BoD Episode 15: Bryan Doerries

Bryan Doerries is a writer, director, and translator who currently serves as Artistic Director of Theater of War Productions, a company that presents charged performances of seminal texts, led by acclaimed actors, for audiences with something at stake to catalyze crucial dialogue about pressing, current issues. A self-described evangelist for ancient stories and their relevance to our lives today, Doerries uses age-old approaches to help individuals and communities heal from trauma and loss.

During his tenure at Theater of War Productions, the company has presented diverse projects across the United States and the world, that regularly take place in homeless shelters and jails, military bases and hospitals, housing projects, churches, public parks, and rival gang territories, but also in cultural spaces, on the radio, and on Zoom. These free events are all designed to be authentic, community-driven exchanges that culminate in guided audience discussions about challenging, often divisive subjects, such as the visible and invisible wounds of war, end-of-life care, racism, incarceration, gun violence, domestic violence, the climate crisis, sexual assault, immigration, and addiction. 

Doerries’ books include The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today, The Odyssey of Sergeant Jack Brennan, All That You’ve Seen Here is God, and Oedipus Trilogy. Among his awards, he has received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Kenyon College, was named Public Artist in Residence for the City of New York, was elected a Hastings Center Fellow, and is a 2025 recipient of the Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize. 

 https://theaterofwar.com/

This monthly gathering invites directors and other theatre makers to come together, share experiences, and seek advice in a supportive community. There is often an isolating nature to directing, and this new space aims to foster connection and collaboration. The Board of Directors is an opportunity to set aside time each month to be alongside members of the Directing community all over the world. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:08

Every once in a while, you have a conversation that doesn't just feel like an interview, it feels like a meeting of minds. That's what this was with Brian Doris. I've known about Brian's work for years through Theater of War productions, and I first encountered it during the pandemic, watching one of his projects unfold on Zoom, bringing ancient Greek tragedy into direct conversation with contemporary communities. But it wasn't until I heard him speak recently that I realized how closely aligned our thinking is, especially around what I've been calling audience making, and what he so beautifully articulates as audience curation. What emerges in this conversation is a fundamental reorientation of what theater is. Not as something made for an audience, but something made with them, where the audience is not passive, but central, where witnessing becomes participation, where the performance doesn't end with applause, but begins again in dialogue. We talk about the Greeks, about amphitheater as a kind of cultural technology, about theater as a civic and even spiritual act, and about the role of discomfort, not as something to avoid, but as something necessary for truth, connection, and for free expression. But more than anything, we talk about responsibility, what it means to gather people, what it means to listen, and what becomes possible when we trust that the audience, collectively, might hold more wisdom than we do. This is one of the most meaningful conversations I've had on this podcast. This is my conversation with Brian Dorries. So, Brian, I'm a bit of an etymology nerd, which I imagine you must be as well. And I used to work with a Greek guy who loved to share with you the origins of so many of these words. And I've always had a bit of an issue with the word audience because it connotes something to do with the ears, spectator has something to do with the eyes. But with my audience, quote unquote audience, that I'm trying to make with my shows, I'm looking for something more akin to a witness, someone who feels a culpability in the act. Um, and my friend told me that an origin of the word witness was martyros. That's right. Where we get the word martyr, where, you know, Christianity and Islam has taken that over. Um at the time it meant someone who was to bear witness at court to come in and do that. Do you think of your quote-unquote audiences as audiences, spectators, participants, witnesses, or something else?

SPEAKER_00 2:39

It's a great question. Thank you, Adam. I I see them as all of those things and and more. I mean, I just going back to etymology for a second, I I was really struck when I visited the theater of Dionysus for the first time in Athens. It was late afternoon, um, the sun was setting this summer, or the sun was moving uh over the the uh south slope to the other side. And the um I was standing in the temple of the Sclepius, the god of healing, uh only feet from the outer rim of the theater of Dionysus, and I was struck by the fact that the word theater and theater in Greek means the seeing place, the teatron. Um, but what I was struck by is that I could hear what a docent was saying on the other side of the theater with the clarity of noise-canceling headphones, that it was an auditory experience. Now, I'm a little bit like a bat, I kind of echolocate my way through the world. So I don't mean to put audio first, but it is, it turns out, neurologically our first sense, first before any other sense in terms of speed. So for some reason, for me, that's you know, the that tension between the seeing place that really ultimately first, both architecturally and technically, is the hearing place. Something makes sense to me about that. Yeah, yeah, etymologically. The idea of the Marteros as a witness, I like very much. Um, Antigone, many of the characters in the Greek plays that Theater of War presents use variations of the word Marteros in all of its sort of, at least in my translations, you know, as I try to find ways to bring them into the present, all of its full meaning. Um, Antigone says um as she's being um dragged away to be entombed by Creon's men, sort of witness the injustice I suffer at the hands of these men um for doing what is right and what is sacred. So um in the context of one of our projects, Antigone and Ferguson, with an African-American woman playing Antigone, and the subject of the discussion that we're attempting to facilitate being racialized police violence and gender violence, um having the meta theatricality of having that actress ask the audience to witness or bear witness the injustice I suffer at the hands of these men for doing what is right and what is sacred is not lost. It's not, it just carries for me the full breadth of the etymological sense of Marta Ross in its classical and also even in its Christian meaning. And then um, but in our model, just to be 100% clear, as I'm sure you know, uh the audience is the main character. What we do is a kind of inside out of cultural production. And if the audience is the main character, then there can there can't be a talk back because the audience is deeply embedded in the Mies and Sen, and the actual true performance is when people stand up in the discussion and take the risk of bearing witness and sharing stories and acknowledging each other's suffering in an ephemeral live way. So, you know, it's it's hard, it I don't I don't see these distinctions of stage and audience, audience and or participatory theater, or I don't consider what we do drama therapy either. Um I I'm I'm most interested in what it means to turn the lights back on and acknowledge that the audience is there not just as an active participant, but as a main the main event.

SPEAKER_01 7:19

Um yeah, if that may if that makes sense. It makes absolute sense. And this is why I I wanted to speak with you because I teach something, I I'm an associate professor at UNCSA, and I teach uh in the directing program, I teach something called audience making. How do you make an audience? What are the what are the aesthetic crafted things that you can do? That's not about marketing. It's not about um, you know, all the things that you would give to the administrative staff of a theater company, but how as a director, how as a creative, can you create the spaces wherein the play becomes a centralizing event for a larger thing? Yeah. And that's why I I love your work and what it does, because um whether you see the work or you don't see the work, knowing that a community has actually changed. The people in that room are forever affected by that. Do you think, and and and you know, I know you you you started with Greeks, Greek plays, and I know you have kind of moved out from there. Do you think Greeks understood something about collective experience that we've lost?

SPEAKER_00 8:25

Yes. Hiding in plain sight for 2,500 years has been a ritual and a tool and a technology for the communalization of trauma, of moral distress, of grief, of loss, um that was born out of necessity in a highly militarized democracy that saw nearly 80 years of war in a single century, and a plague that killed one-third of the Athenian population by the end of that century. This is not coincidental that uh alongside the democratic experiment, a form of storytelling and engagement, a ritual, a democratic ritual of this scale emerged uh to create spaces where people could acknowledge the the full dimensions of their spiritual and emotional anguish. And um, I want to go back just a second to this question of audience building. We call it audience curation at Theater of War Production. So one of our staff members, um, Dominic DuPont is our audience liaison. We've had other people serve in the role of audience curators. One of the reasons we don't have much production value and don't invest a lot of money in aesthetic considerations is that we put that money into audience. Because for us, the audience is our master, our teacher, it is the main character. And so just backing up, it has to be free. And I'm I'm just gonna say for a second why it has to be free. Free is neutral for us. We don't pat ourselves on the back for free. It's not about access. Free is uh uh also a spiritual proposition. It cannot be a gift exchange if it is transactional. And I mean tickets themselves are an impediment. The actual tearing of a ticket is the impediment to the gift exchange that we're trying to establish the conditions for through our work. And so the money that we spend, and we've raised millions of dollars to invest in our audiences, is on transportation, meals, ASL interpretation, childcare, um outreach into communities, performances in communities that then earn the trust to bring those communities into other spaces where they don't feel welcome. That all of that has to come well before the considerations of how much we're going to spend on costumes, lighting, uh, you know, any of the other considerations that would be foremost in the mind of a theater company. And so some might see that as a kind of lack of aesthetic. But for us, our our ethics are our aesthetic. And and um, and so when we had we did Antigone and Ferguson for ultimately 15 weeks off Broadway, and it was free both at Harlem Stage and at the um St. Ann's Church in Brooklyn, we had a very generous grant from the Stavros and the Arcos Foundation that allowed us to um really see that experiment through of what does it mean to actually care for the audience? It can't be transactional in the other direction. Sometimes I think that maybe we should pay audiences because, in some ways, um, I do think that the value proposition that's truly happening in the room um would merit the audience being paid before the actors are paid. And I know that sounds controversial and not to me it doesn't, but but but um but if you've really done the work of audience curation, the question then becomes who is bestowing the gift upon whom? And I feel like in the theater, we spend a lot of time congratulating ourselves for sort of disseminating culture as if that's a given good. And, you know, as Terence McKenna said, culture is not our friend. Like sometimes it's a poison blanket. He didn't say that, I'm saying that. But it's it's a it's uh this idea that um we should be congratulated for seeing ourselves as the teachers. And that the whole framework of access is built upon that idea, as if access is a good in and of itself. And everyone should have access to all kinds of things, but it has to be free. And and and it has to be, and it, and it, and and it, and the and the and the value proposition that the audience knows more than we do, and that the audience is bestowing at least just as much a gift as the artists are bestowing, if not more, yeah, has to be reflected in how we approach the gathering of that audience. And so I appreciate your question because I've spent 19, 20 years thinking about that and working on it in many different ways. Um and it just feels like anytime we try to partner with a cultural organization, we are swimming upstream. Um, they are built to keep audiences out. They are built to to, they're built to take the sacred and turn it into something consumable. Um, they are built to silence the audience. Maybe back to the etymology of audience, um, you know, who is being heard and in the who is doing the hearing. And in the context of, you know, contemporary theater, maybe since Chekhov and since the mid-19th century, there's been a kind of naturalism built upon the unearned silence of the audience. Yes. And I'm interested in turning the lights back on, but I'm also interested in like I that's why I love the black church. You know, that's why I love spaces where, you know, where we can return to the vitality of a theater where people can talk back at any point, not in the legislated moment of a talk back. And where people, at least in the 19th century, people were able to throw tomatoes at the stage.

SPEAKER_02 14:39

Right.

SPEAKER_00 14:39

You know.

SPEAKER_02 14:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:40

Um, but but uh anyway, all that's to say this question of audience. So we spent a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of energy curating our audiences because it would be vanity from my perspective on our part to produce what we're producing if we haven't answered the question of for whom first and made sure that they're in that audience. And for whom for us is a group of people with something deeply at stake who have more to teach us than we to teach them.

SPEAKER_01 15:13

Um I didn't think I could respect you more, but um no, I'm I'm I'm I'm very serious because this uh you know that this is not a conversation that uh so many uh institutions, directors, theater companies are having. They're not they have a model. They you're right, they are mostly there to keep you people out. It is named, it is a marble building in the center of the city, named after a wealthy white guy. And why would a community that is not that want to come there? So um, you're just speaking of my entire language and everything that I try and teach. Um where does that come from? Like, what is the origin story of that? Because this is obviously the harder model to do. Yeah, everything is everything is built for something else, but you are are very uh uh consciously doing the other. Where does that come from inside of you? And how do you find partners for that?

SPEAKER_00 16:08

Let me back up and say while it is the harder work to do within cultural settings, with institutions as your partners, like theater companies, museums, universities, um there is infinite work to be done outside of those settings that is more rewarding than one could even begin to imagine. And so um when I talk to students, and I have I'm teaching at Columbia right now, uh a series of workshops, um, I mean, the good news is there there's there's infinite work to be done in our broken world uh outside of those institutions. And it took me a long time to give up wanting to reform those institutions. Um, but then it just it was so readily apparent as as Theater of War productions gained steam, that our best work took place in homeless shelters, our best took place in jails, our best work took place in public parks, our best work took place in nursing homes, in places where that were not over-determined culturally, and where the rules of engagement were not uh so calcified that um people, you know, where they were an impediment to people engaging on the level that we were hoping them to engage, military bases. Um, and then also I would say for you know, this audience that people talk about giving access to, the underserved audience, the reason there are VIPs is because they haven't been indoctrinated. We don't have to decolonize their minds. They're helping us decolonize ours. So it's inevitably the not formally educated youth with his feet up on the chair, who's laughing during the performance at the places that the acculturated, so-called educated audience finds inappropriate, who has one earbud in the whole time, who is flaunting all of the rules of the theater, unaware of the rules he's breaking, who during the discussion raises his hand and has the most insightful thing to say that moves the room in a totally new direction. And it's it happens every time. And it and then I watch the sort of acculturated, educated audience observe it happening, and then I watch them forget it happened. Um, well, he didn't understand it, but he sure related to it, I've heard. Jesus. You know, all the strategies we use to sort of ignore what's really happening, which is it turns out, there are ways of knowing and understanding the world that no amount of study can accord one, you know, and and there are certain experiential ways of understanding the world that only going to war or being incarcerated or losing a friend or betraying or being betrayed can, you know, can confer. And what are we losing when we're silencing all of that experiential wisdom in the academy and in and in our theaters by trying to give people access and acculturate them to be silent in those spaces so they can receive the gift of our cultural offerings of theater that's based on an unearned silence. So those questions aren't I don't have to even think about when I'm performing in a homeless shelter. And when we're performing in a homeless shelter, I'll tell you the most, the most common experience I have when we're doing a Greek tragedy and then the actors are fully invested and they're ripping into the material, and someone is suffering in an abject way on stage, in a way that at Lincoln Center people would be recoiling. I look out on the audience and everyone's smiling. Yeah. And I say, what are you smiling about? Yeah, it's recognizing. I that's my experience. That's my scream. That's my, I feel seen. So now I'm back to etymology. The amphitheater is the place where we see in both directions, where I see you and you see me, the amphitheatron, the place where we see each other, where we see ourselves reflected in the stories that are performed on stage, where we see the roles that we're playing and step back from them and acknowledge that they're just roles and we don't have to identify with them. And so I'm not an evangelist anymore for Greek tragedy. I started off that way as a classics major who was directing his own translations of Greek plays, but I am very bullish about the amphitheater as a as a cultural and spiritual technology that actually, if taken to scale, could address all that ails our society and culture now. We have all these social media that we've built, but they are not capacious enough to hold the complexity of the conversations that we need to have. And the ancient amphitheater is. I think partially because 100% military compulsory service during a century in which you see 80 out of 100 years of war necessitates that people be able to move back and forth from the battlefront to civic participation with a porousness that is only possible when their trauma and loss and moral injury is communalized with the community they're returning to. And so that's what I mean out of necessity, this technology emerged. So I I etymologically, I'm very invested in the idea of the amphitheatron, and I'm also still. Delighted to report that a lot of our work is hybrid now, thanks to my colleague Marjorie Goldsmith. So we'll perform in three weeks or two weeks, we're performing, for instance, the Oedipus Project. Yes. Firthday, yes. Firthday, and Tony Fauci is uh Dr. Fauci is playing Tiresias. And um Dr. Fauci also is a fan of etymology because he was a classics major like me and studied Greek and Greek and Latin. And he knows that Tiresias' first lines, in my translation at least, are uh how terrible it is to know when in the end knowing gains you nothing. I knew I must have known this. I'm sorry, how terrible it is to know when in the end knowing gains you nothing. I knew this once, but must have forgotten. Otherwise, I never would have come. Um we're of late sort of leaning into the meta theatricality of having public figures and political electeds speaking words that have this kind of valence. We had Zoran Mamdani do a performance for us, the mayor here in New York recently. Um but anyway, we'll we'll be performing the Oedipus for Oedipus the King for DC Climate Week and for 700 person audience at Gaston Hall at um Georgetown University, but also broadcasting on Zoom for thousands more all over the world. And we did the collaboration with the Nobel Prize on the Oedipus Project a few years ago. We had people from 87 countries and every continent on the planet tuning in, including Antarctica with research vessels that were participating. I've I've heard from people on aircraft carriers who listened and watched. And we bring those people into the room via Zoom when they raise their hands, thanks to my colleague again, Marjoline, who sort of hacked this corporate communications tool toward our values. And they raise their hands and all of a sudden they're they're in the space and they're looking at you, and you're looking at them, and we're having this discourse without the mediation of corporations, governments, um, tech companies, other than this like this tool that we're sort of utilizing for free without hopefully any advertising being part of it. And and this direct exchange starts to occur. We hear from people in autocracies who are risking their lives to speak to the audience. We hear from people, you know, janitors in their closets at hospitals, we hear from people in homeless shelter kitchens on their phones, we see people in their cars. And this, I'm just reminded that you know, you know, in the theater of Dionysus, where we started this conversation, it's thought that there were as many as 17,000 citizens and foreign nationals watching the plays on the south slope of the Acropolis. Um, when we went to Zoom with our first performance of the Oedipus Project, we had 15,000 people from 42 countries show up. And it occurred to me, this is what like Marconi must have felt like when, I mean, I don't claim to have invented this, but I just to be on the precipice of a medium that could be capacious enough to hold the complexity. And it's the merging of the ancient amphitheater with the most emergent technologies that creates the capacity for us to hear and see each other and witness each other and validate each other, which I think is the other part. An amphitheater so vast that Sophocles could never have conceived of it when he wrote the play Oedipus the King.

SPEAKER_02 25:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:30

And it excites me. You know, there's a there's a real possibility of democratizing discourse around really challenging subjects in this amphitheater that stands outside of all cultural spaces.

SPEAKER_01 25:43

I I saw that production of Oedipus in was it 2020 that May 7th, 2020. So right at the beginning of the pandemic. Yeah. I remember seeing that and going. Because this was like nobody was doing Zoom theater at that moment. It was, we were, we were all going, like, are we going to have a career? Are we going to do anything anymore? What do we do? And my me and my theater company, we all watched it and we go, oh my God, this is something. Like it's the beginning of something. It's not something yet, but it's this is the beginning of something. And it's been something that with my company, we've always tried to do because we're an internet, we were an international company, yeah, of saying, we're all going to be inside for a year, year and a half, two years, and there's going to be so much access to theater from everybody from around the world. And then all of a sudden, we're going to be out of the pandemic and we're going to be like, sorry, you no longer get to see theater. Or, you know, you're not able-bodied to leave your home and you have had access to theater for a year and a half. Sorry, no more. And I thought, how ridiculous that is. Um, I'm so glad that you brought up the the the um Earthweek thing. I my company is as well, the work that we do, I also run an organization called the Sustainable Theater Project. And we we make work at the COP Climate Conference every single year. And being in a space like that where you know we have no, we can bring no production values to the blue zone and you know be in those spaces, but the kind of the grill and nature of all of a sudden we start performing and this it's not expected. Um, it's been a it's we that's what you can see, because it's not just you know climate scientists, it's also NGOs, it's activists, it's oil executives that are all there, that are your audience. And to have that be the centralizing event that to then start conversations with them afterwards. Beautiful.

SPEAKER_00 27:28

It's beautiful. It's beautiful. I I will say though, also, a conference is also an typically an environment of legislating speech.

SPEAKER_01 27:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:36

Um, as I'm sure you've experienced, it's I I get more nervous at conferences than I do in you know, supermax prisons or in war zones because um it's such a false environment. And um it reminds me, you know, it's like we're all sort of pre, you know, just subject to these rules. You know, you I how many panel discussions have you attended where the audience is relegated to passing up comments on note cards and then having that be mediated by someone else? So the voice of the audience is never heard, or on apps, um, or maybe not at all, or relegated to the last five minutes, which is the like the sort of typical what they call QA structure, which is let's hear from the audience as an afterthought and not recognize that they've been in the room the entire time and have an equal role to play. It's interesting for something as radical as COP or radical as some of the other conferences that certainly we've contempt played with, you know, performed for and with, um, we're always swimming upstream. Um, just like in the theater, against the architecture of the conference itself, to create a space where people can truly hear and see each other. Um that's that's what makes it thrilling because, of course, the expectations are already so low. We've already been through the soul-deadening experience of endless panel discussions and lectures. Um, and uh, and what new things are possible when we try a new mode of engagement. I guess what I keep coming back to in my work is like, in our work, is like we will not panel discuss or lecture our way out of the current crisis no more than we'll uh tweet and uh TikTok our way out of it. Um we have to build new forms. Um and and I would argue, I mean, I go to the theater, I love going to the theater, but we have to become conscious of the fact that the theater itself as we know it is a structure of oppression. Um and no matter how no matter how radical your politics or how experimental your approach, if you're relegating the audience to silence, um, from my perspective, it's not radical enough.

SPEAKER_01 29:49

Yeah. I I spent a decade in Asia and spent a lot of time making work in Bali, where everybody is a performer. Yeah, what a relief. Yeah, yeah. And but but you know, everything is a performance for the gods. And if you happen to be there in the audience, you know, you can have a dog walk through a performance, somebody's working on a motorcycle over here, kids are doing like it's the ultimate kind of thing of like, is this working or not? It's instant uh notification of that. And it's also the flooding back of like, when it's good, it's good. When it's bad, goodbye. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:26

I absolutely love that. Um I love that too. I love, I love those stakes. Yeah. Uh uh and of course I'm reminded of you know the stakes of early modern England where you're you're competing with bear-baiting and bear baiting.

SPEAKER_01 30:42

Ah, the dog killing was better. Come back and get back to that. Um how do you I mean you've you've already talked about this a little bit. How do you facilitate or how do you design those conversations afterwards?

SPEAKER_00 30:57

Yeah. So so to be clear, we see it as one thing. So it's not a not a performance, not a discussion. It's it's it's a performance that culminates in a discussion that wouldn't have been possible without the performance. So the actors are serving the audience, and everything is in service of a discussion that never would have happened had the actors not performed. And so the actors who have over 250 who are part of a company, those who come back over and over again know that it is an act of service to perform, just as much as it's an act of service after the performance is over, to immediately go sit in the audience and listen and witness and bear witness to, not stay on stage. How many times have you had the soul-deadening experience of a talk back in which all of a sudden you've had this sacred experience in theater? Even bad plays can be sacred. And then uh the audience is asked essentially by the framework of having the actors come back out to talk about artistic process as if that's what just happened. But what didn't happen was an artistic. No one wants to artistic process, from my perspective, is just another avoidance tactic on the part of humans from from actually acknowledging what did happen in the room. And nobody, neither the actors nor the director, nor the audience, want to talk about artistic process, although we seemingly have endless appetite to put people. And then I think this ultimately cultivates a certain antipathy by on the part of the cultural producers for the audience itself. I think we're sort of being habituated to dislike the audience and to and to condescend and to think the audience has nothing to contribute. But it's really just a framework of the exchange. I think it needs to be adjusted. So in our model, um I would say I there are a couple things. One is um it's a disappearing act. So if I've done my work and my colleagues have two, it's as if we would never we were never there. This happened really pronouncedly during the pandemic. We started doing performances for soldiers where we weren't actually physically there, but they were physically in multiple spaces congregated together. And the objective was to get them talking about mental health and suicide and moral injury and loss. And we could do a performance on Zoom that was being projected into those spaces that was live and ephemeral. I would ask a few questions, and all of a sudden, those soldiers, their Marines would be engaging with each other in those spaces and on their own terms, owning the text and their response to it. And it wasn't as if we had never been there. We were never there. The Disappearing Act had been sort of fully realized. Um, and one way I know it's working is when it seems like a community that we've engaged is taking ownership of the discussion in its own vocabulary and vernacular on its own terms, and where they don't need a lot of facilitation. It becomes sort of self-facilitating to a certain extent as an audience. The other way I know my, I'm just starting backwards again from how I know it's working, is um, I know our model is working when the least powerful person in the room is speaking. And we don't get to that place haphazardly. We get to it through a series of steps. And I I know I'm sorry, I keep harping on the sort of normal cultural production, but um, you know, very simply, we spend a great deal of time thinking about who is in the audience because the first question we as a company are are asking ourselves for every one of our more than 40 projects is for whom are we telling the story? And then after that question is answered, then what is it that they need that this intervention could help with? And then questions of text and casting and cut and aesthetic questions, and is there music? Follow attendant to how is this an act of service to help this community achieve something that wouldn't be possible without this intervention? But identifying the community or communities is the first thing. It's not the afterthought, it's the first thing. Um the structure is at its bare bones very simple. It's a performance or some most often a reading of a text. Uh, we have a kind of a Brechtan structure where the actors often come out with no fanfare, are sitting in front of the audience talking to each other in their street clothes, and then all of a sudden it just begins and it ends as just as it begins, and they go sit in the audience. And that is against the grain of most cultural production. And of course, seeing Francis McDorman do that and then go sit in the audience waiting to hear what you have to say. Never, yeah. And of course, the actors know the uh sort of unwritten rule, we don't allow the actors to speak during a discussion because actors are kryptonite to discussion. Right. And yet another distraction that allows us to pretend like what we really should be talking about is artistic process, which inevitably results in those benal questions about how did you memorize the lines and how did you prepare for this role, which just reinforce the antipathy the artists have already been acculturated and habituated to feel for the audience, which doesn't achieve anything, it just continues to reinforce this divide and and and sort of justify the silencing of the audience. They have nothing important to say anyway, except these dumb questions we keep hearing over and over again. So why do we go through this exercise of coming out after the performance and listening to them ask these dumb questions? Um so the um so the uh so in our model, we do a performance and the performance is uh culminates in a discussion, and the discussion lasts longer than the performance because the discussion is the main event. So it's free, free is neutral, the discussion is the same, it's one thing, it's a performance that culminates in a discussion, and the discussion lasts longer than performance, and the audience is the main character, and we approach that main character with reverence that it knows more than we do. And when we approach the audience with reverence for the fact that it knows more than we do, all kinds of new things open up that are possible that are that run against the grain of, again, most theatrical and artistic production. Um, we also have a group of people who start the conversation in our model. We call them panelists, but that's kind of a red herring, but because they're not academics and they're they're not power players. They're just the first people in the room to speak. And what we say to them is we bring so the actors finish, and then of course, as soon as they're done, they're replaced by four people from the community for whom we are performing, and they represent a variety of perspectives, sometimes oppositional perspectives. Definitely as much diversity as one could imagine, because the more diverse, the more democratized and pluralistic the conversation becomes. But to be clear, they are not people on book tour, they are not PhDs, with all due respect, they are not academics, they are not, they are not people of heads of organizations or nonprofits, they're not people of any power in the traditional sense of the word. They are regular people who have been directly touched by the issue we're coming to discuss, who have something important to say or will ultimately have something important to say with regard to it. And we ask them to respond for three minutes max from their hearts and their guts first. Um I was listening to Michael Pollan talk on a different podcast this last week about how we're now learning that consciousness, you know, the sort of the predilections of neuroscientists and Western science, similar similarly, I think, to some of the themes that have come up in this discussion is to sort of silence uh the emotions and to privilege the intellect as if consciousness only happens in the mind and not in the body, and as if the emotions have no role in consciousness itself. So even the provocation, the sort of question of responding from your gut. And in Greek animal, I like going back to the Greeks, they had all these centers of emotion. And my favorite is the thumos in Homeric, uh, in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Uh Hector tells his wife Andromeda that he must go to war when she begs him to stay because she knows he will die, because his thumos will not allow him to stay. He's being led to, and uh, you know, this tumos is this like emotional center that resides in the chest and guides emotional decision making and intuition that's distinct from the frain and the main and other seats of intellect, uh, the sukei. This is, you know, there are these all these centers of knowing and understanding that are embodied that aren't simply the mind. So we ask these panelists to respond from their guts, which increasingly is dawning on me this last week, especially, is asking them to come to it with their full consciousness. This is not an intellectual exercise. And to model for the audience a way of responding that uses the text and the performance as a point of departure for the discussion. So hiding in plain sight for 2,500 years is this civic, spiritual, and emotional technology for communalizing trauma. But in the ancient world, a guy like me didn't pop out afterwards and facilitate a discussion afterwards. They went to the agorra and they talked for a while, whatever. But but in our model, the the medium that we were sort of building is one that mediates um through text and performance sometimes unbreachable differences. Um the the the the the um the proposition and the request of the audience is not to agree with each other. It isn't that we'll have a group hug at the end of the conversation, it's just to agree to hear each other's interpretations of a shared story and experience. Um, and acknowledge that we all have interpretations. And I guess one of the core values of Theater of War Productions is there are infinite possibilities of interpretation in every room. And even if I don't agree with them or I find them repugnant, they should be acknowledged and validated so that we don't shut down speech once again because it doesn't comport with our political perspective or our values. So part of our challenge and one of the and the sort of opportunity of facilitating in our model is finding a way to validate every single thing that gets said. Again, so we don't legislate or shut down speech. And sometimes that's people saying, I fucking hated this. And you'll find me smiling ear to ear when I hear that, because that's what free speech sounds like. Right. Yeah. And we know we've actually created, like we have a mandatory audience of soldiers who are watching a mandatory training about suicide prevention, and they're having to watch these New York City actors perform, and we get to them with the microphone early in the discussion, they said, this is absolute bullshit, a waste of tax dollars. You'll see my face grinning ear to ear, because that is what free speech sounds like. That's what democracy sounds like, is people saying what they believe. Or if we're performing at Dartmouth and an African-American woman who's given the mic says, I refuse to narrate my trauma before this white audience. So I will be silent. And things get really uncomfortable. That's what democracy sounds like. That's what free speech sounds like. And so there's all these opportunities in our discomfort to hear and bear witness to each other's interpretations. I would say two other quick things, which is that one of the principal tools of the work is cultural and temporal distance. We're not saying to the audience, this is you. We're asking the audience to reflect what in this distant, either temporally or culturally artifact do you see of yourself, how how do in what ways do you see yourself refracted or reflected in this performance? Not everything is going to resonate, maybe something. And the principal question I ask all audiences is what resonated with you back to auditory. Because for me, um, it's the first sense, and I mean it in the full breadth of the word resonate, not just as sound, but as vibration and how it vibrates and resonates with your experiences. So respond from your gut. How does it resonate? Uh, and then I would say one of the ways the actors serve the discussion is by committing fully and perhaps more forcefully than they would in the commercial and nonprofit theater to the emotions, the emotional opportunities in the plays we perform. So the note that I give the actors, and I say this all the time, but the note I give the actors before they go on is make them wish they'd never come. And I say that not because I want to bore the audience or or abuse it. It's because I've learned over years of doing this work over now more than a thousand performances, that the net result of this work isn't necessarily empathy. That's one byproduct and it's a great one. But the one thing that I can rely upon, the most useful and the most um the most uh reliable tool uh is shared discomfort. So if the actors make the audience supremely uncomfortable, and everyone for a moment in this scene of abject suffering on stage is scanning for the exits because they've committed in a way that very few actors they've ever seen have committed. And everyone's thinking about leaving. Just for a moment, because then we break the play and we interrogate it afterwards, but and explore it. But if that's what happens, then at least we share that in common. If we're all uncomfortable, at least we can acknowledge we're all uncomfortable. And that becomes a shared experience that cuts across all party affiliation, all lived experience, all the things that divide us. And then we can begin to interrogate, well, what makes us so uncomfortable? And a conversation can emerge. So those are some of the elements at work in the model. And then in the facilitation, I would say, just lastly, that um there's a kind of weave. Like there's this, you know, Trump claims that when he speaks in this kind of, you know, non-sequitur way, that it's a weave. But there's a weave in this facilitation. It's not a debate. People aren't speaking directly to each other. They're bearing witness, they're validating. The model is that the panelists have often quoted lines from the play from memory. That's part of the invitation, and then related it to something that resonated with them or spoke to them from their guts. The first person to do this, I was really struck. I'm a military spouse, my husband is a Navy SEAL, my son is a Marine, and my fat my husband went away four times to war. And each time he came back dragging invisible bodies into our house, just like Ajax did in the play. And to quote from the play, our home is a slaughterhouse. So by quoting the line from the play and relating it, something she's never shared in public, let alone in private, and opening the door, she's modeling a way of people responding. Now, there's an architecture of consent in all of this, which is to say, you can talk just about the play. Or you can talk about yourself, but it's your choice. And one of the key rules of my facilitation methodology is we do not ask follow-up questions. I don't say say more. If you said it, you've said what you needed to say. Sometimes I'll say, if I understand you correctly, you just said this, and I'm and one of the refrains that I come back to over and over again is I've never heard someone say something like that that way before. I've never thought of it that way before as I'm listening to you. And if I can find a way as a facilitator to live in the sort of truth of that statement, then it's always fresh. And one of our colleagues who's a nurse and a philosopher named Cinder Rushton says of our work, if you've seen one Theater of War performance, you've seen one. And that's because the audience, which is the main character, is always different. But it's also because the circumstances in which we're performing every day are shifting because of world events and events in the communities in which we're performing. So we do the same thing ritualistically over and over and over again, but it's always different, and the result is always different. Um, so that's a sort of sketch of sort of some of the elements at work in the facilitation and and the structure of our model. Uh by the end of the discussion, uh the comments and the responses from the audience members move further and further toward complexity, typically. So I know it's also working when someone is relating to, for instance, the character that most people see as the villain in the drama, or everyone seeing the creon in themselves. Right. You know. And so I often both validate and also celebrate the audience when people say things that perturb the conversation or complicate it, uh, or when people make each other supremely uncomfortable by speaking their truths in a way that are hard to hear. Uh and some people like jumping out of planes, some people like taking drugs. For me, it's very resistant audiences and also really uncomfortable conversations because I feel like when it gets really uncomfortable, that's when the real work begins. And I feel like my role as facilitator is just to remind people I know where the walls of the room are. They're right here. The actors have already gone all the way out here. You can meet us halfway. The room can hold all the emotions in this space. And we're all fully autonomous human beings who have the capacity to stay in our seats and participate and bear witness and be part of this. And uh, so even the most uncomfortable and challenging conversations for me are the ones where I'm like most excited, just to play that one central role of reminding everybody, hey, we can do this. So, okay, then.

SPEAKER_01 49:56

And this is a debated word. And I'm sure you you know this word. I'm gonna say it's catharsis. Yeah. Is that what you're talking about? That thing that we all collectively can feel uncomfortable and want to go for the doors, but we've all collectively felt that and then it purges or whatever. Does that make sense in that model? I mean, again, it's it's translated in so many bad ways and early, you know, drama classes make you read the poetics and all that. Is that what is that what catharsis is for you? Or does that have no bearing on anything you're doing?

SPEAKER_00 50:33

I I don't want to um abdicate all completely, but I it's a word that I don't use because of I mean, so many thousands of pages of ink have been spilled about Aristotle's use of that word in in the poetics, which are essentially lecture notes on Greek tragedy written 150 years after the height of Greek tragedy in the fifth century. He never saw it. And I mean, it didn't see the original Sophoclean plays he's talking about often and holding up as exemplars. Um I also think it's a kind of a word of pop psychology. Um, and one of the reasons I created Cedar, you asked for the origin story, and we didn't even get there, but I'm the son of two psychologists, and my father's an experimental psychologist, and one of the last skinarians, I grew up like in a like a laboratory with rats and um, you know, lie detectors, uh, which my brother and I would hook each other up to and interrogate each other on, you know, like um like a real sort of experimental psychology framework. And my mother's a therapist and a school psychologist. And I love them both dearly. And also, I don't think you get theater of war without the background of having parents as mental health professionals. Like it's obviously a but I built it to a certain extent out of an allergy to jargon. And I think catharsis is jargon. Uh and I use jargon all the time. Sometimes it's useful as a vernacular, but I think most of the audiences we're trying to serve with regard to the reason theater of war has been successful with veterans or with correction officers or people who've been incarcerated or people who've experienced a homelessness or people who are in bad, challenging relationships with domestic violence, is that they don't feel pathologized by the jargon of Western, the Western psychoanalytic model. Instead, they've heard a play performed and then they get to talk about it, and it doesn't feel like medicine. And catharsis is one of those words that's like right on the border. Now, if you're asking me, I mean, like I still, you know, I'll still I talk about I wrote about catharsis a little bit in my book, Theater of War, and I I feel like um uh is the net result uh when people attend our performances that are about tragic, catastrophic stories of loss, um, in which one of the definitions I have of tragedy is watching people learn too late. And usually by milliseconds, and in those milliseconds, they've destroyed themselves and their families for generations to come. But the difference between what happens on stage and its impact on the audience is vast. We talked about earlier watching people in a homeless shelter smile at the when they feel seen by the portrayal of abject suffering on stage. Um I think along those same lines, what people in the after, after the performance, after the discussion, after our events sort of spill out into either into places where food is served or out into the streets, the thing we hear most regularly people report is buzzing. And you can hear it in the cacophony of the room as people are talking at a kind of volume that would be inappropriate. Like if you came by the room and you were, you hadn't been through the experience that took place inside, you would, why are these people all speaking so forcefully to each other? And um, I talk to people who've experienced suicidal ideation or lost people to suicide, or talk to people who have experienced grave moral injuries, um, people in recovery. Um, there's a buzzing to being brought into community with each other, a sense of interconnection, a sense of camaraderie. That um I the only times I've ever seen anything comparable to it are during natural disasters, wars, terrorist attacks. Like for some reason, as a species, it takes us remembering the stakes of life and death around us and the fragility of our lives and the possibility of human happiness to actually hold each other close and to engage with each other with a consciousness of those stakes. Well, for me, that's what tragedy does. It conveys a kind of consciousness of the stakes of our existence to the audience and its impact, even though the plays are about people learning too late and we're watching people destroy themselves and their families for generations to come, um it can result in people dancing in the aisles afterwards. And that is counterintuitive. Um, this is an argument I have with my father, who was, as I mentioned, an experimental psychologist, who really thought that Greek, Greek plays and sort of a Greek sensibility was a fatalistic one. So the plays are about um for him, he's now uh died 15 years ago, but um I'm still in dialogue with him about it, you know, that um the plays are about these characters who who do not apprehend the forces at work upon them genetics from his perspective, governments, the weather, fate, luck, chance, the media until it's too late, and they are sort of locked into this sort of deterministic universe in which they do come to some consciousness, but it's always after it's of no use to them. And I agree with him that that is to a certain extent what tragedy portrays, but where I disagree is I think that the purpose of gathering 17,000 citizens in the center of Athens during a century in which they saw nearly 80 years of war and portraying people learning too late in front of that audience is to raise the consciousness and the audience to the fleeting possibility of making a change before it's too late. And with some sense of how hard that actually is. And then in our model, what's so lovely is then you get to hear from people in the audience who have changed. My father didn't believe people could change. He had the sort of treatise he wrote called No Meaningful Change from a Psychological Perspective. And this is our argument. This is our eternal argument. And I believe we are capable of change, and that this technology, this intervention, is about consciousness, but it's also about action. Uh back to etymology, drama means to do, but it's not just what the people on stage do that drama is about. It's what the audience does in return. Um so I see the amphitheater as a technology, I see the plays as a part of that, a sort of offshoot of that technology, and the work that we're doing now across many different genres, the amphitheater is still the centerpiece of raising consciousness and creating spaces where people can hear and hold the complexity of the ethics and emotions at the center of the conversations we need to be having for the health of our community, for the health of our family, for the health of the democracy in which we're living. Um and that's sacred. That is sacred stuff. That is not something that you can check the box and said, we just did that. It is, you know, it's something that um so by divesting from the traditional modes of cultural production and uh simultaneously getting to work with some of the best actors living and breathing on the planet, we've been able to sort of uh create these large-scale spaces of communalizing and healing. And if catharsis means consciousness, then I'm okay with that word.

SPEAKER_01 59:07

I would much prefer that definition than what we've been shoved down our throats. Um when you were speaking, I was thinking about um the ancient Indian treatise, the Natya Sastra, which to say um what a play has to do, what drama has to do. It has to entertain the drunk, it has to tell us why we're here, and it has to tell us how do we get along. And I and as you were describing that, I was thinking, I was thinking that um, yeah, that's that's what tragedy attempts to do. Yes, it does.

SPEAKER_00 59:40

I I guess um I would add, I I I don't think it's the artist's responsibility to tell the audience anything. Uh it's actually the the wisdom of the crowd that I'm most interested in learning from. Um I used to I used to have a real chip on my shoulder, like it had to, you know, we had to work to get X number of people from these different backgrounds into the space. Uh now I'm way more expansive and open to the possibility of any audience. A busload of tourists from New Jersey, like it doesn't, with all due deference to New Jersey, it's like there's there's um there's unlimited potential in every audience for these types of exchanges. It's just that our entire cultural apparatus is built to shut these exchanges down. And I meet theater artists, like I was just talking to someone last week who's like, well, I feel like if the play is really well executed, I don't want a conversation perturbing my experience of it. I want to have my experience, or where I was talking to another theater artist originally said, I want people to be having conversations in their minds, not with each other. I'm like, okay, fine, fair enough, fair enough. Um, but I just think of the infinite and sort of innumerable ways we shut down and silence the voice of the audience, and by virtue of that, do not get to benefit from the wisdom that's in every crowd. Wisdom that most often manifests and emerges from the most from the perspective of a sort of a culturated and formally educated audience from the most unlikely of places. But one of the gifts of the last 18 years for me is that we got to serve as public artists and residents for New York City. And under a sort of two-year period with that title, we performed in the most underserved communities of New York. And in any given week, we were performing on sort of every step of the way of the school-to-prison pipeline from Title I schools to Rikers Island, homeless shelters, public parks, old age homes, you know, et cetera. And that's where the thesis really got put to the test that the closer the audience members are in proximity, experiential proximity to the issues we've come to address, the more wisdom, the more they have to teach us than we to teach them. And um, so I just think about what the immense loss it is. I was like, I went to, you know, this my daughter's school play. And, you know, they learn that a play is turning down the lights, you know, taking it. Yeah, paying money, getting taking a ticket, yeah, applauding and laughing. I mean, it's gotten to a point now where the actors are part of the police state is so deeply embedded in the cultural apparatus that I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that I was more assaulted by the um front of house and security staff at a recent Broadway show that I took my daughter to see than entering Rikers Island or Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where we performed as well in the camps. Um also just the dehumanization of the audience from even when they're paying $300 a ticket on the way into the space has become so it's like the dehumanization of our experience flying on airline. That's what a great analogy that the lobbies of American theaters are. Certain ones, like Playwrights Horizons, from my perspective, is like premium economy. Like they they don't herd you like cattle, but they still yell at you on the way in. You know, it's like um, you know, uh some theaters, like the Beacon Theater, which is a you know music venue in New York City, they like they this front of house staff is really cordial and um kind and are sort of facilitating your, and others, you really, you know, and if you've been justice impacted, like if you've had any relationship to the law and you have to pass through a metal detector to have a cultural experience or pass a security apparatus, well, then you know, we're just saying from the very get-go, this is not for you, and you're not welcome. And whatever wisdom you might have, uh this is not the space for it to be shared. Uh so one of the gifts of the pandemic, and I don't mean to fetishize it because I would give it back in a heartbeat, all the lives lost, obviously, but one of the gifts to the theater was just for a brief moment stripping away the architecture of oppression that we've habituated and and gotten so used to. And then went right back to it afterwards. Well, we're creatures of habit. Yeah. Um, I mean, I think there are certain changes that came out of George Floyd and a sort of consciousness of certain elements of oppression that have been part of the theater for some time that need to be addressed. I agreed. But I still and every, you know, I definitely think black and brown playwrights and BIPOC prof theater makers deserve to be earning a living at the highest level with their craft. End of story, full stop. But I'm not sure simply giving underserved audiences access to the theater as we know it is necessarily a service.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:25

Yeah. Um, I'm cognizant of time. Thank you. And uh I just want to wrap this up really quickly. And sure, this this may be a this may be a question that you can't answer quickly. Um, but there was a moment in your life that um there was Brian before you saw something, and there was a Brian after you saw something. Can you can you pinpoint that thing that changed you fundamentally as a human being? It doesn't even have to be a route the work that you're doing now or or the path that you've gone down, but like can you pinpoint a show that's like, oh, I see the power. Power of this, and I am going to change who I am because of that. A student gave me this question, and I always in the con the conversation. Yeah, it's a great question. It's a great question.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:09

And it's back to the question of change.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:11

We're always changing. Um, I'm, you know, more pretty Socratic in my orientation, the Heraclitus, that you shall never step in the same river twice. Everything flows. Um, it's just uh, you know, all these strategies for sort of the investing in the illusion that we're not constantly changing. If it was any solid state at all, I'd be surprised. But the for me, the one of the biggest transformational moments in my journey was I lost my girlfriend, uh Laura Rosenberg. Um she died of cystic fibrosis at age of 22. She'd be in her mid-40s now if she was alive. And um I was a principal caregiver for the last five months of her life after she had a double lung transplant. And during that time, she had scores and scores of more surgeries because the lung transplant didn't go well. And I got the privilege of helping her across the threshold of death. And it was for me something I wrote about in my book, The Theater of War, but for me it was a um, it was a moment where um the plays I'd studied in college in Greek, the the Greek plays I translated, were no longer academic exercises. They were no longer metaphorical. They were like letters written to me or about me from the ancient world. And they reassured me that I was not the first person to have met the limits of my compassion, or to have felt like he'd betrayed himself or another person who was suffering, um, or who had felt this alone or this just entered the blank. And so I had this, that was the inciting moment for me. I had this sort of vague, as Peter Brooks said, formless hunch. Um that if the plays could be useful to me, if they could provide me solace, then they could bring solace and healing to others. And that's what sent me on the journey. Part two of that, just briefly, is that I only a few years after having lost Laura ended up directing one of my translations at a hospital in New York City. Um, a play called Philactetes, about a wounded warrior who's left on an island by his own men on account of a chronic illness he can he contracts in the way of the Trojan War. At the center of the play is a scene of We need you come back. Immense suffering. They learn from an oracle the only way to win the war is to get Philactetes and his invincible weapon, the bow of Heracles, off the island. So it's very much a play about the gifts of affliction. And back to this thing about what we miss when we silence the audience, what we miss when we marginalize people whose voices we don't want to hear. And sometimes people like people, I don't cut off people in our discussions when they're dysregulated by trauma. And it's like, why'd you let that person speak for so long? People say afterwards, and I said, Well, what do you think trauma sounds like? Does sound like sound bites? Sounds like, you know, perfectly crafted statements. No, part of the exercise of the auditory list of uh exercise of being the audience is listening with your full self, and it's not a small, it's not a small ask. Um so anyway, I I we performed Phil Lactidius, which has this scene of just absolute abject suffering in the play, which the wounded warrior is attacked by a fit of this disease that he's contracted, and he's screaming for someone to end his misery and calling out for help and um asking to be delivered from this immense pain. And this is where I started to ask the actors to make the audience wish they'd never come, because by committing to this scene, it would just move the walls of the room back and create a space where people could bear witness and acknowledge their own suffering. Anyway, we did this performance at Wilde Cornell Medical School for an audience of medical students, doctors, staff, some patients. And I still thought I was clever. Like, what an ingenious idea to perform a Greek play in a hospital about chronic suffering. I'd cared for Laura. I'd also cared for my father who died after having a transplant, a kidney transplant. And I'd spent a good deal of my 20s in hospitals, and I thought this is all I'm finding a way to assimilate all this experience. But I still thought of myself as the teacher. I still thought I was the shaman. I thought I was bestowing the gift of culture upon the initiates. Greek tragedy. And we got to the disc, we we framed this as a performance followed by a discussion before the model had really sort of taken hold. And um this audience in the at the hospital, you know, I asked if people related to this play we just performed. And as people started to sort of respond, it was for me, it was like a veil was lifted. And I saw that even though most of the people in the audience had never heard of this play, it's an obscure play by Sophocles, uh and many had never even read or heard Sophocles before, even though I translated it from Greek and thought I was so clever for performing it there, that they they just knew infinitely more about the play than I did. And I was humbled and and and saw something that became the central tenet of this work, which is like when you approach an audience with humility and reverence, um an entire vista of new possibilities emerges in terms of what's possible in the room. And I would say that was in some ways, that was the beginning of the whole thing. And it was the combination of losing Laura, having this form of formless hunch that the plays were working on me in this way they might work on other people who'd experienced loss or moral distress or trauma, to then hearing directly from an audience that had and seeing that I was the initiate and they were the shaman. It took me about a hundred performances after that to realize that while I was serving lots of other people, we did the military next, and that led to prisons, and that led to addiction, and that led to but it took about a hundred performances in to realize I was still also doing it for myself. After Laura died, all I wanted to do was talk about it. And we live in such a death-averse culture that I would watch friends, family, strangers, I've talked to anybody about it, because it was the most incredible experience watching someone who'd prepared her entire life to die and rehearsed it over and over again, finally do it so fearlessly and so graciously, comforting all of us around her when she did it. And I don't mean to fetishize that because very few of us will ever get the opportunity to do that. Uh, death is not something you can schedule or legislate in that way. But I witnessed this thing that I think was such a miracle. All I wanted to do was talk about it, and no one would talk about it. And so it took about a hundred performances in to realize that even though we were serving other people, and that was the main objective, it was as much for me as it was for them, because I needed to be in rooms where people would be willing to talk about it. Um and that's the virtuous cycle of service at the center of the work. It's, I'm sure you experienced this in your own work. If someone in the audience who's never shared their story starts to tell it, and even if it's hard to tell it, is met with the validation of someone else in the audience acknowledging how important it was for them to hear that story and have that open up some other type of sharing or healing, well, then the beginning of the seeds of this thing starts to occur where the person who shared their story realizes that by sharing it, they're helping someone else heal. And this iterative, virtuous cycle of service then starts to unfold. I don't believe in much with any certainty, but I believe in this cycle of service that by sharing one's story and then coming to consciousness of the fact that that is helping other people, one heals oneself. And I do think that's that's at the center of what the Greeks knew, and that we're what we're only coming 2,500 years later to rediscover for our culture. Many other cultures have discovered it and and and knew it long before we figured it out.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:19

Ryan, thank you so much for sharing your stories with us today. And um what I think will be a healing thing for the audience to hear this as well, because this is an international podcast. People from all over the world are hearing this. It's obviously I'm talking to a lot of American directors, and there is a need and a hunger and a desire for those things inside of these rooms, inside of these institutions, but to hear it spoken so absolutely plainly with conviction, with passion, um, will light a fire unto everybody else, I hope.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:50

So that's my hope. Thank you. Uh, I'm honored to be invited to be part of the board of directors, and uh and uh and yeah, uh hope it makes a dent. Um folks can find our work at theaterofwar.com. Uh obviously, theater of war is meant as a provocation, especially in this moment, but the theater of war is a euphemism for violence, and we mean to create a space that where we can interrogate and acknowledge the violence uh rather than make it into metaphors. Um so um that's the hope. I invite people to attend. All our work is free, and um uh and if any of the directors listening would like to attend someplace that isn't on the public schedule, just reach out and we'll see if we can get you in.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:48

Brian, you are so it's it's amazing how accessible you have have been and continue to be, and the fact that I could easily just email you and you've just offered that as well. So of course, you're a real mench. Thank you so much. Thanks for the opportunity. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:01

It's great talking to you today. And uh look forward to um tuning in to the other episodes down the road.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:10

If this episode gave you any insight, inspiration, or even just made you smile, please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts for more conversations like this. And if you're looking for guidance with a creative challenge, or want to advance a dream of your own, we'd love to help. Visit Board of Directors.world. The Board of Directors is a global constellation of theater directors dedicated to building community, sharing knowledge, and transforming the role of the director in the 21st century. We convene and curate a fellowship that fosters mentorship, artistic inquiry, and collective care, transcending borders and institutions and traditions. Until then, take care of yourself and take care of each other.