November 19, 2025 | Read Time: 4 minutes
Hundreds of organizations aim to bring Americans together and transform “us versus them” into “we.” But Theater of War Productions might be the only one that puts its hope in a seemingly dark premise: that the pain we all experience in everyday life has healing properties for America’s deep divisions.
The New York-based theater organizes shows for audiences nationwide that can mix Harvard MDs with drug users, survivors of gun violence and perpetrators, and members of rival gangs. Strangers and even enemies sit side by side as famous actors — the likes of Frances McDormand, Bill Murray, and Oscar Isaac — perform a classic text. Afterward, the audience talks about what they’ve seen and heard, sometimes for hours.
Theater of War Productions was born out of artistic director Bryan Doerries’s suffering. In 2003, when Doerries was 26, he cared for and eventually lost his girlfriend, Laura Rothenberg, to cystic fibrosis. He found solace in rereading the Greek plays he had studied as an undergrad at Kenyon College in Ohio. Sophocles’s “Philoctetes,” about a severely wounded warrior, showed him he wasn’t the first person to feel helpless while watching someone else suffer. After he began in 2007 to stage performances of a range of classic texts, first in hospitals and then for the military, he realized the plays could similarly help others.
To earn trust with the military, Doerries spent months talking to service members in cigarette smoke-filled rooms, drinking stale coffee. Ultimately, he presented scenes from two Sophocles plays — one from “Philoctetes” and another from “Ajax,” about a warrior who commits suicide. The audience included Marines who had recently returned from deployment and their spouses.
At the time, openly discussing mental health struggles could jeopardize a military career. But to his surprise, a conversation scheduled for 45 minutes stretched for three and a half hours, and he had to cut it off at midnight. Audience members connected lines from the play and their own harrowing war experiences. One woman, the mother of a Marine and wife of a Navy Seal, talked about how her husband went to war four times. Each time, she said, he came back “like Ajax, dragging invisible bodies into the house. … To quote from the play, ‘Our home is a slaughterhouse.’”
Doerries realized he had found a powerful technology that could help people understand and share their struggles — and promote healing.
Eighteen years later, Theater of War Productions has nearly 40 projects in repertory. Each follows a similar formula: staged readings of seminal texts followed by a town hall-style discussion. The organization has received funding from the Greenwall Foundation, the Hearthland Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, Stavros Niarchos Foundation, and the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund. Every performance addresses trauma, violence, or loss as depicted in texts including Shakespeare plays, historic speeches, 18th-century pamphlets, and even sermons. (One show drew from Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermon “The Drum Major Instinct,” in which King describes his own funeral.)
Doerries hopes each performance can help the audience access emotions they often bury deep in themselves. He often tells his actors to make the audience wish they never come. Wailing and screaming — both frowned upon in everyday life — is expected. By watching actors give voice to powerful emotions, the viewers can, to some extent, feel those extremes as well, he believes.
Given the opposites who often find themselves in the audience, discussions sometimes become uncomfortable.
But with once-private feelings aired, everyone can forget their affiliations — as gang members or Harvard doctors — and engage more deeply, Doerries believes. Whatever their disagreements with the person next to them, they recognize that we all suffer. — maybe from a loss of a loved one, a betrayal, or a moral compromise that still bites.
“We can look with compassion and understanding upon each loss,” Doerries says. “It’s an opportunity to make connections.”
To hear more from Doerries and see glimpses of performances by Theater of War Productions, watch the Chronicle’s short documentary.
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