For the Medical Record - Bryan Doerries (Theater of War Productions) ===

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Mia Levenson: Hello, and welcome to another episode of For the Medical Record, a podcast from Johns Hopkins University Center for the Medical Humanities and Social Medicine. My name is Mia Levenson.

Richard Del Rio: And I'm Richard Del Rio.

Mia Levenson: And with us today, we have Bryan Doerries, artistic director for Theater of War Productions, here to talk to us today about A Refutation, which was a dramatic reading of archival records related to the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia performed at Johns Hopkins Hospital, as well as several black churches in the DC/ Baltimore area. The primary text for this performance was a pamphlet written by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, two figures that are fairly well known to historians of medicine. They wrote about the black community's experiences during the epidemic and how they were called upon to act [00:01:00] as caretakers because they were believed to be immune from yellow fever. The pamphlet condemns how Black Philadelphians were smeared in the press following the epidemic and said to have taken advantage of the sick and dying. The reputation of this libel became the first federally copyrighted publication by black authors. And I can speak for myself that I found this performance to be just so powerful. We're really excited to welcome Bryan Doerries, thank you for joining us.

Richard Del Rio: Yes.

Bryan Doerries: Thanks so much for having me on your show.

Richard Del Rio: Before we talk about the performance, which I really enjoyed, I enjoyed it so much. I saw it twice. Can we talk a little bit about Theater of War Productions? Um, what is Theater of War Productions? What kind of work do you do?

Bryan Doerries: Sure. Theater Four Productions is, uh, a social impact focused theater company. We're based in New York City. We've been around for 18 years. We have over 45 projects in repertory, um, that [00:02:00] all present, um, often acclaimed actors reading or performing seminal texts to frame crucial discussions about often divisive topics. And, um, we have a list of over 200 actors who're part of the projects and who participate regularly. Theater of War Productions got its start in hospitals, so it's fitting that we'd be talking with you about a performance at Johns Hopkins Hospital, um, with readings of ancient Greek tragedies about caregiving and about suffering about moral injury.

Richard Del Rio: Hmm.

Bryan Doerries: And hospitals led to the military and military led to prison and prison led to end of life care and addiction and, um, natural disasters. And the list goes on and on. It's sort of like this giant Venn diagram of various communities of trauma and loss, who are brought together under the umbrella of our [00:03:00] projects and who span deeply, radically liberal perspectives to firmly conservative ones. Um, there's room in our tent for everyone, uh, because what we do is we ask audiences to listen to a performance of a text and then interpret it. And while we may disagree about lots of things, we can agree to hear each other's interpretations of a story. And so I guess I would act, I would say that what we do, one of the things we do best is kind of mediate by way of the stories we perform. Topics that would be sometimes hard to talk about straight on.

Richard Del Rio: I, I wasn't aware of the historical detail about your start in hospitals,

Bryan Doerries: Yeah.

Richard Del Rio: so it makes me even more curious about the choice of name, Theater of War, what, what goes into what, what's behind that.

Bryan Doerries: Well, Theater of War Productions. I quit my day job and started doing this full-time, uh, in 2009, [00:04:00] uh, when we were able to make an argument to the Department of Defense that performing ancient tragedies by Sophocles is about the Trojan War and about suicide and what I would argue PTSD and moral injury in front of troops returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to open up discussions about those topics. That that was a good idea and that we actually had a role as artists to play in mediating and addressing the stigma associated with mental health and the military. So that's where we took everything to scale. In that first year, we did over a hundred performances on military bases all over the world. and I became a defense contractor. I went from being a classic student to being a defense contractor, but- and that name, Theater of War stuck. I mean, there are so many different ways to interpret it. Theater of War productions or Theater of War. Theater of War, to be clear, is our military project. It's not the company the company's Theater of War productions, of which there are dozens and dozens of other [00:05:00] projects. I'd say the military is probably about 5% of what we do now in terms of our focus. Uh, and we also these days spend a lot more time focusing on the receiving end of war and on immigrants and on those who've been impacted directly by war. But, you know, Theater of War is a term like many in our martial, uh, vocabulary whereby we euphemized violence. We make it palatable. So rather than talking about the place where we go kill people, we say the Theater of War and Theater- one of the reasons we took on the name Theater of War is because we're kind of use reverse engineering. Its use. The Theater of War is where we go to see and speak the truth about war. And there are many theaters of war, many places where we encounter violence, uh, in its many forms, and then silence [00:06:00] and marginalize those who have the most to say about it. So I would say our mission started with hospitals and the military, but it's expanded to so many other communities. I. I would say theaters of war, communities of trauma, where rather than euphemizing violence, we're actually there to speak about it directly. And by directly, I mean hearing from those closest in proximity to the violence, whether that's a veteran or a gang adjacent individual and a perpetrator of violence, a survivor or a victim of violence. Um, and in this case, with this project. know, we tried to frame that we're gonna talk about today. We tried to frame discussions around health inequities in America, especially racial health inequities, uh, by way of these texts from 1793. And then foregrounded privilege, the perspectives of and brown first responders, nurses, um, caregivers, home [00:07:00] health aides, undertakers, people who had something at stake. Um. And so that's the, it's the same basic idea, just applied to a different set of questions.

Richard Del Rio: Hmm.

Mia Levenson: I find it compelling to hear that you started off with the performing of, of Greek tragedies. And this piece is so, um, you know, Greek tragedies follow a very, like, formulaic, kind of like rising action, climax and, and then, falling action. And This piece really is a, a dramatic reading of simply just like the archival texts.

I know you were commissioned to, to write this piece or to create this piece. Right. So I'd love to hear a little bit about how A Refutation came about. How did you come to for, for medical historians, the 1793 epidemic is really well known. And so how did you as sort of a, a person from the classics, a person from the world of theater come [00:08:00] to, to this piece?

Bryan Doerries: Well there are a couple things I wanna say. One is that I wish I could say that. The text within our repertory, of which there are many that span ancient Greek tragedy to contemporary long form journalism. Um, and everything in between plays, speeches, sermons, um, historic and archival materials. Uh, I, I wish I could say that they, they didn't all fall under the umbrella of tragedy. in fact they do, maybe not in the Aristotelian sense that you were talking about, but in the sense that they provide opportunities for actors to, bring an emotional clarity and intensity to the performance that does something very specific for the audiences for whom we perform. And that is make them uncomfortable. And I [00:09:00] think that that's one of the things, the elements that Aristotle didn't talk about as much in Greek tragedy. I'm not so much interested in catharsis. I don't even know what that means to me. It sounds like a 19th century neologism and thousands of books have been written about it. I don't think anyone really knows. what I've learned over the course of doing this work is that there is immense utility in shared discomfort. And so these texts describing the yellow fever epidemic from multiple perspectives. In its symptomology, in, its in the breakdown of the social fabric and social contract in Philadelphia at that time, in the racially uncomfortable aspects of what occurred, uh, in the things that reflect back to us, things that were still parroting and sort of, are integral to our understanding of medicine, I think broadly, uh, in our culture like racial. differences that are still in the forefront of the media and the news that are being [00:10:00] discussed as if, as if nothing has changed. There are so many ways that like this or these can make us uncomfortable. And so in some ways I would define, you know, one of the things that we learned by doing Greek tragedies early on is that there's a, there's a distinct difference between what happens on stage and what it can provoke in the audience.

And uh, a lot of times we perform in places where people have ex experienced really extreme loss and suffering and are in the throes of that experience. And yet when we perform a what's called a tragedy for them, or something that's uncomfortable for most audiences to listen to, the reaction and the audience is counterintuitively joy, relief, people smiling. As well as other emotional responses that's, that are all reasonable. And I, you know, we perform in homeless shelters often, and I look out in the audience, everyone's smiling at the most, abject suffering at the center of the [00:11:00] play. And, uh, when I ask in the discussion, well, why is everyone smiling es essentially what comes back each time is because I feel seen, because that's a sound I've made in my head, but haven't found a way to express or whatever it is.

So that's all to say. I would put every, I, we have not ventured into comedy, you know, like, because there's so much utility in texts that make us uncomfortable. There's so much that divides us this deeply polarized moment. So if we make an audience extremely uncomfortable, the note that I give the actors is make them wish they'd never come.

Then, then at the very least. Even if we're divided on so many things, if we share in that discomfort, there's a place to start a conversation. Well, why are we so uncomfortable? makes us so uncomfortable? so there's a, there is a, a through line to all these different texts. Um, just briefly, the, [00:12:00] the answer to your question, the, this, this, this was commissioned by the Greenwall Foundation.

This project, they wanted to do a project that celebrated its 75th anniversary as a foundation that's focused mostly on biomedical ethics around health inequities in America. And it was through a longstanding collaboration with Johns Hopkins University and the Berman School of Bioethics, which has been our partner on five different projects now, and with the School of Public Health and Josh Sharpstein who recommended I talk to Sasha White, a sociologist and assistant professor at Johns Hopkins. That led me to these texts which are pervasively, like known amongst historians of medicine, but not so much outside those, those, those halls. And so the idea was, you know this, these are seminal texts as seminal as Greek tragedy, as seminal as Shakespeare. As seminal is O'Neill. As seminal as anything else that's in our repertory. And more people should know about [00:13:00] them be in dialogue with them. So that was part of the impetus for choosing. .

Richard Del Rio: So. I'm kind of curious because the play for those who have, excuse me, play the performance for those who haven't seen it yet, or maybe who aren't familiar so much with 1793, uh, Yellow Fever Pandemic in Philadelphia, in which roughly one fifth of the population died, we are getting documents from Benjamin Rush, kind of the storied founding father, physician of American history. Carey, who wrote a, uh, kind of tell all story of the pandemic, I think maybe three editions or so. We have the refutation itself, a co-authored by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen. You see this performance and you see these texts and dialogue together, and it's a really powerful, powerful [00:14:00] thing.

You mentioned some of the collaboration from Hopkins faculty like, Sasha White here, in the the Department of History of Medicine. How did you come to decide like these, this is definitely the text to do. As opposed, as opposed to, you know, any other, there's plenty of examples in history of, of these kind of issues, but what made you say, this is the one

Bryan Doerries: Well, the, to get more granular, uh, Sasha had written a piece with a bunch of other co-writers. I believe in the Lancet. Uh, and also had done a podcast on another podcast on J HSU's platform with the School of Public Health, hosted by Josh Sharpstein about, um, W. E. B. Du Bois and his, uh, sociological study, the Philadelphia Negro, which again is a seminal text to the history of medicine

Richard Del Rio: It's a classic.

Bryan Doerries: known by sociologists. Foundational. But also marginalized and [00:15:00] excluded in ways that are telling, in terms of how, how it's taught and, and people's knowledge of it outside of medical and sociological circles. So my first, I, I said, "can you introduce me?" to, um, Sasha to to Josh over at the School of Public Health. And he did. And I went to Sasha.

I said, Hey, this is who I am. This is what Theater of War Productions does. We're looking for texts. you think that the Philadelphia Negro might be something we could perform? And I had read some of it and he is like, I actually think that that's, um, it's, even though there are a couple of sections here and there that might illustrate and make visible some of the themes that you want to talk about with audiences, I actually think it's a little too dry and sort of data-driven and not dramatic enough.

But I have these other texts that you should take a look at from 1793 and uh, and onward the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia. And I went and looked at them. I haven't given up on Du Bois. I, I, he wrote [00:16:00] plays, he wrote all kinds of things. And we, I'm taking a deeper dive. Someday we will develop a Du Bois project, which I'm excited about.

We have a Frederick Douglass one, we have a Martin Luther King, one Susie King Taylor. Um, but, but this excited me. And, um, what I'm interested in when I'm looking at texts from, you know, one of the strategies of Theater of War productions is distance. So we do texts that are sort of temporarily or culturally distant from the audience to create a space where people can reflect. We're not saying, this is you. We're saying, what do you see of yourself in this? And what about this rhymes with your experience of the present historic moment. So I'm looking at these texts and thinking, can they be performed and do they, do they lend something to performance that actors can sink their teeth into and make something of, and, you know, is there a a going to be a difference between the read word and the affective experience of hearing it read and by decentering the read word, especially with texts written in [00:17:00] 1793 and making it an affective experience. Can we bring more people into the fold who aren't formally educated, but who have lived through these experiences, who have some kind of insight to bring to them that might be lost in an academic setting where those kinds of individuals are systematically kept out? And, um, what was exciting about the, the text to me is they seemed like even though they were pamphlets for the most part, uh, the refutation, um, by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen of, uh, Matthew Carey's history or version of the, uh, narrative of the epidemic, um, they seemed like oratory. And pamphlets were the social medium of the, of that time in the late 18th century.

So, uh, it made sense that they were written for a reason for, for sort of stimulating public discourse, for engaging in a public way. And they seemed, seemed like actors could read them as [00:18:00] if they were oratory and we could structure something with them that would be, agonistic, slightly like a debate where Matthew Carey would give his version. And then Jones and Allen would deliver theirs and one would see why they delivered theirs. And then we'd hear Carey respond to them in his rebuttal, in his public address. And then we'd hear his correction in the, uh, final edition of the text published decades later, uh, after Absalom Jones' death. So. That structure started to come to the fore.

I, it was through conversations with Sasha White, but then on my own and with other collaborators, with the actors, we started to discover could this work and when we first performed it, uh, at Ebenezer United Methodist Church in DC on Capitol Hill, in the first rehearsal, the actors started to flag in, in, 'cause I included almost all of Jones and Allen's [00:19:00] words. This is the first federally copyrighted work by African Americans. I wanted to make sure that. It, honored as much of it as possible and they started to flag and I just, I stopped them and I said, I don't know if you understand this is going to be riveting. Is It'sveting for me to hear you say these words. It's gonna be even more riveting for people who's who've lived these words, are gonna see their own experiences reflected in something from hundreds of years ago, written in a form of English. We no longer speak. Um. And then they doubled down and they, and, and, and then that, that, I've been doing this long enough to know that the affective experience of hearing a text read where there's a motivation behind it being read, uh, for an audience with something at stake, because that's the other element of what Theater of War productions.

We don't just perform for any old audience. We work on curating audiences that have skin in the game.

Richard Del Rio: And, it's not just, you know, like a debate or, you know, people getting on stage and dramatically [00:20:00] engaging in counter narratives. There's an action to this performance 'cause it, it opens up with a very brief letter Of Benjamin Rush, reaching out to the leaders of the largest free black community in the United States, asking them for help in dealing with this pandemic in the young capital of a fledgling United States.

Bryan Doerries: Yeah. I mean, here I, what, what I mean it's exciting to me also 'cause we're, we just launched the project in DC on Capitol Hill at a moment where these debates about racialized medical differences are front and center with the current administration. certain arguments that are being made in the public sphere about differences that we know are not genetic, but are the result of the conditions in which people live.

The social determinants of health, the things to which people are exposed, the communities from which they come, but not the color of their skin. And yet that still is, you know, I, in talking with [00:21:00] medical doctors, it's still a myth that many people implicitly hold in their minds. And so it's exciting to me that we're about to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the country at a time when questions about what that narrative will be and how, and, and whether we can both celebrate and interrogate at the same time, which is, I would say that's Theater of War productions' core value and belief that we can interrogate and celebrate. We don't have to throw out everything that's good just because we're calling into question everything that's bad. We're trying, this is an iterative experiment. This so-called pluralistic, multiracial democracy. This is not ever going to be finished.

The form is still emerging and um, so I'm excited that we get to be part of this. So our next stop is gonna be Philadelphia, where we'll be performing at Richard Allen's church Mother A. M. E., it looks like in October

Richard Del Rio: Wow.

Bryan Doerries: right on the sort of [00:22:00] edge of the beginning of these 250th anniversaries and celebrations in Philadelphia. Something in Philadelphia, at the point where Philadelphia was our nation's most significant city, medically, business-wise, politically, our capital. That demonstrates without any question that, that this, these kind of racial health inequities, racial biases and myths and misconceptions about racial medical difference were fundamental and foundational to America itself as it was being born. And we can't, I don't think we can really even address fully what's happening now until we acknowledge that. And so this is like, you know, it speaks for itself. Um, Benjamin Carey's pamphlet, um, went into four, maybe five print runs, uh, sold over 10,000 [00:23:00] copies. Um, and what still remains this sort of dominant narrative of that time? Uh, Allen and Jones' went into 400 copies, and we're still talking about it today, but you know, I think this larger question of, you know, who controls this narrative and whose voices are being left out and can we create spaces where those voices can be heard?

So I'll just say this. Theater of War productions, you know, we know the work is working. We know our projects are succeeding, not when some biomedical ethicist stands up and makes a brilliant comment. Anyone can do that. We know it's working when the least powerful person in the room the microphone and the, the person who's never had the microphone before and their hands, the person who's surprised to hear their voice amplified through the speaker system 'cause they've never heard that before. [00:24:00] And they explicate and illuminate the text through their lived experience and their earned wisdom. In a way that no formally educated person in the room, no expert ever could do because they can't access that knowledge simply through books and studies. And so in our model, we can honor both types of knowing both types of wisdom. But, you know, the challenge is can we create truly inclusive spaces where. You know, we're not acting like we're bestowing a gift on the audience. We're approaching audiences with humility for what they know and can teach us, audiences with something at stake, uh, that we can't possibly know without their help. Um, so that's a little bit about how our, our model works and why this project's so exciting, because the few times we've done it so far, especially in public settings in [00:25:00] DC and in West Baltimore. Um, you know, we've heard from a wide range of people lived experience in this subject.

Mia Levenson: One of the things that I find really fascinating about this piece is your choice of non-traditional theater spaces. Um, I, and part of it is that as dramatic reading, you have these four actors, in front of an audience, but you don't necessarily have, uh, a set, or costumes. You don't have those, the things we think of when we think of the theater. Um. And, and as you mentioned, right? So, uh, in addition to the local black churches in the, in the DC/ Baltimore area, you've also performed, uh, this piece at the Martin Luther King Library, Johns Hopkins Hospital. You said you're, you're about to go to Philadelphia and perform at the Mother A. M. E. Church. So what is behind your choice of performing outside of traditional theater spaces? And how do you go about finding these sites, pitching [00:26:00] this idea, to these non theaters?

Bryan Doerries: I am less interested in traditional theatrical spaces because I would argue that the traditional theatrical spaces are both architecturally and socially constructed to keep the very audience that I'm interested in engaging out. From the transactional nature of buying tickets, to the expense of tickets, to the security apparatus that people must walk through and buy in order to gain access to the space, to the way that they are assaulted by ushers and other staff on the way in policed and told to be quiet. And we don't have enough time for this, but I, I, I would argue that since the na mid 19th century notions of naturalism have been predicated and built on the silencing and erasure of the audience itself, not just the marginalized, underserved audience that I wanna engage with the audience with something at stake, but also all audiences that theaters are spaces where audiences [00:27:00] go to not be seen and not be heard. The advent of electric light, the advent of the cinema, the advent of Chekhov and certain styles of performance have led us to this place where that plus the, the, the sort of full integration of the security state into our cultural life renders it such that if I take my daughter to see a play on Broadway, we pass through more aggressive security than I do when we go to Rikers Island. And are treated. So, and if I, if I had any experience with the law personally, I assure you I would not want to go into that space. So if I'm trying to accomplish something or we're trying to accomplish something where we're actually honoring the wisdom of audiences with something at stake, we have to create truly inclusive and open and democratic spaces.

We have to bring them. So I would say the entrapments of the theater. The lights, the props, the [00:28:00] sets, the security apparatus, the tickets themselves, and the culture around it. The acculturation of an audience to be silent and to police others who aren't silent is all an an obstacle to our objective. And I would add one more thing, that keeping audiences out formally educated in the theater or aren't acculturated to behaving a certain way in the theater, not only keeps out their wisdom, uh, it's a, it's an act of violence that I don't want to be part of in any way, and we won't, we won't get to what we're trying to accomplish, uh, if we're somehow complicit in, in keeping those audiences out.

So Theater of War Productions. We spend our money not on props and costumes. We spend it on audience curation, on building trust in communities, on childcare, on transportation, on ASL [00:29:00] services, on, meals, on welcoming people into spaces and inviting them to be themselves. That didn't happen at Johns Hopkins Hospital 'cause we were in a clinical site.

That's one place we perform in lots of professional settings, which I don't set apart from everything I'm saying right now. But our mode of operating is a little bit different in professional settings, prisons, hospitals, military bases, corporations, law firms, wherever we are, government there, while we're trying to achieve all the things I've just mentioned. thing, the one thing we're dealing with head on is that all of those institutions share another form of silencing, and that is the myth of infinite compartmentalization. That these things aren't to be talked about. They're to be set aside, our moral discomfort of the things we do every day.

Richard Del Rio: I, I'd like to, I'd like to narrow down on this sentiment a little bit, because [00:30:00] having seen Refutation twice,

Bryan Doerries: Yeah.

Richard Del Rio: I've noticed that at the beginning of, of each performance, you mentioned that the. Kind of not, not, it's not so much a panel discussion, although you have a panel come up after the performance is over.

But also you have the audience engage in a q and a, um, a commentary where they kind of express themselves. You describe that moment as the most important part of the performance.

Bryan Doerries: Yeah.

Richard Del Rio: And in a way it's very interesting because the both times that I've attended, it's been a hybrid event where the people who are asking questions, uh, whether they're asking questions virtually through Zoom or whether they're asking questions from the pews of a church, um, everyone else is there to listen and absorb it.

You know, like they're part of the, um, they're part of what is to be seen.

Bryan Doerries: [00:31:00] Yeah.

Richard Del Rio: So can you elaborate a little bit more about precisely why this is the most impart important part. What purpose does it serve for the, for the,

Bryan Doerries: yeah.

Richard Del Rio: for the mission of Theater of War.

Bryan Doerries: Yeah, let's be clear. The actors take a risk. They perform a text with minimal rehearsal that's challenging to perform, whether it's a Greek tragedy or something from the late 1700s. But that risk isn't, that's not to be compared to the risk that people take when they raise their hands and share something they've never told people. And their most intimate circle of friends and family members, let alone in front of peers or members of the public. That's not like we can't compare that risk to, to the exhilarating risk that people take when they share their hidden trauma or their, their, their fears or their moral distress at doing whatever that they do every day or feel complicit in, in their daily lives. And so the real performance, when you stop silencing and marginalizing the audience to the [00:32:00] shadows and you open up discourse, I would not call it a q and a and I don't say the word talk back. Those are all, I think, residuals of both academic and theater structures that are part of that marginalization.

A q and A is where the audience ask questions and the artists answer them. And a talk back is how dare you talk back, except in this very sort of, uh, legislated place. We call it

Richard Del Rio: Hmm.

Bryan Doerries: a guided audience discussion. Two, it's a multiple way exchange, not just in the room, but people all over the world participating on Zoom.

Some of our events have as many as 87 countries participating, uh, all at once. And it's not passive because it's not i'm gonna sit back and ask the, they're not really panelists. You're right. The people who start the dance, who speak first or just modeling for the audience, the risk taking, we're gonna ask of them, the openness, the candor, the sharing that we're gonna ask of them.

It's not coercive though, beyond that. We don't ask follow up questions of the audience. We don't ask people to narrate their trauma. The beauty of our model is you can talk about the play or [00:33:00] the text, or you can talk about yourself, but it's your choice. And the play or text can offer some top cover for people who aren't comfortable talking about them.

So I was really struck when Absalom Jones said X, or I am Absalom Jones, and this is why. And, uh, so difference is important in our model, this architecture of consent that's built into the idea. I'm very inspired in my work, not by Greek tragedy. I used to be, but I'm not so much anymore. I'm, I'm much more inspired by the Greek Amphitheater. Amphitheater in Greek means the place where we see in both directions, or I would say in all directions. Amphi means both, but maybe it's the omni theater in our model, we're, we're seeing in all directions where I see you and you see me. And we see each other reflected in the story and we hear each other's interpretations and we see that we're playing roles in our own lives and wearing masks, and we step back from them for a second and interrogate, are we the thing that we say we are in [00:34:00] relationship to the other people in the room.

We're all taking the risk of being that vulnerable. Now the play is one thing, the text is one thing. It's great to see these amazing actors render these texts comprehensible and immediate. But I'll never tire of hearing people in our discussions come forth and be present and truthful and candid and real in the ways that we hear every time we perform. That's why we say, if you've seen one of our performances, you've seen one. It's always different based on who's in the room and what's happening in the world and in their lives at that moment in time.

Richard Del Rio: Definitely.

Bryan Doerries: So what things are possible when we turn on the lights? And where we as artists stopped acting like we're bestowing some gift on the audience and receive the gift that the audience has to bestow on us? What new things in this culture of celebrity and endless consumption are possible when we make it we restore the possibility of a gift exchange, [00:35:00] um, that isn't happening in our theaters. And I would say lastly. You know, I think what the Greeks knew that we, we sort of borrowed from, but other cultures have discovered it you just give them long enough, they figure it out. Is is what storytelling is for, and we've lost touch with that. It doesn't mean that like storytelling is mutually exclusive. It can only be for social impact and it can't have artistic merit or like, it can only be uh, you know about healing and not be literary and not be rigorous in, in other ways? No, we want both. why we work with the best actors on the planet to deliver some of the most remarkable material. But even that sounds self-congratulatory because that all pales in comparison to what happens when an audience of people who've never heard of the texts or even have been to a play stands up and start to share and [00:36:00] explicate what just happened in the room. Uh, that's the real performance.

Mia Levenson: Well, and it goes back to this deconstruction of the traditional theatrical model, which, which even as I say like "the traditional theatrical model" is. Is such a recent modern invention that I think you spoke a little bit about earlier, but I do think it's probably surprising for other maybe like medical humanists to, to realize is that this idea of sitting in a quiet theater and being told to, um, you know, don't move, don't laugh too loud, you know, keep to yourself, um. How the, all the lights are off around you, you are focused on what's in front of you. That's, that's a late 19th century invention that only really becomes popularized later in the 20th century, beyond just the, like, high, high opera, high art, theatrical spaces. And so to, to keep the, essentially to keep the lights on, to invite the audience To not just ask questions, but the way that you frame it is that they are a part of [00:37:00] this, right? That this is both for them, but they, they are also engaging with this, um, as are the actors, as are you, as sort of our, our introducer to the performance. And, and you spoke about this a little bit during the, the conversation following the performance at Hopkins. But I'd love to hear about responses to the performance, of A Refutation that surprised you or any that you really wanna take a moment to highlight.

Bryan Doerries: Yeah, sure. I'd be happy to. I, I mean, we've only done it four times now and it sometimes takes at least 20 to begin to have a sense for what we're doing or the shape of the questions, I'll ask an audience or the contours of a discussion that might unfold. But we've had some really powerful things said and some, and also typically with projects like this one, we try to do one in a sacred setting and one in a secular setting in each city that we go to, um, because set and setting, you know, that you asked this question about sets, well, [00:38:00] where people are and the context of where that is and whose community we're in, and. Who feels welcome in that space and what things happen in that space deeply influence people respond. and I've noticed that in both of the churches, we've had deep spiritual responses to these texts by these black spiritual leaders of, uh, the late 18th century. You know, and in the, hospital and in the library setting a different set of, or more secular responses. Um, I was really touched when, uh, we were performing at the library in MLK Library in DC when a woman raised her hand about halfway through the discussion and talked about she was a, a African American woman, um, elder who spoke about, um, directly about her experience having her pain denied in a DC hospital after dislocating her shoulder, and because she hadn't time to do her hair, as she said [00:39:00] before, being taken to the hospital, she was treated as if she were drug seeking for the first five hours of being in the hospital in excruciating pain, having dislocated her shoulder, even though she tried to reveal to them that she was a professor at Howard University and that they got, they were interpreting the situation all wrong.

It took a great deal of self-advocacy just to have her pain believed and acknowledged and validated. Well, she resonated with and spoke to the experiences of African-Americans in 1793 whose experiences during the yellow fever epidemic were either distorted, uh, or grossly misinterpreted by Matthew Carey or in a wholesale way, erased their death, their suffering completely erased from the record altogether because they were black. And um, that was, you know, there's one thing that have someone stand up and say [00:40:00] statistics or have someone speak about, uh, the history of racial health inequities in America. Another to have someone sitting to your left stand up and be vulnerable and direct in that. And also someone of, you know, some stature in the community, um, that, that I found very powerful.

Um, in the performance at Union Memorial United Methodist Church in West Baltimore, one of the early participants in the discussion talked about black maternal health from a perspective of an African American woman who said, I will not go to the hospital. I did not, I chose not to go to the hospital, have my child, in spite of the risks that I knew that would entail, because I didn't wanna have my pain denied and I felt it was riskier to go to a medical facility than to to, to do this in my own home. as I recall, shortly after she spoke. A young man who had attended the DC performance and driven to West Baltimore months later to see this performance stood up and talked about his experience as someone [00:41:00] living with autism,

Richard Del Rio: I remember him. I remember him. That was powerful.

Bryan Doerries: he spoke right after an African American woman spoke about having her pain denied.

And at the end of his, I thought, beautiful and well rendered and emotionally present set of comments. He said, I wonder if a refutation could be written on the part of those living with autism. This is what I mean about our tent being big enough to hold it all, because it's not competitive trauma we're talking about.

It's not about a struggle to see who's pain is more profound than the person to your left. It's about making connections through the pain that we share. Another way that I think we can bring audiences together in this polarized moment is to acknowledge that there are certain things that touch all of us and all of our families in some direct way. And through that pain, through that discomfort, we can come together even just for a brief moment and acknowledge our humanity. This young man [00:42:00] standing up and talking about, I wonder if someone could write a refutation for those living with autism seemed it was in some ways, in direct response and in concert with some of the other people who spoke about their pain denied or having been discriminated against because of the color of their skin in this black church in West Baltimore, we were having the performance. So those are some of the immediate responses that come to mind, but there were so many more.

There was a nurse who spoke very beautifully about her own experience of being discriminated against and treated poorly by the institutions for which she worked, and then she pivoted and said to all of us in the audience, including the white members of this audience, this is a system, this medical system, this broken system in which we're all sort of living and struggling that requires advocacy no matter who you are. And she kind of gave grace to everyone in the room to acknowledge that although there are differing levels of advocacy that are required, that in order to [00:43:00] navigate the system, everyone needs advocacy and to advocate for themselves. And these beautiful moments that kind of lift up, you know, we're not, we're not solving for these problems, but we're, and we're not, it's not necessarily gonna result in a group hug, for a brief moment, if we've really done our work, people are able to hold each other's tragedies in the, in the same hand, in the same sentence without conjunctions. Like, it's, it's, it's, it's not mine versus yours.

It's, we can acknowledge these. If these things touch us all in some direct way. So I'm excited by the fact that this, this project, which kind of against all odds, where people read for over an hour texts from 1793 results in this kind of sharing with really diverse audiences. And I'm excited what happens when we take it to Philadelphia next.

Richard Del Rio: We are coming to that time where we, our time together is drawing to a close, but it would be a shame. If we didn't [00:44:00] end by asking what is up next for Theater of War. Of course I want to encourage our listeners to, if they have a chance to catch Refutation, to catch it. But the, the, the, the performance, uh, the quality of the experience, the insight that was offered makes me want to ask, what is up next?

Bryan Doerries: Well, the good news is you can join our mailing list at theaterofwar.com, spelled the American way, T-H-E-A-T-E-R of war.com. And on that page, you can join our mailing list and find out, uh, our next event. We have a radio show in New York City at WNYC, where we engage audiences readings of long form journalism.

Our next one is by the author Rebecca Nagle. It's gonna be on May 28th. She's a Cherokee activist and, and journalist who has written about her own experience with long COVID and then how it showed her at the very bottom of the American health system. And we're gonna have a number of Native American actors performing her article here at a studio in [00:45:00] WNYC for 130 people in the room, and thousands more on Zoom. And the distilled conversation then gets broadcast on the radio two weeks later and the archived audio gets pushed out over various channels. This is a collaboration. This next one with ProPublica, excuse me. The next one is with the Atlantic. Rebecca writes for the Atlantic. Um, and uh, it's a collaboration overall with ProPublica, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and wnyc. I'm also, I, there are some events that are private and some that are public, but to sort of give you a sense for the scope of what we do. in the coming months, uh, in the coming weeks, the coming months, we're doing a performance of Theater of War, our main bread and butter of the story of Ajax, who's a great warrior who loses his friend in battle and is betrayed by his commanding officer as, and ultimately takes his own life feeling there's nothing else for him to do, but to end his life. Um, we're doing this for an audience of 400 correction officers who [00:46:00] work at Rikers Islandon June 23rd at a conference on masculinity, mandatory conference. And then one and a half days later, we'll be presenting our project based on An Enemy of the People as the headlining event at the Aspen Ideas Festival on the night one.

So we're going from corrections officers to billionaires, and there's room in our tent for all. Um, because we deal with issues that affect all of us. So those are some of the things coming up. Uh, the radio show continues. Uh, once you sign up on the ra, uh, the mailing list, you'll get invited to the next couple of episodes.

The next one after, that'll be on June 12th. You can watch on Zoom, raise your hand and participate in the discussion. You can join us in person here in New York. Um, I'm gonna send you all the link 'cause we're about to release the recording of A Refutation West Baltimore performance, so you can share that with your [00:47:00] listeners directly and they can have an experience by watching the performance and discussion in its entirety with the caveat that a live experience is different than a recorded one and that our work functions on the shared risk proposition that we're all in the same space experiencing something together and that anyone can speak. Um, but there were so many whys and beautiful things spoken in that audience in West Baltimore. We, we felt that we needed to release it world. We also released the previous recording of a refutation, the premiere at Ebenezer United Methodist Church on Capitol Hill.

That was also really powerful. Different set of actors. Um, like I send you both links, but your listeners are welcome to, to, if they want to get go deep, explore this proposition that if you've seen one, you've seen one and watch both in their entirety, which would be like a six hour experience. Um, but anyway, I'll send this to you and, and, and you [00:48:00] can distribute it as you see fit because we, we released one and we're about to release the other very soon.

Mia Levenson: Yeah, we'll, we'll make sure to drop that in the show notes. I'm so appreciative that you guys have everything virtually accessible, um, that some of your performances are also available on Zoom. Um, and that's just for, you know, thinking about how during the pandemic there was all these fears about what is theater gonna be, what, where, how are we ever gonna have a live experience again. The fact that like, you're sort of migrating into this world of like, well, yeah, well we can do things hybrid, we can do things virtually, we can make things more accessible is just so cool. Uh, Brian, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been so wonderful. I'm really grateful for this conversation.

Bryan Doerries: Uh, thank you, Mia. Thank you, Richard. I, I really appreciate it. Um, and, uh looking to staying in touch, uh, about our, our ongoing collaborations with Johns Hopkins University so we don't miss each other next time we're passing through Baltimore.

Richard Del Rio: Definitely

Bryan Doerries: It's been a [00:49:00] pleasure.

Mia Levenson: Thank you.

And we are taking a break for the rest of the summer and we'll see you all in the fall.

Mia Levenson: