly defined.
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: And we partner with the New Yorker, the Atlantic and... ProPublica, and we brought to bear our amazing actors.
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: And by brought to bear, I mean, I really think there's a role for actors to play in helping us reawaken our emotions, whether we're talking about Sophocles or we're talking about the Atlantic.
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: And it's not every line because there's lots of reporting, for instance, in the Atlantic.
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: that's just data.
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: But for example, our first performance in the series, as an experiment was about the death of Jordan Neely, the individual experiencing homelessness on the F train who was killed by Marine named Daniel Penny last year, who was recently acquitted.
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: And the actor Chad Coleman was reading the lines of Jordan Neely.
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: And what Jordan Neely said as he entered the F train was, I need food.
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: Well, As I'm reading, I need food.
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: It doesn't hit me in the gut.
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: It impacts me, but hearing Chad Coleman bring a kind of emotional valence, a kind of desperation to the reading of those three words while it changes the dynamics.
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: And then the other thing is of how I'm receiving those words, but also in the company of others.
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: What I like about radio and also about Zoom is the simultaneity of broadcasts, the idea that we're all watching and listening at the same time.
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: What I really like about what we've done with Zoom and thanks to Marjolene is that we can actually be in dialogue with each other.
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: It's not a one-way stream.
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: And radio has the last vestiges of a broadcast medium with call-in where the simultaneity of a tension of consciousness that could be generated when people are listening to a story and then calling into your show heightens the experience for all that are involved.
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: So this has been an experiment for us.
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: I was worried in the beginning.
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: We were worried.
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: One of our principal strategies is I think you know, Alan has been distant.
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: We do classical plays.
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: We do texts from history.
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: We're not saying to the audience, this is you.
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: We're asking the audience to reflect.
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: What do you see of yourself in this distant thing, this culturally or temporally distant thing?
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: You know, sometimes the greater the distance, the deeper the conversation goes.
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: People don't feel accused of anything.
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: What if... But, you know, by doing long-form journalism, it felt, you know, it felt too close to the bone or too much like documentary theater, which is to rife with so many ethical issues.
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: I never really wanted to touch that form of theater.
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: It turns out the other leg of the table that's so critical to our projects.
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: working as we've discovered in this series is having audiences curated with something deeply at stake.
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: So by performing long-form journalism, not just for the general public, although we pick topics that affect everyone.
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: Mental health, the pandemic, Ozempic, most recently, ghost networks and insurers, fatherhood.
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: Having audiences that have... Our last one was about domestic violence and gun violence and the intersection of the two in a rural county and two rural counties in Tennessee.
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: Having people in the audience who had a direct experience with domestic be part of the audience response in the audience itself undergirds the exchange so that I think it still works.
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: I hope it still works.
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: We're five.
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: We're about to do our fifth episode or installment.
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: But it's really exciting new territory for us.
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: And for, I think, scale for this project is doing one a week.
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: Right now we're doing one a month.
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: I think scale for this would be a nationally syndicated show.
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: where we're able to bring to bear these hundreds of actors, bring them into the fold and have them perform long-form journalism and have national discussions, global discussions about the news.
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: Sometimes I hope as it's unfolding, so we could be performing stories just as they drop or break.
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: And that would be, I think, another act of mediation, mediating the media, creating a space where people can actually communalize their own emotions and discomfort and challenges in response to what the news is bombarding with us with every day.
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: And can we pick topics?
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: This is one of the challenges that don't divide us further and then present them in a way where we'll hear from conservative as well as liberal communities.
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: And that's the other thing we've been trying to do.
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: And it's exciting because I guess the one thing I've seen over the last eighteen years that I have come to take as an article of faith is that there's so much that divides us in our country right now, and this I know speaks to Talberg's mission and polarization.
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: There's so much that divides us, and it's counterintuitive, but I think if we're able to tap in the suffering that unites us, the things that we all experience that are actually painful and create spaces where we can communalize that suffering, a lot of those differences at least temporarily can fall away, and we can have an exchange.
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: And that's what we're seeing with this series, with Longform journalism.
• 36:42
  Speaker 0: One of the things I love about this initiative is that it really is an effort, maybe not consciously, to redefine journalism.
• 36:53
  Speaker 0: So much what happened in the twenty-first century has been the diminution of journalism.
• 36:59
  Speaker 0: Down to a hundred and sixty characters, or two hundred and fifty characters, social media, TikTok, you mentioned.
• 37:04
  Speaker 0: So Longform is getting, still exists, but it's mostly ignored and some of it's really bad.
• 37:11
  Speaker 0: And I think you're actually doing is trying to take it and say, oh, this is really important stuff, but it needs to be done differently in order to reach people who probably aren't reading the Atlantic regularly.
• 37:24
  Speaker 0: I suspect almost no one in your audiences are subscribed.
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: On one hand, it's about exposing more people to this form and engaging them with it.
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: And it definitely...
• 37:35
  Speaker 0: But it's also about changing the form.
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: It's much easier for them.
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: I don't see what we're doing as journalism, but we have the writers in the room with us in the rehearsal process, which has been really exciting because when we reach ethical questions, like, do we go for verisimilitude here or do we make another choice in the performance of this text?
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: Or was this said with emotion or removed?
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: But at the end of the day, this is a performance to provoke a discussion that uses journalism as the catalyst.
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: It's not journalism itself, but I do think it has the potential to further democratize the form.
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: And I think one of the ways is, and this may or may not be appealing, but I think one of the things that's been really effective about our model of the last eighteen years is that although we use text that people will, no one's going to understand Sophocles.
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: Well, the reason people understand Sophocles is both because They've lived the experiences in Sophocles plays that we you know intentionally going for those auditing but it's also because we've Decentred the written word as the catalyst for the discussion.
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: It's about the affective experience of hearing the story perform and if it's not about your ability to read or your Interest or capacity whether it's read Sophocles or the Atlantic But more just about the affective experience we can all have listening to a story performed in real time in front of us.
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: Well, then it democratizes the possibility of response and exchange.
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: And there are people exploring, you know, I've talked to companies who are exploring the idea of long-form journalism existing only as audio in some instances, not as written text.
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: And I think there's something compelling about that.
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: I mean, obviously, I'm a voracious reader of all these magazines and I was, Sophocles, and I'm an evangelist for the texts.
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: But I also think sometimes these cultural models that are sort of constructed for a very specific audience, whether we're talking about theater or we're talking about long-form journalism.
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: And some ways are built to keep other audiences out just by nature of how they're constructed.
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: And there are ways we can democratize them.
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: And it's not just about the didacticism of extending long-form journalism to audiences that don't know about them.
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: It's also about the power of, you know, our last episode where we had people who'd done thirty years in prison talking about going back into the communities that they had harmed with gun violence and trying to change not just themselves but the communities that they lived in.
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: They'd never heard of ProPublica necessarily, but they illuminated something in the ProPublica article we read that was as essential as the article.
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: And so creating media that are not one-way streams.
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: but that move in multiple directions, I think changes the nature of journalism.
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: It's already happening with these other media like TikTok and these other social media.
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: There's this sort of meta commentary that's constantly occurring, but those mediums as powerful as they are, I would argue, aren't capacious enough to hold the emotions and the complexity of the kind of exchange that we should be having.
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: And that's why when I talk about Zoom, people look at me because they're like, Zoom is where I go to have banal conversations with my family about things I wish I weren't talking about.
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: Zoom is like this corporate communications tool that, you know, it should be avoided, especially after the pandemic.
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: But for me, Zoom and other media like Zoom, intimate and suggest a medium that's yet to be born that could meet the needs of this deeply polarized, still fledgling, pluralistic, multiracial, multicultural democracy that's still trying to figure out if it's going to work or not, and needs forms, desperately needs forms that can hold the emotions and the ethics in one space.
• 41:51
  Speaker 0: Brian, I've known you and your work for some time, and as you know, have been a great fan, even to the point that I try to steal some of your ideas.
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: Thank you.
• 42:02
  Speaker 0: But I've often wondered why more people aren't doing the voodoo you
• 42:08
  Speaker 0: do?".
• 42:09
  Speaker 0: And the answer I've just realized as we've had this conversation is because you're damn good.
• 42:17
  Speaker 0: You really have built something that is working, and it's working at a level that is, in the true meaning of the word, fantastic.
• 42:28
  Speaker 0: So thank you for this conversation.
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: Thanks, Alan.
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: I appreciate it.
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: That's really nice of you to say.
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: I wish that... I don't think that what we're doing is rocket science.
• 42:38
  Speaker 0: It's fantastic.
• 42:39
  Speaker 0: I didn't say it was rocket science.
• 42:40
  Speaker 0: But
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: you know, I think it's fantastic too.
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: But I think anyone can do it.
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: I don't mean to be glib about that.
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: I just think it's a value proposition.
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: Do you believe there's wisdom in the audience?
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: Full stop.
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: If you believe there's wisdom in every audience, then why are we turning off the lights and relegating it to silence every time?
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: Or trying to legislate how it speaks and when?
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: Or policing it when it enters a room?
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: And these are the questions I leave you with, because if we truly believe there's wisdom in the audience, and I do, then we have to dismantle all of these structures we built to keep the audience silent, including, I would say, the basis of naturalism in the theater itself and our cinematic spaces, the turning off of the light, which happened sometime in the mid-nineteenth century.
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: from which we've yet to sort of awaken.
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: What the Greeks knew, and I'll stop here, is that, you know, there had to be a place where you could see in both directions.
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: And that's what amphitheater means in Greek, amphitheatron, the place where I see in both directions, where I see you and you see me and we see each other and we see ourselves reflected in stories.
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: And we see that we're playing roles.
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: And maybe we step back from the roles and we engage in a more direct and human way.
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: And I don't think we get there until we turn on the lights.
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: and invite people to be themselves.
• 44:10
  Speaker 0: And on that note, thank
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: you very much.
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: Thanks,
• 44:29
  Speaker 0: Al.